INTRODUCTION Learning and Technology at Work

MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 14(1-2), 1–4 Copyright © 2007, Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition

INTRODUCTION

Learning and Technology at Work There have been a number of special issues of Mind, Culture, and Activity (MCA) over the last few years. Broadly speaking, they have fallen into one of two main categories: They have focused either on a central issue within cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), such as the concept of the object of activity (Kaptelinin & Miettinen, 2005) or artifacts and inscription (Goodwin, 2000), or on an individual scholar deemed to be of interest to the readers of MCA (e.g., Wertsch, 2003). This special issue adopts a rather different approach. It emerges from the symposium Learning and Technology at Work, which was held at the Institute of Education, University of London, in March 2004, with the support of the European Unionfunded Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence1 and the U. K. Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme.2 We invited a number of scholars from diverse backgrounds to present at the symposium their ideas on topics related to learning and technology in the workplace.3 Following this, we invited a selection of these presenters to develop their presentations as articles for this special issue. We should offer a word of explanation about the title. There is an intentional pun using the dual meaning of “at work”: to study learning and technology as they enter into working practices, or practices that are sites for work. And, at the same time, to study how learning and technology work together in technology-rich sites such as those described in the articles that follow. The aims of the symposium were ambitious, seeking to: •

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Explore how the practices of learning, the modes of knowledge creation in workplaces, and the knowledge required for work are being transformed by information and communication technologies. Explore how the design, production, and delivery of goods and services is being radically changed by companies’ concerns for efficiency, global competitiveness, quality control, and productivity. Identify new models of learning and innovation, and new conceptual tools to support work-based learning and e-learning, in a range of different contexts.

For more information visit www.noe-kaleidoscope.org For more information visit www.tlrp.org 3 A record of these presentations in the form of videos may be found at www.lkl.ac.uk/kscope/ltw/ seminar.htm 2

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The symposium brought together researchers from diverse disciplinary fields and perspectives, with the ambition that through the discussion and interaction, new conceptual and methodological tools would be developed. This special issue is one outcome of this endeavor. It provides a focus for thinking about: • • • •

The complex interaction and mutual shaping of individuals, collectives, and technology in the workplace. The kinds of knowledge that are called for, or that emerge, in workplace activity, mediated by technology, and learned as forms of mediated practice. New models of learning and new conceptual tools to support work-based learning in a range of different contexts. How new identities, competencies, and communities of practice evolve.

As the articles presented here testify, these issues involve new theoretical approaches within CHAT, as well as approaches that cut across CHAT and related fields. For some time there has been an expanding field of research on human-computer interaction that draws on cognitive psychology and focuses on practical problems of design and evaluation (Carroll, 1991). There is also a rapidly growing field of workplace-learning research that adopts either (a) a cultural-anthropological perspective on the factors, environments, and relationships that facilitate learning in workplaces (Billett, 2002) or (b) an activity-theoretical perspective that studies artifact-mediated communication and practice in workplaces (Engeström, Lompscher, & Rückriem, 2005). What is distinctive about the articles in this special issue is that they all take human activity as a unit of analysis to analyze learning and technology at work. This not only provides us with an opportunity, but also demands a caveat. This is an opportunity because it allows us to include articles that take a range of stances toward both learning and technology, focusing on different levels and depth of analysis on the interplay between them. This constitutes a caveat: The very novelty of the field entices us to cast our net widely and to embrace a range of theoretical positions and methodologies that inevitably risks eclecticism and poses challenges for future development. Some contributors use the concept of activity as a way to introduce a new perspective on learning and technology at work. Instead of following mainstream practice in, for example, the sociology of work or organizational science and focusing on the site and organization of work, Nardi (this issue) focuses on organizations’ activities and their objects. This allows her to identify new forms of organization—“placeless organizations”—in which objects are constructed and instantiated to address both the intended and unintended consequences of globalization. It also begins to shed light on the multifaceted roles for technology in supporting new collaborative working and learning activities in these settings: Technology serves as a resource for coordinating human activity, disseminating information, and facilitating the creation of new technology. In acknowledging that learning is embedded in, and expressed in, the deployment of technology, Nardi draws attention to how little is known about the different types of learning associated with these various deployments of technology and their potential relations to one another. Using examples from a bank, a health centre, and a hi-tech company, Engeström (this issue) summarizes findings from recent research on coconfiguration and argues that the concept of

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learning by experiencing provides a way to capture the process of imagining and simulating situations and attempting to implement new models of activity. The phenomenon of “experiencing the future” is found to be a complement to three modes of learning inherent in coconfiguration at work, namely transformative, horizontal, and subterranean learning. Engeström elaborates the theme of identity, in recognition of the need for practitioners facing major transformations in work to develop new ways to think of themselves and their relation to their practice, and above all, as learners. Developing the theme of identity further, Roth (this issue) explicitly links the concept of activity to the key notions of emotion, motivation, and identity, which have received little attention in third-generation cultural-historical activity theory. His article gives several examples of the interesting relationships between learning and the use of technology at work in relation to emotion. In the context of a fish hatchery, he analyzes how emotions mediate the work of two fish culturists, one of whom intensively uses computer software that shapes both her mathematical knowledge and her identity in the workplace. Kent, Noss, Guile, Hoyles, and Bakker (this issue) use the concept of activity to focus on knowledge within workplace activity. They analyze the use of mathematical knowledge in boundary-crossing situations at work through the notion of “techno-mathematical literacies” that involve the use and communication of functional mathematical knowledge mediated by computational tools and grounded in the context of specific work situations. Techno-mathematical literacies are needed, they argue, for effective practice and communication in technology-rich workplaces that are both highly automated and increasingly focused on flexible response to customer needs. The authors illustrate their argument through an example based in a pensions company, which shows how artifacts produced by the company to communicate information routinely failed in this role, largely due to the invisibility of the mathematical-financial models underlying them. Thus, like Hall, Wright, and Wieckert (this issue) and to a certain extent Roth, Kent et al. seek to identify and elaborate the nature of the mathematical knowledge required for effective communication at work and to introduce an epistemological dimension to activity theory, specifically to the notions of boundary object and boundary crossing. Some contributors adopt a more multifaceted notion of activity, thus contributing to the discussion started by Latour (1996) in Mind, Culture, and Activity regarding the way in which actor-network theory can complement activity theory. Drawing on actor-network theory, ethnomethodology, and conversational analysis from Goffman, Bruni, Gherardi, and Parolin, (this issue), argue that the introduction of information technology redefines workplaces as systems of fragmented knowledge: that is, learning settings in which people, symbols, and technologies work jointly to construct and reconstruct understanding of social and organizational action. These settings suggest new forms of knowing-in-practice to mobilize the fragmented knowledge located within them. Using the example of teleconsulting in medical practice, Bruni et al. argue that one of the key characteristics of this form of working at a distance is that humans end up delegating aspects of practice to nonhuman computational agents that become interpreted as active subjects in the consultation process. Thus, they shed light on how, as information technology is deployed to transform working practice, practitioners are required correspondingly to learn how to operate with it effectively in new environments. Other contributors focus on dialogic activity to identify the transformations of the knowledge involved in communicating across technology-rich settings. Hall et al. (this issue) analyze interactions through which statisticians working as research consultants insert new statistical

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concepts into existing scientific research practice. By analyzing at a microlevel the talk, gestures, and inscriptions developed in interaction, Hall et al. describe the assembly of a complex combination of specimens, research workers, devices, algorithms, and texts in alternative representations of work to be done. In contrast to Bruni et al., (this issue) Hall et al. concentrate on how the introduction of new technical concepts results in those concepts being extended in scope and meaning as they are distributed through work organizations in ways that may, ultimately, be given collective structure as they become embedded in work routines. Finally, Daniels, James, Rahman, Young, Derry, and McConkey (this issue) discuss a form of learning in work that contrasts with the other articles in this issue: It focuses on the difficult work that cancer patients and their care workers need to do once cancer has been diagnosed. The potential for cancer patients to access information has been transformed enormously by the emergence of the Internet as a rich source of medical information (and misinformation). This is an important instance of learning in a technologized setting that, as the authors note, is often not thought of as learning. These authors argue that the providers of information within the healthcare system have not sufficiently recognized what is involved for learners in transforming the results of their information seeking into meaningful understanding, in the context of the patient, care workers, and medical professionals. They reinterpret a study on current U. K. medical practice in terms of CHAT, which illustrates the complex issues faced by learners and workers in relating their learning to the context and the roles of technology in mediating access to knowledge. The authors propose a model for facilitating this underappreciated form of learning. Taken together, the articles forming this special issue illustrate a range of perspectives that are currently contributing to the emerging field that studies learning and technology in the workplace. One of the principal challenges for the field is the need to elaborate theoretical positions that may establish common ground between the diverse perspectives adopted in these articles. Phillip Kent, Celia Hoyles, Richard Noss, David Guile, and Arthur Bakker Institute of Education, University of London

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