[Air-l] Informal programming learning?

[Robert Luke]

This is an interesting thread.  With respect to knowledge management and
fostering
involvement in online communities, I have been working with the term open
source
learning (OSL) that lends itself quite well here. We are currently seeking
to measure
this kind of involvement in a community learning network study, using the
metaphor of open source to describe the kind of iterative participation and
development of social capital within community networks in general.

Also of interest may be Rajiv Shah's (who is on this list, I think) work on
the social
construction of code. There are interesting parallels between what I term
open
source learning (to describe the process of learning within networks) and
the
discussion about how code, as socio-technically constructed, contributes to
this
process.  Rajiv can say more, but I have found his ideas very useful.  He
has an article linked from here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=328920

Also, I have a short article about OSL online here:
http://smaug.java.utoronto.ca/~luke/articles/network_society/osl_cop.htm
called “open source learning: developing communities of practice in the
network society”

I am very interested in these ideas, as they relate very much to my own work
on community learning networks, digital citizenship, diversity and
accessibility, etc.  Also relevant is Lucy Suchman’s work on situated
actions, and Lave and Wenger’s community of practice work.

Best,
Robert


jeremy wrote:

> yes, i have Brown and Duguid and have read some of it.   i find it goes
> well with much of the work on tacit knowing in technological fields such
> as found in Michael Polanyi's work amongst others.  learning tacit
> knowledge is also somewhat exemplified in leviathan and the air pump by
> shapin and shaffer, seeley brown also has some interesting work on the
> web like http://www.creatingthe21stcentury.org/JSB4-motorbike.html  but
> all of this ties in with that huge set of literatures on organizational
> learning, org. theory, knowledge management, etc.  which then takes us
> back to looking for in open source.  Now, I'm sort of approaching these
> open source questions through the rubric of 'epistemic communities'
> which i sort of take from *Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make
> Knowledge by Knorr-Cetina, but you can find it elsewhere.  If you google
> on some of these terms with open source, interesting papers arise here
> and there.
>
> A while ago, '2000', when myself and a few others were running a
> side-program called cyberassistants, which was a program oriented toward
> using undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities and social
> sciences to 'span the gap' in higher education computing support in
> various disciplines, I set about developing a set of knowledge trees*
> which led from basic skills toward complex skills, such as starting in
> web design and ending up in scripting, databases, etc. or from basic
> maintenance to advanced trouble-shooting, etc, I ended with having
> people learn by doing.  This generated a problem centered around tacit
> knowledges and the translation of knowledge in practical and
> performative environments.  In short, the problem was that know-how for
> certain groups of people was not a universal knowledge, but highly
> located knowledge.  So while they understood that word document could be
> edited, and understood that an HTML document could be edited, they did
> not see that it was the same thing, thus when presented with a block of
> code that could be edited they did not make always the inductive leap
> even upon presentation and instruction.    In the end, I started moving
> away from those problems and thinking about other questions involved in
> getting certain populations using certain things in certain ways, and i
> started looking at nodes of translation in actor network theory and
> similar things.  Somewhere in one of my archives, i have a paper started
> on using undergraduate logic classes as the point of translation for
> understanding certain digital technologies.  In short, it was about
> finding a common way of understanding how things operated and then
> allowing certain groups of students and faculty to leverage that point
> of translation to further their own understanding and interest.
>  However, 2001, i closed cyberassistants as the fundamental structure of
> the program changed due to personel changes, and that ended most of this
> line of enquiry for me, though I still find it interesting and if others
> are interested in trying similar types of programs at their school, and
> I think we did manage to export some of the principles to some programs
> trhough SURA, I'd be interested.  I'm also interested in how informal
> programming learning occurs, because that is inherently what
> cyberassistants were supposed to be learning in one part of their job
> and to some extent they did.
>
> Irene Berkowitz wrote:
>
> >
> >
>
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