Knowledge And Interaction

Decades of research in the cognitive and learning sciences have led to a growing recognition of the incredibly multi-faceted nature of human knowing and learning. Up to now, this multifaceted nature has been visible mostly in distinct and often competing communities of researchers. From a purely scientific perspective, "siloed" science—where different traditions refuse to speak with one another, or merely ignore one another—is unacceptable. This ambitious volume attempts to kick-start a serious, new line of work that merges, or properly articulates, different traditions with their divergent historical, theoretical, and methodological commitments that, nonetheless, both focus on the highly detailed analysis of processes of knowing and learning as they unfold in interactional contexts in real time. Knowledge and Interaction puts two traditions in dialogue with one another: Knowledge Analysis (KA), which draws on intellectual roots in developmental psychology and cognitive modeling and focuses on the nature and form of individual knowledge systems, and Interaction Analysis (IA), which has been prominent in approaches that seek to understand and explain learning as a sequence of real-time moves by individuals as they interact with interlocutors, learning environments, and the world around them. The volume’s four-part organization opens up space for both substantive contributions on areas of conceptual and empirical work as well as opportunities for reflection, integration, and coordination.

Internet, intranets, the Web, chat rooms, E-mail, and E-business. With the advent of this widespread networking, it is clear that the nature of human interactions is changing. As communities develop based on common knowledge, connections through traditional social routes are de-emphasized. Dynamic Knowledge Interaction presents groundbreaking, inte

Each time we take a turn in conversation we indicate what we know and what we think others know. However, knowledge is neither static nor absolute. It is shaped by those we interact with and governed by social norms - we monitor one another for whether we are fulfilling our rights and responsibilities with respect to knowledge, and for who has relatively more rights to assert knowledge over some state of affairs. This book brings together an international team of leading linguists, sociologists and anthropologists working across a range of European and Asian languages to document some of the ways in which speakers manage the moral domain of knowledge in conversation. The volume demonstrates that if we are to understand how speakers manage issues of agreement, affiliation and alignment - something clearly at the heart of human sociality - we must understand the social norms surrounding epistemic access, primacy and responsibilities.

This book is a collected volume that brings together research from authors working in cross-disciplinary academic areas including early childhood, linguistics and education, and draws on the shared interests of the authors, namely understanding children’s interactions and the co-production of knowledge in everyday communication. The collection of studies explores children’s interactions with teachers, families and peers, showing how knowledge and learning are co-created, constructed and evident in everyday experiences.

The educational use of television, film, and related media has increased significantly in recent years, but our fundamental understanding of how media communicate information and which instructional purposes they best serve has grown very little. In this book, the author advances an empirically based theory relating media's most basic mode of presentation -- their symbol systems -- to common thought processes and to learning. Drawing on research in semiotics, cognition and cognitive development, psycholinguistics, and mass communication, the author offers a number of propositions concerning the particular kinds of mental processes required by, and the specific mental skills enhanced by, different symbol systems. He then describes a series of controlled experiments and field and cross-cultural studies designed to test these propositions. Based primarily on the symbol system elements of television and film, these studies illustrate under what circumstances and with what types of learners certain kinds of learning and mental skill development occur. These findings are incorporated into a general scheme of reciprocal interactions among symbol systems, learners' cognitions, and their mental activities; and the implications of these relationships for the design and use of instructional materials are explored.

Transformation of Knowledge through Classroom Interaction examines and evaluates different ways which have been used to support students learning in classrooms.

In this essay collection, leading physicists, philosophers, and historians attempt to fill the empty theoretical ground in the foundations of information and address the related question of the limits to our knowledge of the world. Over recent decades, our practical approach to information and its exploitation has radically outpaced our theoretical understanding - to such a degree that reflection on the foundations may seem futile. But it is exactly fields such as quantum information, which are shifting the boundaries of the physically possible, that make a foundational understanding of information increasingly important. One of the recurring themes of the book is the claim by Eddington and Wheeler that information involves interaction and putting agents or observers centre stage. Thus, physical reality, in their view, is shaped by the questions we choose to put to it and is built up from the information residing at its core. This is the root of Wheeler’s famous phrase “it from bit.” After reading the stimulating essays collected in this volume, readers will be in a good position to decide whether they agree with this view.

Written by highly respected theorists in psychology and philosophy, the chapters in this book explicate and address fundamental epistemological issues involved in the problem of the relationship between the individual and the collective. Different theoretical viewpoints are presented on this relationship, as well as between the nature of rationality and morality, relativism and universalism, and enculturation and internalization. Many chapters also highlight similarities and differences between these alternative frameworks and Piaget's theory, and thus correct the misperception that Piaget had nothing to say about the social dimension of development. Other chapters focus on the implications of these debates for the important topic areas of pedagogy, moral development, and the development of social understanding in infancy and childhood. Although Piaget's theory is presented and evaluated by some of the chapters in this collection, the authors remain critical and do not shy away from revising or extending Piaget's theory whenever it is deemed necessary. Though the topic covered in this book is of fundamental importance in the social sciences, it is rarely addressed in a sustained way as it is in this collection of chapters. The book benefits social scientists interested in fundamental epistemological issues, especially as these concern the relationship between the individual and the collective, with implications for the conceptualization of morality and rationality.