Computers are developing into a powerful medium integrating film, pictures, text, and sound, and the use of computers for communication and information is rapidly expanding. The Computer as Medium brings insights from art, literature, and theater to bear on computers and discusses the communicative and organizational nature of computer networks within a historical perspective. The book consists of three parts: The first part characterizes the semiotic nature of computers and discusses semiotic approaches to programming and interface design. The second section discusses narrative and aesthetic...

Psychotherapy in Everyday Life shows how clients employ therapy in their daily lives. The varied and extensive efforts involved in this are systematically overlooked in therapy research. The book shines important new light on processes of personal change and learning in practice. More generally speaking, it launches a theory of personhood based on how persons conduct their everyday lives in social practice. This approach and many of the book s findings are of immediate relevance for understanding other fields of expert practice."

Teams are commonly celebrated as efficient and humane ways of organizing work and learning. By means of a series of in-depth case studies of teams in the United States and Finland over a time span of more than ten years, this book shows that teams are not a universal and ahistorical form of collaboration. Teams are best understood in their specific activity contexts and embedded in historical development of work. The book develops a set of conceptual tools for analysis and design of transformations in collaborative work and learning.

Psychotherapy in Everyday Life shows how clients employ therapy in their daily lives. The varied and extensive efforts involved in this are systematically overlooked in therapy research. The book shines important new light on processes of personal change and learning in practice. More generally speaking, it launches a theory of personhood based on how persons conduct their everyday lives in social practice. This approach and many of the book s findings are of immediate relevance for understanding other fields of expert practice."

These essays by leading theorists and researchers in sociocultural, cognitive, developmental, and educational psychology honor the memory of Sylvia Scribner, who believed that science holds a responsibility to human welfare and understanding and whose work is recognized by the authors as seminal to their own thinking. The themes include the relationship between history and culture, the importance of context to thinking, the place of literacy in human activity and thought, and cognition in school and in the workplace. The volume presents applications of activity theory to fundamental issues in...

Talking Mathematics in School investigates the relationship between students' discussions about mathematics in K-12 classrooms and their mathematical understanding. Beginning with a linguistic and sociolinguistic review of what is known about connections between thought, language, and learning, Lampert and Blunk consider what this research suggests for the teaching and learning of mathematical ideas and discourse. A collection of studies from various disciplinary perspectives--set in elementary and secondary classrooms, a computer-supported tutorial, and a workplace interaction--examines the...

The field of educational research lacks a methodology for the study of learning that does not begin with humans, their aims, and their interests. The Materiality of Learning seeks to overcome this human-centered mentality by developing a novel spatial approach to the materiality of learning. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), Estrid Sorensen compares an Internet-based 3D virtual environment project in a fourth-grade class with the class s work with traditional learning materials, including blackboards, textbooks, notebooks, pencils, and rulers. Taking into account pupils and...

How Humans Learn to Think Mathematically describes the development of mathematical thinking from the young child to the sophisticated adult. Professor David Tall reveals the reasons why mathematical concepts that make sense in one context may become problematic in another. For example, a child's experience of whole number arithmetic successively affects subsequent understanding of fractions, negative numbers, algebra, and the introduction of definitions and proof. Tall's explanations for these developments are accessible to a general audience while encouraging specialists to relate their...

How Humans Learn to Think Mathematically describes the development of mathematical thinking from the young child to the sophisticated adult. Professor David Tall reveals the reasons why mathematical concepts that make sense in one context may become problematic in another. For example, a child's experience of whole number arithmetic successively affects subsequent understanding of fractions, negative numbers, algebra, and the introduction of definitions and proof. Tall's explanations for these developments are accessible to a general audience while encouraging specialists to relate their...

How do people organize their body movement and talk when they interact with one another in the material world? How do they coordinate linguistic structures with bodily resources (such as gaze and gesture) to bring about coherent and intelligible courses of action? How are physical settings, artifacts, technologies, and non-linguistic sign-systems implicated in social interaction and shared cognition? This volume brings together advanced work by leading international scholars who share video-based research methods that integrate semiotic, linguistic, sociological, anthropological, and...