Books about Situated from Amazon.com

In this important theoretical treatise, Jean Lave, anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, computer scientist, push forward the notion of situated learning--that learning is fundamentally a social process and not solely in the learner's head. The authors maintain that learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process they call legitimate peripheral participation. Learners participate in communities of practitioners, moving toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. Legitimate peripheral participation provides a way to speak about crucial relations between newcomers and oldtimers and about their activities, identities, artifacts, knowledge and practice. The communities discussed in the book are midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and recovering alcoholics, however, the process by which participants in those communities learn can be generalized to other social groups..
Price: $22.67 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This book considers how agencies are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by the sciences of the artificial, the author proposes that the rhetorics and practices of those sciences work to obscure the performative nature of both persons and things. The question then shifts from debates over the status of human-like machines, to that of how humans and machines are enacted as similar or different in practice, and with what theoretical, practical and political consequences. Drawing on recent scholarship across the social sciences, humanities and computing, the author argues for research aimed at tracing the differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are constituted..
Price: $25.80 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A collection of more than two dozen essays by diverse authors, this collection focuses on the role of gender and how it affects ordinary people. A cynic might say that some of the essays are merely academics stating the obvious, only in oddly tortured and clunking prose. Yet the themes explored in the collection, such as pieces dealing with people working in jobs that are not traditional for their genders, are deserving of the serious treatment they are given..
Price: $31.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Situated Fathering proposes a new theoretical framework for studying how various contingencies of physical space, in conjunction with social/symbolic issues, affect men's identities as fathers and their involvement with children. Written largely for family scholars and students by an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars, this distinct volume of original research explores fathers in a wide range of physical and social spaces. Contributors outline directions for theoretically guided research in specific, often gendered fathering sites. Visit our website for sample chapters!.
Price: $26.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

'Information Commons' often refers to the theoretical production, sharing, and democratic discussion of information that is afforded by new technologies It also refers to the physical manifestation of this concept - new facilities that bring together researchers, instructors, students, teachers, and users into one space and equip them with technology (computers, projectors, Internet) and facilities (workstations, conference and class rooms, print stations) for success. In this comprehensive guidebook, Beagle helps academic, public, and school librarians create new spaces that encourage research, discovery, instruction, and learning and meld the traditional research library with the latest technology. This comprehensive handbook guides librarians through: Space planning, budgeting, and technology set-up; Service modification, staff reallocation, and training; Assessment, improvement, and modification of services and facilities, and Publicity and marketing of the new commons. Descriptions, photographs, and plans from information commons of various types and sizes are included. The companion CD-ROM features model plans from various institutions and working documents from successful information commons projects. Grounded in the theory of information commons, this forward-looking handbook will transform traditional spaces and redefine library service models for the information age..
Price: $125.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Why do poor and minority students under-perform in school? Do computer games help or hinder learning? What can new research in psychology teach educational policy-makers?
In this major new book, James Gee tackles the 'big ideas' about language, literacy and learning, applying his findings to real problems facing educationalists today.
He tackles controversial debates such as the New Literacy Studies, and the idea that the academic language required to study, for example, Mathematics and the Sciences, is exclusionary and places unfair demands on poor and minority students. Gee also explores learning outside the classroom, looking at computer and video games and comparing the way a child interacts with others and technology to learn and play, with school-based learning in science classrooms.
Bringing together the latest research from a number of disciplines, Language, Literacy and Learning is a bold, ambitious book by a leading figure in the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in education and language..
Price: $31.85 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Situated Literacies is a rich and varied collection of key writings from leading international scholars in the field of literacy Each contribution, written in a clear accessible style, makes the link between literacies in specific contexts and broader practices. Among the issues discussed are: the visual and material aspects, concepts of time and space, how literacies shape and sustain identities in communities, the relationship between texts and their practices, and the role of discourse analysis. Together, these studies, along with a foreword by Denny Taylor, make a timely and important contribution to understanding the ways in which literary practices are part of the broader social processes..
Price: $47.24 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This lively and original book offers a provocative critique of the dominant assumptions regarding human action and communication which underlie recent research in machine intelligence. Lucy Suchman argues that the planning model of interaction favoured by the majority of AI researchers does not take sufficient account of the situatedness of most human social behaviour. The problems that can arise as a result are pertinently, and often amusingly, illustrated by the careful analysis of a recorded interaction between novice users and an intelligent machine, whose design has failed to accommodate essential resources of successful human communication. Plans and Situated Actions presents a compelling case for the re-examination of current models underlying interface design. Lucy Suchman's proposals for a fresh characterisation of human-computer interaction which also incorporates recent insights from the social sciences provides a challenge that everyone interested in machine intelligence will seriously need to consider..
Price: $29.69 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The re-emerging field of ethnoecology offers a promising way to document and analyze human-environment interactions This collection brings the discipline into sharp focus, conveying local understandings of environments and proposing a way of looking at the relationship between humans and the natural world that emphasizes the importance of cognition in shaping behavior. Case studies by international experts explore the varied views of scholars on the human dimension of conversation and the different views of local peoples regarding their own environments. Filled with peoples' voices from North and South America, Africa, and Asia, these cases cover a range of issues: natural resource conservation and sustainable development, the relationship between local knowledge and biodiversity, the role of the commons in development, and the importance of diversity and equity in environmental management. As the only volume to address the status of this increasingly multidisciplinary field—especially as it relates to the differential power of multiple stakeholders—Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge/Located Lives is intended for a wide range of specialists not only in social and natural sciences but also in agricultural studies. It conveys the overriding importance of this powerful methodological approach in providing insiders' perspectives on their environment and how they manage it. CONTENTS
1. Introduction. A View from a Point: Ethnoecology as Situated Knowledge, Virginia D. Nazarea
2. The Value of Subsistence for the Future of the World, Eugene S. Hunn
3. Practical and Religious Meanings of the Navajo Hogan, Lillie Lane
4. The Agronomy of Memory and the Memory of Agronomy: Ritual Conservation of Archaic Cultigens in Contemporary Farming Systems, Michael R. Dove
5. Ethnoecology Serving the Community: A Case Study from Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, Richard I. Ford
6. Lenses and Latitudes in Landscapes and Lifescapes, Virginia D. Nazarea
7. Cultural Landscapes and Biodiversity: The Ethnoecology of an Upper R¡o Grande Watershed Commons, Devon G. Peña
8. Conserving Folk Crop Varieties: Different Agricultures, Different Goals, Daniela Soleri and Steven E. Smith
9. Plant Constituents and the Nutrition and Health of Indigenous Peoples, Timothy Johns
10. Sustainable Production and Harvest of Medicinal and Aromatic Herbs in the Sierras de C¢rdoba Region, Argentina, Marta Lagrotteria and James M. Affolter
11. Managing the Maya Commons: The Value of Local Knowledge, Scott Atran
12. Safeguarding Traditional Resource Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Darrell A. Posey
13. A Practical Primer on Intellectual Property Rights in a Contemporary Ethnoecological Context, David J. Stephenson, Jr.
14. Toward Compensation: Returning Benefits from Ethnobotanical Drug Discovery to Native Peoples, Katy Moran
15. Am I My Brother's Keeper?, Christine S. Kabuye
16. Epilogue. Quo Vadis? The Promise of Ethnoecology, Robert E. Rhoades and Jack Harlan.
Price: $21.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Catching Ourselves in the Act uses situated robotics, ethology, and developmental psychology to erect a new framework for explaining human behavior Rejecting the cognitive science orthodoxy that formal task-descriptions and their implementation are fundamental to an explanation of mind, Horst Hendriks-Jansen argues for an alternative model based on the notion of interactive emergence.

Situated activity and interactive emergence are concepts that derive from the new discipline of autonomous agent research. Hendriks-Jansen puts these notions on a firm philosophical basis and uses them to anchor a "genetic" or "historical" explanation of mental phenomena in species-typical activity patterns that have been selected by a cultural environment of artifacts, language, and intentional scaffolding by adults. Situated robotics, allied with techniques and principles from ethology, allows the testing of hypotheses framed in terms of natural kinds that can be grounded through the theory of natural selection. This approach negotiates the "nature versus nurture" dispute in a radically new way.

Catching Ourselves in the Act provides a thorough overview of autonomous agent research in America and Europe, focusing in particular on work by such eminent researchers as Rodney Brooks, Pattie Maes, Maja Mataric, and Rolf Pfeifer. It reassesses the basic principles of artificial life and explores the repercussions of autonomous agent research for human psychology and the philosophy of mind, as well as its affinities with the "contextual revolution" in sociology and anthropology..
Price: $22.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]