This volume in the NATO Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology focuses on the role of discourse in cognition, tools as constituents of cognitive activity, the social nature of reasoning, and how individuals reconstitute knowledge in social interaction.

Klappentext

To reason is to talk. To think is to use tools. To learn is to join a community of practice. This book explores thought and reasoning as inherently social practices, as actions situated in specific environments of demand, opportunity, and accountability. Authors from diverse disciplines - psychology, sociology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology - examine how people think and learn in settings as diverse as a factory, a classroom or an airplane cockpit. The tools that people use in these varied settings are both physical technologies and cultural constructions: concepts, structures of reasoning, and forms of discourse.This volume in the NATO Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology is based on an international conference on situated cognition and learning technologies.

Inhalt
Discourse, Tools, and Reasoning.- 1 Constructing Meaning from Space, Gesture, and Speech.- 2 Centers of Coordination: A Case and Some Themes.- 3 Animated Texts: Selective Renditions of News Stories.- 4 To Resolve a Technical Problem Through Conversation.- 5 The Blackness of Black: Color Categories as Situated Practice.- 6 Reasonable Uncertainties: Parents' Talk About Caring for Children with Chronic Renal Failure.- 7 Syncretic Literacy in a Samoan American Family.- 8 Other Voices, Other Minds: The Use of Reported Speech in Group Therapy Talk.- 9 Situational Effects in Computer-Based Problem Solving.- 10 Discourse and Development: Notes from the Field.- 11 Interactional Perspectives on the Use of the Computer and on the Technological Development of a New Tool: The Case of Word Processing.- 12 What Organizes Our Problem-Solving Activities?.- 13 Understanding Symbols With Intermediate Abstractions: An Analysis of the Collaborative Construction of Mathematical Meaning.- 14 Strategy-Specific Information Access in Knowledge Acquisition from Hypertext.- 15 Talking About Reasoning: How Important Is the Peer in Peer Collaboration?.- 16 Seeing the Light: Discourse and Practice in the Optics Lab.- 17 Learning to Argue in Family-Shared Discourse: The Reconstruction of Past Events.- 18 Discourse in the Adult Classroom: Rhetoric as Technology for Dialogue.- Author Index.