Key Terms
- Compound mediation: “the ways that people habitually coordinate sets of artifacts to mediate or carry out their activities…Each artifact – and each type of artifice – helps to shape the activity and enable people to perform their many actions” (98).
- Genre: “genres embody distributed cognition. That is, a genre…is a material solution to a problem once faced by its originator, a solution that was successful enough to be used repeatedly by others. When workers apply a genre to a problem, in a sense the problem is being partially solved by those who developed the genre. Over time, the genre becomes familiar enough to its users that it is perceived as obvious (and in some cases trivial).7 That effect is difficult to see when one is embedded in the community using the genre. At the same time, rules for use are not ‘designed into’ these artifacts. [Within different communities], the material tools [may] not vary, but the domain knowledge [does], and that variation resulted in artifacts that were qualitatively different, that is, perceived as having quite different uses and possibilities” (109). “[W]ithin…different…communities, the domain knowledge (including unwritten rules, habits, and practices governing artifacts) [is] sometimes quite different. Consequently, [participants] sometimes perceive…artifact types or genres as having different uses, possibilities, and levels of important [in] different [communities]. These genres were constrained by the characteristics of the genres…as well as the historical development of practices and the interrelationships of genres [in] the various [communities]” (106).
- Genre ecology: “provide a community-centered interpretive view. Genre ecologies highlight idiosyncratic, divergent understandings and uses of artifacts and the practices that surround them as they develop within a given cultural-historical milieu… ‘[E]ach tool creates to environment of the others’…There tools are connected in multiple, complex, and often nonsequential ways. Furthermore, they co-evolve: changes in one lead to changes in others…[This] is made possible by the tools’ interconnections in the ecology. The ecology itself – not its individual tools – is the mediator of the activity” (99-100).
- Activity system: “account of how people coordinate and enact cyclical, objective-driven activities, activity is conceptualized as inherently social and intricately bound up with joint (community) labor…Activity theory posits that in every sphere of activity, one or more collaborators use artifacts (including physical and psychological tools) to transform a particular objective with a particular outcome in mind… Yet the [participant’s] activity does not spring from herself alone. It is intimately related to her communities…; her relationships to these communities are mediated by domain knowledge, including the habits she has developed for using various artifacts, work regulations, and ethical guidelines. Similarly, the relationship between the community and the object is mediated by the division of labor within that community” (99 emphasis in original).
Other Concepts
- “[A]rtifacts become useful to a given set of workers only through the ways in which those workers intermediate or juxtapose other artifacts” (98).
- Learning genre is often done with a “bricoleur strategy” in which one finds examples of the genre and adapts the examples to one’s current writing situation (114).
- “Analytical frameworks offer three key advantages to researchers: standardization, critical reflection, and scalability (116).
Critical reflection: Second, once articulated, frameworks can be examined and incrementally improved by various researchers. They become objects of study themselves…and therefore can be studied more critically. Consequently, later researchers might improve on the reliability, validity, and analytical power of existing frameworks.
Scalability: Third, since analytical frameworks are developed to offer a systematic analysis, they tend to be scalable. For instance, work models can be applied to very small numbers of artifacts … or very large numbers” (98).