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: $20.00 [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: $22.95 [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: $31.93 [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: $34.82 [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: $43.37 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Situated Lives brings together the most important recent feminist and critical research that illuminates the lived experience of ordinary women and men. Focusing on gender and culture, these essays situate gender in relationship to the historical and material circumstances where gender, race, class and sexual orientation intersect and shape everyday interaction. They explore several critical social issues: how new technologies are altering reproduction, what new forms of family and household are emerging in response to economic and material realities, what transformations are shaping the workplace, and how men and women in colonial and post-colonial societies resist the cultural construction of their lives by those with greater power and control over the images and ideology.

Utilizing rich ethnographic accounts and first-person narratives, these articles examine how ordinary men and women are responding to the complexities of genetic counseling, surrogate motherhood and the abortion debate inthe US; resisting management policies in the new workplaces of Malaysia; and contesting forms of cultural and economic domination in Jamaica and the US-Mexican border. Several essays explore the politics of representations, including how colonial administrators, missionaries and the tourist industry have represented "Other," such as the Tswana of South Africa, the peoples of Sumatra, Java and Malaya or Pueblo women potters in the Southwest.

In analyzing cultural transformation, gendered practice and varied forms of resistance, these scholars give a sense of hope. Even in the most fouled work sites, repressive regimes, rigid notions of the family, or segregated neighborhoods, men and women express their own cultural meanings, take matters into their own hand and work together..
Price: $32.30 [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: $25.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Since its inception some fifty years ago, cognitive science has seen a number of sea changes Perhaps the best known is the development of connectionist models of cognition as an alternative to classical, symbol-based approaches. A more recent - and increasingly influential - trend is that of dynamical-systems-based, ecologically oriented models of the mind. Researchers suggest that a full understanding of the mind will require systematic study of the dynamics of interaction between mind, body, and world. Some argue that this new orientation calls for a revolutionary new metaphysics of mind, according to which mental states and processes, and even persons, literally extend into the environment. The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition is a state-of-the-art guide to this new movement in cognitive science. Each chapter tackles either a specific area of empirical research or specific sector of the conceptual foundation underlying this research. The chapter authors are leading figures in the emerging interdisciplinary field of situated cognition, including representatives from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology..
Price: $55.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Louis Kahn is perhaps the most important architect to emerge in the decades following World War II. In this book Sarah Williams Goldhagen dismantles the myths that have cast Kahn variously as a mystical neo-Platonist, a structural rationalist, a visionary champion of Beaux-Arts principles, a rebel against modernism. She demonstrates instead that the essence of Kahn's architecture lies in his deeply held modernist political, social, and artistic ideals. Throughout his life, Goldhagen shows, Kahn sought to rework modernism into a socially transformative architecture appropriate for the postwar world.

Goldhagen presents much new archival evidence about Kahn's buildings, his ideas, and his indebtedness to contemporary art and to the many socio-critical and architectural discourses of the postwar years. She offers fresh interpretations of many of his important buildings, including the Yale University Art Gallery and the National Assembly complex in Bangladesh, as well as of such previously understudied or misunderstood works as his essay on monumentality and his AFL Medical Services building in Philadelphia. Goldhagen theorizes Kahn's architectural principles to show that he struggled with modernism rather than against it, reconceptualizing it into a singular and powerful new vocabulary that retains architectural and social relevance today..
Price: $48.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]