[Air-l] Informal programming learning?

[jeremy]

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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