seminar: Internet Swarms and Peer production

Today we have in KERG seminar two guests, Petri Kola and Juhana Kokkonen.
Topic is: Internet Swarms and Peer production

Swarm as a structure of very skillful internet users - net natives - who move from service to service using them in a very creative way. Participants have between them lose connections compared to the physical world. Traditionally if you start a volunteer organization officially people first must argue of hierarchy and rules and it slows down the process before anything real happens. In the net it is the opposite - people come together and start to develop some idea and start to put it into action step by step. People are investing a little time to see if the thing goes forward - microtrust, things do not have to succeed.

It is different from common view of web 2.0 users as amateurs, Petri believes the users are more with expertise.

How net is different from physical world?

Our concept of “how internet works” shouldn’t be developed on the basis of metaphors but real research data.

Metaphors can give us totally wrong picture how things are, eg. friction and privacy can be totally different in physical and virtual environment.

Internet happens to be a different kind of beast.

Micro contribution is something that doesn’t exist in physical world.
It is different from traditional participation systems - you can make easily contributions (eg. like in wiki).

Typical life patterns change with micro contributions.

More and more knowledge production is becoming the leading part in creating values and money.
Productivity in cognitive work depends on the right participants and resources meeting together.

Open systems better as information processing systems.

Individual physical differences are not so big as the knowledge work differences between individuals.
Out cognitive ability is different at different times of the day, we are productive when we can choose time and space.

Commons based peer networks: open systems

Compared to hierarchical organizations, it makes a lot of sense to go over organizational borders and give people initiative to choose people to work with and to choose what to do.

Yokshai Benkler: The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom (2006).

Essential question: how to combine contributions.

What are the criteria for someone to have the permission to contribute.
In open production model there is no hierarchy about who is more competent. In digital world we have a permanent undo-possibility - if someone contributes what does not fit it can be undone.

Question is how to make difference and separate good and bad contributions.
Community can establish a system where contributions are evaluated.
Contributions can be evaluated by their merit, effect.

There must be some rules:
The rule of neutral point of view: every article should be balanced with point of uses.

Forking makes open virtual immaterial collaboration different from real production.
Community can choose the safe branch and avoid the problematic one.

Forking is an insurance for participants.

How virtual organizing is different?
Organizing to the virtual internet can be differnet from organizing physical reality.

early feedback
do something and evaluate afterwards
emergent rules
unclear borders
focus on action and achievement
short time periods for one goal
rules are more decided on the way
doesn’t look like much effort
doesnt have to succeed
the collaborations do not look like anything
you must be part of it to see the point

In lightweight organizations, if based on volunteer participation, the projects can go to sleeping mode without a problem.

Hacker attitudes from wikipedia, but many of these attitudes seem much in line how participating in swarm.

Produsage= production + usage
If production and consumption cannot be separated, it may change values, it may make to rethink what is the product.

If you are not a contributer now, you are always a potential contributor. A wiki must be constantly monitored all the time to remain the product it is.

stigmery= indirect coordination between agents or actions
It means the way how ants coordinate their action, they change their environment and it changes actions of other sin this environment.

Eric Bonabeau, a complexity theorist and the chief scientist at Icosystem Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We’re not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. “

Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won’t be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it’s made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part.

Karsten Heuer, a wildlife biologist, observed in 2003, when he and his wife, Leanne Allison, followed the vast Porcupine caribou herd (Rangifer tarandus granti) for five months. “It was as though every animal knew what its neighbor was going to do, and the neighbor beside that and beside that. There was no anticipation or reaction. No cause and effect. It just was.”

“In biology, if you look at groups with large numbers, there are very few examples where you have a central agent,” says Vijay Kumar, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “Everything is very distributed: They don’t all talk to each other. They act on local information. And they’re all anonymous.”

Charles N. Harper: “When ants bring food back to the nest, they lay a pheromone trail that tells other ants to go get more food,” Harper explains. “The pheromone trail gets reinforced every time an ant goes out and comes back, kind of like when you wear a trail in the forest to collect wood. So we developed a program that sends out billions of software ants to find out where the pheromone trails are strongest for our truck routes.”

ecological niche idea is there!

The text is not only content, but it is also a guide for participating in the project. It is both the content and the participation interface put together.

Projects parvi.fi

Tutkimusparvi: people from social media research

Swarm-like education is the model where people will be representing different stakeholders. There will be learning materials like wikibooks. The idea would be start a peer-learning process, where all the diffrenet groups contribute and learn from each other.

Mauri: when does swarm lose being a swarm, are there characteristics of swarminess

Petri: maybe swarm is a phase of getting more organized

Forking ability gives the swarm-quality.

Learning swarm wiki was started.

My reflections:
i think Petri put two different things into one that are not same at phenomenon level - awareness based dynamic small-particle behaviour centred microblogs, and wikis that are more the broad result centred less than identifying the actors.

1. some swarm phenomena in awareness systems are at particle level dynamic and convey short term feedback type of influence to changing of the ecosystem/niches in the sense why and what the others do, that is socio-emotional and task and process (activity) awareness perhaps

2. more artifact-centred wikis are systems where the long-term feedback (the pages) influences the niche more and is of more ecological impact. Focus is on what changed in the environment where the actors are living in. Maybe it is the broad situation awareness?

In embodied simulation there are some aspects from both: picking up and integrating into your action both the other actors as well as the objects (something in text either as traces of action or triggers of meaning building) that might serve as your action triggers.

knowledge management in organisations

Was reading the book
Knowledge Creation and Management
edited by
Kazuo Ichijo
Ikuijoro Nonaka
Oxoford University Press, 2007

Preface
In 1492-1800, at globalization 1.0 period, enterprises were entering to the global markets. 1800-2000 was the period of globalization 2.0 with global competition of enterprises. Starting from year 2000 globalization 3.0 has started with newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally through knowledge work.

Why do firms differ. The theory of the knowledge-creating firm
by I.Nonaka & R.Toyama
Theories explain that differences between firms originate from imperfections of profit-maximizing like blocked barriers (cannot get certain confidential resources or mobility problems); high cost (too costly to acquire resources, high transaction costs); limited capabilities of managers (firms fall into path dependencies and are ecologically dying out).
Firms differ also because of their management vision (values, commitment of employees) differs, they envision different futures (maximizing profit versus making a good car).

It has been claimed (Teece, 2003) that firms are passive entities in the environment, that take information and produce products and services, but they merely adapt to the environment and never try to shape it. Nonaka and Toyama view firms as dynamic knowledge-creating entities that interact with the environment (an ecosystem of knowledge) reshaping the environment and even itself by creating and intaking knowledge assets and the environment as an ecoystem of knowledge and multilayered ba, through knowledge creation.

The knowledge-based theory of the firm rests on two elements:

1) basic view of human beings (human subjectivity in the company’s information-processing machine is not a noise)
The difference in human subjectivity (how we view the world) in companies helps to create new knowledge. Humans are not replaceable parts of machines. An individual transcends himself/herself through knowledge creation (Nonaka, Toyama, Konno, 2000). In organisational knowledge-creation process, individuals interact with each other to transcend their own boundaries and, as a result change themselves, others, the organisation, and the environment.

2) process of organisational knowledge creation (where knowledge includes values and ideals).
Knowledge-creation theory treats knowledge as fallible and influenced by subjective factors. However, in organisational knowledge-creation this subjective tacit knolwledge, held by individuals, is externalized into objective explicit knowledge to be shared and synthesized within and beyond organisations, and newly created knowledge is, in turn, embodied by individuals to enrich their subjective tacit knowledge. Organisational knowledge-creation is an ongoing social process of validating truth in which knowledge keeps expanding (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).

The firm’s knowledge vision (Why do we exist and do what we do?) inspires organisation members so that they are encouraged to create knowledge and defines a consistent value system to evaluate and justify the created knowledge within the organisation. Firms need the concept/goal/action standard as a driving objective of knowledge-creating process that helps to realize the vision.

Knowledge creation is guided through the synthesis of contradictions (Nonaka & Toyama, 2003) - accepting dualities and synthesizing them through dialectical thinking and action in dialogues. Contradictions that cannot be solved through objective analysis alone can be solved by synthesizing subjective views and intuitions that have accumulated through practice.

A foundation for knowledge-creating activity is ba - a shared context in motion at certain time and space.At ba one can be open to the others by losing oneself, seeing itself in relation to the others, accepting their views and values. The boundary of ba must be permeable so that it can accept new contexts. Ba needs the participation of multiple perspectives.

The ecosystem of knowledge consists of multilayered ba, which exists across organisational boundaries and is continuously evolving. A knowledge-creating firm needs to manage a multilayered ba, which stretches across organisational bondaries. At the same time firm needs to protect its knowledge assets as sources of competitive advantage.

Knowledge assets are not knowledge just created but it also includes social capital that is shared in the organisations. One of the most important knowledge asset is firm-specific kata, a pattern or way of doing things in dialogues and practices. Three steps of kata, creative routines, are: shu (learn), ha (break) and ri (create).

Leadership of knowledge-creating firm requires active commitment from all members of the organisation, not just from elite members using the middle-up-down mechanisms.Middle managers break down the vision or driving objectives, create ba and lead dialogues and practices. Knowledge is the source of power that exist outside the hierarchy of organisation. Leaders provide visions, develop and promote sharing of knowledge assets, energize and connect ba, protect ba from outside contexts so that it can develop in its own contexts according to organisation vision, enable the spiral knowledge creation.

Knowledge in organisational settings.
L.Prusak & L.Weiss
Early knowledge management initiatives collected individual knowledge assets without contextualizing them in team contexts. New view of knowledge management has increased attention to the adding context to content and the group knowledge (opposite to individual knowledge) is made easier to access, secondly the social networks must be made viewable making it easier to find knowledge workers with whom to establish relationships.

Knowledge creation and Transfer. From teams to the whole organisation.
B. Büchel
There are two key measures of social networks that indicate the organisational capabilities and use of social capital: density of networks within teams, and number of external contacts. Performance is more effective if density of networks in group creates cohesive understandings, however, too cohesive groups with stabile perpectives lose effectiveness and are unable to integrate diverse perspectives from external contacts.

Knowledge transfer within organisations
D. Leonard
Transfer is always two-way.
Knowledge assets must be replicated to hold stability within firm, but understanding the core knowledge and practices these assets hold is essential to apply them in situational contexts.
Knowledge assets must be evaluated and changed through reuse in different situations.
Initiating creative fusions to cooperate at multiple levels.
Types of knowledge to be transferred: know-what, know-why, know-how, know-who.
Barriers of knowledge transfer: too rigid or too vague knowledge assets, culturally sticky knowledge (difficult to separate from source), the gap between the initial source and the receiver of knowledge assets.
Transfer is aided if knowledge is made explicit and if there is physical proximity of the knowledge source and the receiver.

Bringing the outside in
M. Mazevski & N. Athanassiou
Knowledge is personal - social networks and social capital.
Relationships may be:
strong/weak: stong relationships are built with the kind of interaction necessary for establishment of shared tacit knowledge, they are characterised by trust
flexible: participants share many areas of knowledge and expertise, they have willingness to share and learn
transferable: transferable relationships can be given to someone else, people are reluctant to transfer strong relationships unless they are aware that new contact is worthy
power: power is the access to resources that are important and scare, powerful relationships provide access to such resources.
satisfying: if needs are fulfilled reciprocally

Human resources management and knowledge creation
M. Osterloch
Creating synergies constitutes collective good that can be used by people who have not contributed their share to its production.
In contrast to manual teamwork, pure knowledge teamwork raises productivity of the team if different knowledge is dispersed among different people (Hayek, 1945).
The result of knowledge teamwork is at least in part new explicit knowledge that can be used by others outside the team.
Knowledge workers in teams have more bargaining power than manual workers do, the people cannot be easily replaced.
Motivation is the key of knowledge work:
- enjoyment based intrinsic motivation: the individual acts as homo ludens (Huizinga, 1986), pleasure is derived from activity itself and not from compensation, flow experience
- prosocial intrinsic motivation takes into account the well-being of others, the welfare of the community, people want to contribute to common good of their community or company
extra-role behaviour: willingness to cooperate, willingness to keep organisational citizenship behaviour (protecting other members if rules are violated)
How to increase intrinsic motivation:
The perception of autonomy decreases if people perceive that their self-determination is reduced when doing intrinsically interesting activity. They feel that they are not the origins of their behaviour.
Feeling of competence grows if individuals understand what they are doing and when they feel responsible for outcome. If people feel that they are competent, they make greater contributions to the community (Kollock, 1998). But individuals must get positive feedback about the outcome of their contributions that does not eclipse their feeling of autonomy. Feedback must be perceived as supporting not controlling. Second, individuals must believe that their participation is important for the provision of the community good. Feedback, whether other members have received and used the contributions, and training possibilities are important. Providing opportunities to personal contacts increases motivation.

expectations to new social learning tools

Social software is generally recognized as tools, which development is highly dependent of users‘ mutual interaction with the mediation of these tools, involving group processes such as discussion, mutual advice or favors, and play (Shirky, 2002).

Any activity is always mediated by the tools that we create in the process of actualizing certain affordances in our goal-directed and enculturated actions - when making something from the environment into our own or when bringing something of our own ideas into the environment. More than at earlier times, current social tools are the creation of communities. While the artifacts and meanings, created and distributed with social software, obtain in the process of use the community-defined folksonomical dimensions, the activities what are performed and evolve in these systems as a result of community interactions, have yet remained implicit, and are not well observable for the users of social software. Social software still lacks the means how to make activity potentialities of tools, and activity patterns, which emerge in the communities, more observable. What we basically lack, is the soft ontologically defined constraints/possibilities of actions determined by the communities who use social tools.

When using social software for learning at institutional courses, but also for personal self-directed learning attempts with other learners in the Web, the explicit socially defined action potentialities within activity systems would enhance the selection of communal tools for common objectives. Some of the recent developments, such as Friend of a Friend (FOAF) technology that aims at creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do, seem to promise that the action-based automated search of learning partners would soon become possible. The best practice of the tool-use for certain learning activities is, thus, disseminated giving a valuable input for the others and narrowing down their choice of appropriate tools for particular learning goals. For example, it is suggested that the super-peer networks would enable the learners to observe, record and share their activity practices with artifacts through networks (Clematis et al., 2007). If FOAF and similar specifications could read personal action potentialities with certain social software, their communities and artifact types, which we described earlier, the decision processes at constructing collaborative landscapes for learning purposes, could be supported by technological means.

Tools that support the construction of group landscapes from distributed personal tools play an important role in the application of new Learning Environment Design model. The new generation of aggregation and mashup tools is anticipated to support the construction of distributed personal and group learning landscapes, using the affordance-based activity system model. The mashup of the learning environment from distributed feeds will be realised, considering, in one hand, the anticipated affordances for action, and personal activity preferences, which may be described with FOAF kind of scripts, and on the other hand, the socially defined action potentialities of tools would enable the mashup tools to automatically select a suitable set of widgets for certain learners or groups. In these mashup tools learners would pertain full control over the selection of feeds – eventually they can ignore or close some tools and even add new tools. Such user-activity can be, in turn, used to update the semantic models refining the activity-tool relations, improving the tool recommendations.

The critical factor of effective use of distributed social landscapes and scaffolding in such systems is the possibility to monitor the use of landscape elements and the information flows between them in the cause of action. New developments at social software systems enable already to visualise the folksonomy based meaning-building dimensions in the communities (see Klerkx & Duval, 2007). What is yet needed, is the visualisation of activities and learning landscapes for the learners. This may be realised through visualising the mashed learning landscapes as affordance-based activity systems in which the distributed social tools would convey also the socially defined activity potentials. Certainly, this may not indicate, which of these available activity potentialities were put into action. For understanding this, interaction within specific social tools, and the content of feeds between tools must be analyzed (eg. which regulatory, social or content-creation types of action potentialities were put into action). But that seems even more complicated issue.

The joint learning situations would also pertain the use of asynchronous or synchronous interaction tools when working with artifacts. Some of the tools like Gabbly chat can now be easily integrated with different webpages, social software applications and masup tools. Yet, the develoment of tools, which keep the interrelations between the talked content and the productive actions made at artifact, should enhance learning at distributed landscapes. The future of using distributed social software elements for self-directed and collaborative learning purposes is in mashing selectively the evidence from different activities eg. weblog posts and commentaries with certain tags, artifacts purposfully created and stored in different repositories, wiki-contributions, discourse logs etc. In these places (hubs) where our distributed knowledge meets again, we propagate ourselves as the connectors between the communities. If we mix our distributed self with the knowledge of our community members (like in micro-blogging feeds of Jaiku), these mashed feeds may work as triggers for learning. They enable to access knowledge community-wise and transfer it to other community spaces.

distributed self

One of the phenomena in web 2.0 is keeping distributed self.

We all invade various spaces: weblogs, twitter, jaiku, flickr, youtube, social bookmarking spaces etc.
What these distributed spaces enable us to do, is to keep our personality in multiple places at the same time and variate our presence in different modalities.

The result of keeping distributed self increases likelihood that my external knowlege, my artifacts, my meanings, my activity patterns will be noticed, modified and duplicated.

Keeping distributed self keeps us in touch with different communities.

Being simultaneously in different communities enables us to bring information across the borders of the communities, initating semiosis, enabling us to constantly create new knowledge.

The maintenance of distributed self has also become external - we tend to feed together our distributed spaces into aggregators or weblogs in order to feel as a whole and observe our external presence. In these places (hubs) where our distributed knowledge meets again, we propagate ourselves as the connectors between the communities.

Can we create in these spaces as well? If we mix our distributed self with the knowledge of our community members (like in microblogging feeds of Jaiku or Twitter), these mashed feeds may work as triggers for writing new blog entries. They enable us to access knowledge community-wise and transfer it to our other community spaces.

The social media starfish is a good representation of our distributed self. Another idea of digital and distributed self is here.

There is also an article by Stanton Wortham about distributed self - The Heterogeneously Distributed Self (2007)
Journal of Constructivist Psychology, Volume 12, Issue 2, March 1999, pages 153-172.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/107205399266163
http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/109/

Article explains that heterogeneous distribution can be applied to the self.
The self is heterogeneously distributed because a coherent self emerges from the interconnection of structures of diverse sorts, which together facilitate the experience and manifestation of a coherent identity.

Performative account of self: self emerges when person repeatedly adopts characteristic positions, with respect of others and within recognizable cultural patterns, in everyday social action (Butler, 1990).

The author suggests locating self in several different types of structures, including performative, psychological and other patterns.

For example the author writes how there will be interaction between our past and present self in autobiographical narratives.

This makes me think, if we reflect in weblog - do we also talk with our past and present self in order to create some coherence?

ecology of hybrid social web

Rising social web and its rapid becoming into the hybrid environment that integrates virtual and real spaces has given birth to the new activities:

• self-management of personal mediation spaces constructed by orchestrating distributed sets of web-based and mobile tools;
• self-propagation of one’s presence and self-positioning into the multi-perspective hybrid places evoked by merging virtual and real spaces through creating personal external meaning-spaces and geo-tagging personal meanings as action potentialities to hybrid locations;
• self-localization in the hybrid space by tagging, feeds, and mashup technologies for obtaining awareness of people, their meaning perspectives and activities;
• self-identification and alignment into virtual communities and their spacial perspectives through detection, participation and playful variation of their activity patterns, and connective uptake and translation of meanings;

These activities all together enable to establish the dynamic ecology of hybrid social web as an activity system. This consists of external spaces with objects, what people need to activate as embodied concepts in neural circuits of sensory-motor area of brain. Embodiment happens by intentionally evoking anticipated affordances related to previously experienced or culturally defined action potentialities and their emotional correlates.

Embodying objects in space as embodied concepts turns them for persons into places with embedded meanings, which serve as mediating tools for activities. People propagate their activity patterns in spaces as meanings attached to artifacts, what they externalise through mediating tools. Each artifact, when interpreted in space, constrains the dimensions of the space for the person, it contains action potentialities (affordances) that will be created and embodied by new person, and which start constraining the space, actions in space, emotions related to this space. We can see these artifact-action triggered affordances as sort of ecological activation or even instruction for the user how it is possible to use the environment.

In order to perceive certain activity potentials of other people in space people need to be intentionally at same wavelenght and embody similar/or potentially competing action potentialities and their emotional correlates (affordances). Self-identification of spaces into places enables the person to locate himself, propagate one’s identity, and distinguish from the other identities creating therefore an ecological niche where to inhabit. Continuous self-localization in respect to other space perspectives and their inhabitants, and potential adjustment to their places serves for community formation that is ecologically important to defend the communal places.

Ecological social web is in dynamic changes because the embodiment of action potentials of individuals is never totally similar and brings in variations. Within the communities this variation is low, resulting in similar perception of places and uptake of meanings and participation of the common activity patterns. As certain communities embody different perspectives of spaces, this creates the potential borders of understanding meanings, and noticing afforded activity patterns. Thus, the social web as an ecosystem obtains structural complexity – certain communities may simultaneously inhabit the same space while defining it as a different place. The uptake of meanings of another community in the jointly inhabited space may also happen. Such meanings will be embodied in the different intentional frames causing novel activity patterns to emerge.

Example:

We may walk in town seeing the previous location of Bronze soldier monument. Depending of our alignment to certain cultural-ideological group we may embody certain emotions (fear/anguish/pride) and maybe some motor actions like (not)going there. If we are the inhabitant of hybrid social spaces, we may be tempted to take a picture of this place and upload it to Flickr, geotagging it at Tallinn map. We may also comment our experiences with the location in the post of our weblog and drag the feed of the Flickr image to the weblog. Let’s suppose many people do the same thing. They can also see the other images tagged to the place, maybe some from the times when the soldier was still there, or some from the hot days in Tallinn. They reflect their different meanings and related action potentials in narratives of their weblogs. Someone else studying the event, will find different weblogs and images and needs to detect what were the action potential of people, if he is able of detecting some communalities in meanings he may also embody some action potentials. These depend of the cultural and activity background of this person (eg. whether this is a citizen of Moscow or New York). They will comment the posts and take other actions, presumably sending some liberty fighters to Tallinn or decide not to take the trip to Tallinn as tourists. We can also imagine there is a certain software that enables people to directly geotag their images or meanings to the Bronze soldier location and view the meanings at spot. This will create a potential for embodying different action potentials for the different communities, and also the possibility to develop novel activity patterns – for example the narratives of the place, grounding of what happened and finding the compromises between cultures etc. We can say then that the previous Bronze soldier location becomes into the space with meanings that serves as a mediating device for understanding and participating in activities.

course designs for web 2.0 tools

Recently i have had some thoughts and discussions with Sebastian Fiedler and Terje Väljataga about courses with web 2.0 tools in higher education. The question is, that although we intend to use social software for educational purposes..it doesn’t go that simple that we just teach how to blog, write wiki or so on.
These are only means, offering new environment for something meaningful we want to achieve. What would it be what we should stream for and where should the emphasis of the course be so that it meaningfully integrated web 2.0 tools? Content generation? Projectwork? Self-direction? Social retrieval patterns? Networking? Dealing with challenges?

We have tested in spring self-direction as the course focus, which brings along the nessecity to investigate social software from the affordance perspective when building personal or collaborative landscapes of web 2.0 tools for conductig certain activity patterns. This focus has worked out quite effectively, we are continuing running the same course…but

as we know this works there is a temptation to shift focus and try out something new.

One idea we briefly talked with Terje is what if to focus on the development, social retrieval and contextualization of new media objects in activity patterns. This idea is a continuation of what we have tested already at individual and team-learning level when students created complex landscapes and integrated their activity patterns with these by evoking certain affordances of the integrated environment.

The advancement is to highlight the role of media objects in the patterns.
Secondly, what is the role of these media objects for the users, how they contectualize and interpret objects in social networks? (This relates with my previous thinking that we should not talk of social networks that consist only of people, but of people and objects networks).
Thirdly, it is interesting, how the affordances of the environment and affordances of the media objects interrelate and influence each other?

So, the course could be of the distributed actvity systems in which we emphaise the role of media objects - their creation, roles in the activity, how media objects trigger new lines of activity patterns, how the environment with its affordances supports learning process with media objects etc.

Ok, it seems there are enough ideas to try it out and study.

social innovations in school library

Tomorrow we will discuss with Ele Priidik of her future master study.
Initial idea is on my opinion very promising - to develop information using strategies based on social bookmarking that would enhance the use of school library in subject lessons. We were talking previously of two ideas:

Literature-suggestions and browsing: this would be the framework in which the compulsory literature books will be tagged in school library first by the librarian, and then in the following lessons the methodology will be worked out in which people should add more tags on the basis of what was relevant for them in these books (eg. in the book Gone with the wind..some might see the love story, the others history of South etc.) and enhance it also with comments. Then the eventual result would be the school library that suggests through the readers. This should develop the new kind of search skills and +

Research literature and storing: in this case the students would start working with their specific research cases in specific subject, collecting social bookmarks, sorting and reorganizing them accordingly into tag-clouds. This should develop new kind of organizing skills and +
It is not that clear yet what exactly we would do. There might be another interesting approach based on tagging the specific domain-related information-books at the library during making reports.

Ele’s task would be working out the methods and trying them out and evaluating in her school at Paide. For this she needs to investigate other similar approaches with social bookmarks, like Martin Sillaots or Riina Vuorikari propose in their weblogs.

Secondly she would need to develop the framework what are information analysis skills and how social software would bring in the need for different type of skills.
Today i read something interesting about telling that:

The efficiency of social tagging is decreasing.

This claim is based on entropy - a measure of the disorder of a system.

Would it mean that the nice social bubble like del.icio.us will be gone soon because of laws of entropy and there will be the next kind of information sorting/storing/analyzing method needed?

Would it mean that in the organization (eg. school library) the smaller closed systems should be used?

I can also think it might be useful to try out some social-bookmarking service that would be like open social school library project also in other schools.

Some comments about entropy in systems:
Entropy in unisolated systems can increase or decrease.
In an isolated systems entropy cannot never decrease…thus in isolates systems it can only increase.

There is also theory of entropy in information systems.

In information theory, entropy is the measure of the amount of information that is missing before reception. The definition of the information entropy is expressed in terms of a discrete set of probabilities. In the case of transmitted messages, these probabilities were the probabilities that a particular message was actually transmitted, and the entropy of the message system was a measure of how much information was in the message. For the case of equal probabilities (i.e. each message is equally probable), the Shannon entropy (in bits) is just the number of yes/no questions needed to determine the content of the message.

This is of course for Ele to decide and find out.
I can imagine that eventually some kind of hierarchy for evaluating the skills might be suggested besides methods. And..why not to introduce in the school library practice (which are usually quite small) the whole concept of folksonomies?

Then thirdly, Ele has to test out how her methods are applicable, describe them as cases and evaluate the cases on the basis of how they developed students’ information processing skills, and how they were effective as the social methods that enhance information access at school libraries.

We have not decided yet, which system to use for this study. On one hand del.icio.us seems to have many good functions and it is belieavable that people would use it anyway. But there are also shelfari and others…

Locative video and collaborative sense-making workshop

I just got information from Mauri Kaipainen about very interesting workshop in Tallin.
A workshop on locative videos and video editing as distributed community activity, Tallinn 14.5. - 16.5.2007. The event is organized by Tallinn University and Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia. Sponsored by EMT.
For whom: BA and MA students of Stadia, Tallinn University and EKA. Ideal number of participants 10-15, max 20. There was a plan with Mauri to do a small study about our ideas related with meaning-making in relation with this study, but we have both been so busy recently that we didnt discuss it lately. I hope i can still catch up and be there.

working on affordance paper ideas

Yesterday i spent whole day in Tallinn with Terje Väljataga and Sebastian Fieder discussing the key terms in our affordance paper. What was nice …we started from lab, moved to the coffee-shop and ended by the side of the swan pond in Kadriorg. I think the last part was the most creative.

Some of the ideas we tried to refine:

Should we use term web 2.0 tools?
Old term would have been social publishing tools or social media, is it different from read and write web, two-way web?
Sebastian argued that social cannot be part of the tools and systems, social is the second order effect.
So we decided to describe the trends towards new systems with new properties, name the tools and not to use web 2.0, but web-publishing as the general term.

Another discussion was, should we distinguish between individual and collaborative web-publishing. Our thought was that at any time when an individual decides to publish, it accepts the new paradigm of sharing. It feels that individual is an egoistic perspective, but individual web-publishing becomes community-based contribution and practices, and involves paradigm change. So we decided not to distinguish between individual and collaborative web-publishing in the paper, and just to refer to web-publishing tools and services, giving their description with novel aspects.

Bereiter (2002) raises the questions: Where is knowledge if it isn’t contained in individual minds? The kind of answer coming from activity and situated cognition theorists runs along the following lines: Knowledge is not lodged in any physical or metaphysical organ. Rather knowledge inheres in social practices and in the tools and artifacts used in those practices (p. 57). Learning as it pertains to individuals is a process of moving from peripheral to full participations in cultural practices (Lave and Wenger 1991). At another level, learning is the evolution of those practices. Knowledge is regarded as distributed. This does not mean merely that it is spread around, a bit here and a bit there… knowledge does not consist of little bits…all the knowledge is in the relationships – relationships among the people engaged in an activity, the tools they use, and the material conditions of the environment in which action takes place. Bereiter concludes (p. 59): People do not acquire items of mental content which they then take out on occasions and use. Instead they learn how to take part in what is going on and how to function intelligently in the work environment. On page 66 Bereiter (2002) writes: My purpose is to argue for distinguishing knowledge in the form of identifiable conceptual artifacts from knowledge implicit or embedded in individual minds, in social practices, or in physical tools.

Secondly we argued which term is more precise - personal learning environments or personalised learning environments?
PLE incorporates technology, material resources, people, and everything it is a general term meaning environment concept in broader sense, so we discussed to use this and make some arguments with british group. Presonalised relates with adopting some environment to personal needs, like making a personalised web-browser, and it feels a narrower concept.

Third aspect was, whether to use instructional design model term or educational environment design?
We have already written that: User-selected variability in the learning environments has to be considered as part of the learning design, but now we need to change it to the learning environment design.
We decided that, because of the wider degrees of freedom in new distributed systems, we want to put the effort on designing the learning environment, not the learning designs. Learning- or instructional designs would control and determine the activities of the learners, new environments suggest less control of cognitive learning processes and more effort has to put on the environment design where the learners can act self-directed manner.

Then we discussed what is the difference of our understanding of knots compared with Engeström. My argument was that Engeström’s knots are tied and untied when different activities meet either inside the activity system or between several activity systems. But people have problems at the action level whithin activities. So our suggestion was to look at the knotworking situations at action level. This enables to consider every orchestration between actions as a knot. In our framework we say that in each knot of the activity system subjects with certain objectives try to realise something using tools and artifacts and their meaning-system relying on their rules and roles - thus, in every knot the affordances emerge due to that action, which start constraining the possible realisation of the knot.
Engeström has written about collaborative orchestration of action in knots (i think he does not refer to the activity-action-operation hierarchy, but on the moves or actions as a general term). We discussed is this applicable at individual level (in self-directed learning situations). One thought is that individual always has the conversation with artifacts (e.g. Wertcsh’s ‘Voices of mind’), and then knotworking happens at individual level, when certain cognitive and metacognitive actions must be performed in the personal activity system which is in networked situation interrelated with other personal activity systems. Artifacts from other activity systems can be considered as the actors’ minds which need to be translated into one’s own mind..from different perspectives.

Engeström, Y, Engeström, R., Vähäaho T. (1999). When the center does not hold: the importance of knotworking. (pp. 345-374). In S. Chaiklin M. Hedegaard and U. J. Jensen (Eds.), Activity Theory and Social Practice: Cultural-Historical Approaches. Aarhus University Press.

Activity theory takes a collective object-oriented activity system as its prime unit of analysis. Activity is realised in goal-oriented individual and group actions.
Knotworking is not reducible to a single knot or a single episode. It is a temporal trajectory of successive task-oriented combinations of people and artifacts. Knotworking situations are fragile because they rely on fast accomplishment of intersubjective understanding, distributed control and coordinated action between actors who otherwise have relatively little to do with each other.
In knowtworking, the combinations of people and the contents of tasks change constantly. This highlights the importance of communicative actions and tools for the success of knotworking.
Instead of being stable the combinations of people collaborating to perform for some tasks change constantly. Combinations of people, tasks and tools are unique and of relatively short duration yet in their basic pattern, they are continuously repeated. These forms of organisation do not fit standard definitions of a team. Teams are typically understood as relatively stable configurations. Neither do they fit standard notions of networks. Networks are typically understood as relatively stable structures, which can be exploited more or less effectively by their individual or collective nodes. We call this type of organisation of work knotworking.
The notion of knot refers to a rapidly pulsating, distributed and partially improvised orchestration of collaborative performance between otherwise loosely connected actors and activity systems.
Knotworking is historically significant new form of organising and performing work activity, connected to the emergence of new co-configuration models of production.
We may name six criteria of co-configuration: a) adaptive product or service b) continuous relationship between customer product/service and company, c) ongoing configuration or customization d) active customer involvement, e) multiple collaborating produces and f) mutual learning from interactions between the parties involved.

Knotworking needs to be represented along several complementary dimensions (Engeström, 1999). First we need the socio-spatial dimension to depict the relations between the different activity systems involved in forming a knot at any given point of time. We also need a temporal dimension to depict successive steps or episodes in a trajectory of knotworking. The spatial and temporary dimensions are fairly obvious. What is less obvious is the need for an ethical dimension. Knotworking regularly calls for redistribution and reconceptualisation of control, responsibility and trust. This does not imply that knotworking is automatically a benign phenomen of empowerment. Our claim is simply that the emergence of knotworking shakes and makes questionable the given forms of hierarchy and segmentation of professional and organisational authority.

Knotworking is characterised by a pulsating movement of tying untying and retying together otherwise separate therads of activity. The idea of pulsation integrates the socio-spatial and the temporal dimensions: knots are tied and untied in various rythms which need to be represented along both dimensions simultaneously. Pulsation alows comresses and releases the different participating activity streams in ways that tend to disrupt and shake given notions of responsibility and power, opening up the ethical dimensions of work for analysis and intervention.

The tying and dissolution of a knot of collaborative work is not reducible to any specific individual or fixed organisational entity as the center of control. The center does not hold. The locus of initiative changes from moment to moment within a knotworking sequence. Thus knotworking cannot be adequately analysed from the point of view of an assumed center of coordination and control, or as an additive sum of the separate perspectives of individuals or institutions contributing to it. The unstable knot itself needs to be made the focus of analysis. Each thred in a knot may be analysed as a collective activity system.
We may distinguish between more individually-based and more collectively-based forms of knotworking.
Dimensions of knotworking:
Knotworking is dependent on fast accomplishment of intersubjective understanding and distributed control. Intersubjectivity is not reducible to either the interaction between or the subjectivity of each participant. Both are needed. Thus we may be able to analyse the internal dynamics and tensions of the activity systems that partake in a knotworking trajectory. For this we use the model of an activity system (Engeström, 1987).
Activity-theoretical studies of work and communication have mainly dealt with development and learning within well-bounded singular activity systems. If knotworking is indeed a historically-significant new way of organising work, associated with the rise of co-configuration, activity theory must expand its methodological repertoire to cope with the challenge.
Activity-theoretical studies of work and organisations must conduct critical dialogue with varieties of discourse and conversation analysis that neglect or ignore the object to be produced as the central driving force and glue of practical-discursive human activity.

Activity systems are complex social organisations containing of learners, teachers, curriculum materials, software tools and the physical environment (p. 79).
Situative learning perspective builds on (Greeno, 2006, p. 80):
1) patterns of information that are hypothesised to be recognised or constructed in activity related with operating in the problem-spaces
2) pattern of coordination in groups of individuals engaged in joint action with material and informational systems in their environment, relates with operating in the activity system

Phillips (1972) has called such patterns participation structures or participant structures. A participation structure describes the distribution of the functional aspects of the activity including agency, authority, accountability leading and the following, initiating attending accepting questioning or challenging and so on. Participation structures that are charactersitic of a community or group are aspects of the community’s or group’s practices and learning to become more effective in one’s participation corresponds to achieving fuller participation in a community’s practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991).

Situative studies bring the individual cognitive and interactional approaches together by providing analyses of interaction in activity systems that include the hypotheses about semiotic structures that are the informational contents of the activity. These analyses include representing contributions of the material and technological tools and artifacts of the system. The goal is to understand cognition as the interaction among participants and tools in the context of an activity. The situative analysis has two components: an interaction analysis of the conversation including close attention to its turn taking, responses and contributions (Sawyer, 2006) and the semiotic structures of information that they constructed in the coversation.

We also discussed what Engeström meant by the community term in the activity system, and is this community the same as the community in new networked situations. Engeström wrote that: The community comprises multiple individuals and/or sub-groups who share the same general object and who construct themselves as distinct from other communities.
In networked situations it is questionable, whether they share identity and goals when acting individually (which are the properties of the community), but the result would still be a participation network.
We decided to use term actors in an activity system which seems enough (instead of community) - this can be supported with Wenger’s (199 arguments. But we agree that participation networks can develop into a community after a certain period of time.

Community of practice is a group of people participating together to carry out different activities. For individuals it means that learning is an issue of engaging in and contributing to the practices of the communities. For communities, it means that learning is an issue of refining their practice and ensuring new generations of members. For organistions it means that learning is an issue of sustaining the interconnected communities of practice through which an organistaion knows what it knows and thus becomes effective and valuable as an organisation (Wenger, 1998, pp. 7-8).

There are four charactersitics that the learning communities must have (Bielaczyc and Collins 1999):
1)diversity of expertise among its members who are valued for their contributions and given support to develop
2)a shared objective of continually advancing the collective knowledge and skills
3)an emphasis on learning how to learn
4)mechanisms for sharing what is learned

In the end we made some major changes on the figure of the distributed activity system. We removed the community term and moved the subjects to the center of the model. This simplified the picture a lot, and if the term SUBJECTS is used, it is not changing the idea how the participation network emerges and works.

1. Assembling distributed learners and their learning spaces in groups, using shared communication spaces.
2. Grounding, who will do what actions in teams with tools; Grounding leardership etc.
3. Grounding, how to work; planning the meetings etc.
4. Grounding, where to work and what activities to do in each medium
5. Evaluating team-members, with whome you work socially.
6. Grounding the content to be created, and the content of learning materials to be used, and their relationships.
7. Materializing the objectives with tools. Creating the questionnaire and its content; publishing communicative acts.
8. Grounding discussed learning content, and its realisation in material artifact.
9. Grounding, how the subjects‘ performance was meaningful for realising their shared purpose.

The other figure, on which we explain the emergent nature of affordances will also be simplified. We will remove the context terminology, because the ideas, how Nardi describe what context is and how it influences the activity, started to overlap with the notion of affordances, and how they emerge and influence the activity.

It is some info i want to add to the paper to make it more related to AT and affordance literature. Also i needed to test my interpretations which i wrote in paper, and they seem to be ok.

Gaver (1991) finds that culture, experience and intentions are indeed entangled in the user-system interaction.
Gaver finds that such contexts can function to highlight certain affordances.
Affordances are:
“Properties of the world that are compatible with and relevant for the actors’ interaction, which, when perceptible, offer a link between the actors’ perception and action” (Gaver)

*this seems interesting objectivistic approach environment has affordances that are links if perceptible for action
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Bärentsen in particular mobilises the principle of situated action (Suchman, 1987) and the theory of cultural historical psychology/AT (Leontjev, 1978).
He explicitly addresses the dynamic aspect of the affordance concept, for instance through underlining the importance of what space (invariants) and time means for the learning aspect.
The perception of affordances are dependent on the degree to which users are able to know or feel (intuition) “where they are” in ecological space.

*can be added to the dynamic affordance reference
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As Vicente (1999) rightly mentions, Ecological Interface Design (EIS) principles by Vicente and Rasmussen (1992) in particular explores the application of ecological design principles for loosely coupled work domains with a high degree of strategic task uncertainty and self-organisation, where the actors’ levels of control, learning, strategies and tasks are crucial units of analysis.
EIS principles:
• Support of skill-based behaviour: a gradual aggregation of singular physical movements or cognitive processes
• Support of rule-based behaviour: supporting the actors’ cognitive control of her goal-directed behaviour through displaying perceptual and diagnostic cues for changes in the environment
• Support of knowledge-based behaviour: in particular crucial in high-risk work domains and situations requiring continual awareness and fast intervention.
An important design rationale in the EIS approach is the notion that actors have the ability to directly perceive the state of affairs in the environment, given that the information is present in a proper format. In order to do this, the interface of a system must be transparent in the sense that the deep structure of the work is accessible to direct perception as an affordance space in a Gibsonean sense.

*particularly interesting is approach to deal affordances in similar environment as we do, secondly i like they don’t use properties of the environment but “state of affairs” in the environment which emerge from deep structure of work - it is a step towards activity system where affordances emerge.

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The affordance spaces are created from a separate analysis of the deep structure of the work domain, from its physical properties to its goals, and from a separate analysis of the actors’ recurrent behaviour, intentions and strategies (e.g. Pejtersen & Albrechtsen, 2000; Albrechtsen & Pejtersen, 2000).

The Definition of affordances should be extended as follows: “cues for action relevance, displayed in the context of a virtual ecology of work”.
The shift between the actors’ focus on work problems and context, tools that mediate their activity and their coordination of work activities with other actors performs at several levels of action, communication and understanding.

*here again i see implicit relations with activity system components, secondly i like they consider actors’ behaviour, intentions and strategies as the source of affordances

From: Affordances in Activity Theory and Cognitive Systems Engineering
H. Albrechtsen, H.H.K. Andersen, S. Bodker, A.M. Pejtersen
Ris National Laboratory, Roskilde
August 2001

Boundary crossing

My research in science learning domain has moved towards ideas of translation and semiosis between partially untranslatable systems (e.g. everyday situations and scientific models of these situations in various abstract and visual forms), which bring in the conditions for learning and creating new knowledge structures. The topic of boundaries is a key concept in translation and semiosis. For instance in the works of J. Lotman he assumes that there must exist semiotic boundaries within the system that are constantly in move and cause the semiosis as a process to happen between the common and align contexts.

The book, which i refer here considers the questions of transfer and boundary crossing from the activity theory and situated learning perspectives. It is somewhat different from semiosis ideas, but it also conveys similar message.

For instance in the ideas of boundary zone and boundary objects are very similar to the ideas of Lotman of two partially overlapping cultures or systems which enable translations in the overlapping zone and beyond. I like the idea that ‘What is transferred is not packages of knowledge and skills that remain intact; instead the very process of such transfer involves active interpreting, modifying and reconstructing the skills and knowldge to be transferred’.
This suggests semiosis to take place although it is not referred to explicitly.

There are also some aspcets that i don’t agree completely: ‘Transfer depends on an ability to perceive the affordances for the practice that are present in a changed situation (Greeno, Smith, Moore, 1993). It seems Greeno et al. suggest that the affordances are sort of embedded in the situations. Can it be that he means situations are ativity systems? If he used the term evoked by situations i would have liked it more. In another sentence they suggest: ‘We call the support for particular activities created by relevant properties of things and materials in the situation affordances. For practice learned in one situation to transfer into another situation, the second situation has to afford that practice and the agent has to perceive the affordance. Also this interpretation seems to attribute affordances to the situations even if there are no agents at present. My understanding is that affordances exist only because of activities people do in a certain situation, they are constraints of the activity system which emerge in the interaction of the people, tools, artifacts, rules, norms and objectives of that activity system.

Soma ideas related to horisontal transfer evoked me the thoughts of bidirectional scaffolding conception (King, 1999) which occurs in networked systems. But the elaboration of horisontal transfer seemed somewhat weak and disappointing. It seems the book considers the vertical transfer to happen within the community and the horisontal between the communities. Is there actually a transfer or translation or semiosis?

Book:
Between School and Work. New perspectives on transfer and boundary-crossing
Ed. Tuomi-Gröhn, T., Engeström, Y.
Pergamon
2003

Boundary-crossing studies in creative thinking emphasise the potential embedded in transporting ideas, concepts and instruments from seemingly unrelated domains into the domain of focal inquiry.

Boundary crossing requires significant cognitive retooling (changing cognitive tools).
Brockers (Wenger, 199 are able to make new connections across communities of practice, faciltate coordination and open new possibilities for new meanings. The idea of boundary-crossing puts great emphasis on the new intellectual and practical tools that boundary-crossers or brokers bring into processes of change.

Boundary zone (Konkola, 2001) is a sphere which resembles no man land, free from prearranged routines or rigid patterns. Boundary zone is the place where each activity system reflects its own structure, attitudes, beliefs, norms and roles. This means that elements from both sides are always present in the boundary zone. It is a hybrid, polycontextual, multi-voiced and multi-scripted context, a place where it is possible to extend the object of each activity system and to create shared object between them.

Boundary objects (in this context object is understood as objective, intention to do something, but object can also be understood as artifact or tool, or it can be a shared mental model) (Star, 1989; Star and Griesemer, 1989) are objects that inhabit several intersecting social worlds and satisfy informational requirements of each of them. They are both plastic enough to adapt local needs and constraints of several parties employing them, and robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. Boundary objects develop from the problems that emerge in the collision of different classifications, they emerge over time from the interaction between different communities.

A concept boundary object is useful in denoting a tool used to join activities together (Bowker and Star, 1999). Boundary object gives common meaning across the settings where the activities take place. At the collective level the object is weakly structured, for individual actors strongly structured. Tensions in regard to the meaning of the boundary object are part of what actors have to take into account in their attempts to coordinate their different interests.

Wenger (199 introduces the concept boundary practice by referring the overlappig activities of the participating activity systems.

Dominant approaces to cognition share a narrow and vertical view of expertise in which some have more knowledge than others. Characteristically they distinguish between stages and levels of knowledge and skill. In recent research (Engeström, Engeström, Kärkkäinen, 1995) an argument for a broader, multi-dimensional view of expertise has been put forward. While vertical master-novice dimension remains important, a horisontal dimension is rapidly becoming increasingly relevant for the understanding of expertise. In this research, experts are viewed as operating in, and move between, multiple parallel activity contexts. These multiple contexts demand and afford different, complementary but also conflicting cognitive tools, rules, and patterns of social interaction.

Central features of this newly emerging landscape of expertise may be designated as polycotextuality and boundary-crossing between communities of practice. Polycontextuality means that experts are engaged not only in multiple simulatenous tasks and task-specific participation frameworks within one and the same activity and are also increasingly involved in multiple communities of practice.

Sociocultural approach conceptualizes transfer as consequential transitions between different organisations (Beach, 1999) and the approaches based on the activity theory and expansive learning (Davydov, 1990; Engeström, 1987).

Beach (1999) introduces the concept of consequential transitions to reconceptualize transfer. For Beach generalization is located at the interface of persons and activities, embodied in systems of artifacts, and symbolic objects that are created with human intent. Transition involves consequential change in relation between the individual and one or more social activities across time. All forms of transition involve the construction of knowledge and skills understood as transformation rather than as the mere application or use of something that has been acquired elsewhere.

Activity-theoretical view of learning (Engeström, 1987, Leontjev, 1977) redefines the unit of analysis of cognition and learning as a collective activity system. In this view, meaningful transfer of learning takes place through interaction between collective activity systems (eg. school activity system is in interaction with workplace activity system and both learn from each other). What is transferred is not packages of knowledge and skills that remain intact; instead the very process of such transfer involves active interpreting, modifying and reconstructing the skills and knowldge to be transferred.

Bereiter (1995) distinguishes between two kinds of transfer in individual learning and teaching: transfer of principles and transfer of diaposition (whether students apply the principle acquired in a real situation). Bereiter conceptualizes transfer of situations rather than transfer across situations.

Situated cognition research (Greeno 1997, 1998; Greeno, Moore and Smith, 1993) have emphasised the critical importance of the affordances that learning contexts and activities provide for participants.
Greeno (1996) proposed situated view of transfer. He draws on Gibson’s (1986) notion of affordances to explain the mechanisms of underlying situated cognition: We call the support for particular activities created by relevant properties of things and materials in the situation affordances. For practice learned in one situation to transfer into another situation, the second situation has to afford that practice and the agent has to perceive the affordance.Transfer depends on an ability to perceive the affordances for the practice that are present in a changed situation (Greeno, Smith, Moore, 1993). The range of situations that provide affordances for an activity constitutes an important aspect of the socially constructed meanings of the properties of those situations, so that the potential for transfer between situations is shaped by social practices in which people learn activities.

According to Van Oers (1998, 1999) contexts have two functions in learning: they support the particularization of meanings by constraining cognitive processes and elmininating some meanings as not relevant (specification function of context); they bring about the coherence with the larger whole (provide meaning in the sense of putting things in context) (connective function of context). Van Oers suggests that in order to overcome the constraints of thinking that are imposed by specific contexts, people have to access new contexts in which they can develop new alterantive ideas and visions about their current situation. Activity development refers to the processes through which people free themselves from constraints that specific situations might impose upon them. For van Oers recontextualization involves seeing an original activity from the new perspective rather than trying to extract it from its original context.