2005.02.03 - SLIDE 1IS146 - Spring 2005

Computation: History and Ideas

Prof. Marc Davis & Prof. Peter Lyman

UC Berkeley SIMS

Tuesday and Thursday 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Spring 2005http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is146/s05/

IS146:

Foundations of New Media

2005.02.03 - SLIDE 2IS146 - Spring 2005

Job Announcement

• WANTED: Research Assistant Extraordinaire– Be organized, responsible, resourceful, and a great

communicator– Type amazingly well (able to take dictation when I talk fast)– Get personal satisfaction from organizing and filing paper and

digital documents for an unrepentant archivist– Be meticulous about data entry (contact addresses, bibliographic

references, etc.)– Be a comfortable user of MS Windows XP, Word, and Outlook – Able to compile expense reports using MS Excel– Able to carefully and cheerfully help manage my schedule and

external communications to address the demands for my time– Available at least 10 hours per week– Pay/credit and hours negotiable– EMAIL: marc@sims.berkeley.edu

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Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check Ins– Assignment 2: Group Formation– Assignment 3: Documenting Artifact Usage

• Review of Last Time– Ethnography and Design

• Today– Computation: History and Ideas

• Preview of Next Time– Computation: Programming Concepts

2005.02.03 - SLIDE 4IS146 - Spring 2005

Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check Ins– Assignment 2: Group Formation– Assignment 3: Documenting Artifact Usage

• Review of Last Time– Ethnography and Design

• Today– Computation: History and Ideas

• Preview of Next Time– Computation: Programming Concepts

2005.02.03 - SLIDE 5IS146 - Spring 2005

Assignment 2 Check In

• Group names?

• Group members?

• Issues in using web page content management system?

• Artifact choice questions?

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Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check Ins– Assignment 2: Group Formation– Assignment 3: Documenting Artifact Usage

• Review of Last Time– Ethnography and Design

• Today– Computation: History and Ideas

• Preview of Next Time– Computation: Programming Concepts

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Assignment 3: Documenting Artifact Usage

• Objective 1. Refine your understanding of the artifact that will be your topic for the Semester:  phone, camera, Web, or game

• Objective 2. Use ethnographic methods to develop a profile about how your artifact shapes the users’ life—to begin your investigation into how to improve the design of your artifact (i.e., programmable, communication, social organization, play)

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Assignment 3: Documenting Artifact Usage

• Four questions you need to focus upon in your ethnographic report include:

1. Utility. How do different people use the artifact, and what are some of the features of the artifact that are not used?

2. Image and style. How is their sense of image or style expressed by the artifact?

3. Social networks. How did they learn to use the artifact? Who influences their use? How do they use the artifact to relate to people?

4. Life style. How does the artifact influence (or changes) their life style?

• Example: how might we analyze someone’s car?

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How To Do Ethnography

• Who? Your group could decide to watch one particular group to study in depth (college students), or two groups to compare (men and women, students and working people).

• How? If your artifact is the Web, you can observe people online, and/or ask someone if you can talk with them while they’re online, or use email or IM. Otherwise, observe in public spaces, or ask if people are willing to be interviewed.

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How To Do Ethnography - 2

• How long? A good idea for each of you watch at least two people, for at least half an hour each time, then write up key behaviors you think are important. Or, ask two people to agree to be interviewed, then write up at least a page of key findings. Then your group needs to meet to try to identify patterns.

• Working together. If you want to work together, your whole group could watch the same event (for example, how students on Telegraph Avenue use an artifact on campus), each of you write up your one page of notes, then compare findings and figure out patterns. Two people can interview someone together, but two is usually a maximum.

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How To Do Ethnography - 3

• Organizing the report. Your report should be organized around the four themes about your artifact, featuring two kinds of evidence – First, are there specific behaviors you observed or

stories that are really interesting? – Second, what patterns does your group think are

important?• Point out issues

– If your group doesn’t particularly agree about patterns or examples, set your report up as a debate with competing interpretations

• Example: Marketing report on Youth and Wireless devices [Reader Vol. 2, p. 69]

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Peter’s Ethnographic Research• Mimi Ito, IM usage by teens in Japan have

created private space in social world almost public (future reading), new modes of friendship, intimacy

• Scale of social networks– Kids use blogging to vastly include the scope

of social networks, creating of new knowledge, exchanging ideas

– Email has created transnational research teams

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Marc’s Ethnographic Research• Social Uses of Personal Media

– Looking not just at what people do with digital imaging technology, but why they do it

• Goals– Identify social uses of photography to predict

resistances and affordances of next generation mobile media devices and applications

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Marc’s Ethnographic Research• Methods

– In depth video interviews– Focus groups– Surveys– Usability testing– Review of online photo sites– Sociotechnological prototyping

• Developing new theoretical and practical frameworks for ethnographically informed design research– Activity Theory– SCOT– Embodied design methods– Interleaved ethnography and design teams

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Ethnography of Artifacts

• Papert describes that he learned to think like a mathematician by figuring out how gears work (parts of a transmission, gearbox, differential) – Artifacts can be described as objects we own, but

also things we love, or “objects to think with”– Sherry Turkle = children’s play with toys is how they

learn– Barrie Thorne = children’s hobbies are the way they

form strategies for learning, in their collections– Csikszenmihalyi = we need things to organize our

experience, to organize memories (like architecture)– How can we get people to talk to us about their

emotional and intellectual relationships to artifacts?

2005.02.03 - SLIDE 16IS146 - Spring 2005

Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check Ins– Assignment 2: Group Formation– Assignment 3: Documenting Artifact Usage

• Review of Last Time– Ethnography and Design

• Today– Computation: History and Ideas

• Preview of Next Time– Computation: Programming Concepts

2005.02.03 - SLIDE 17IS146 - Spring 2005

Your Assumptions About Computing

• What are computers for?

• Do you program?

• How do you feel about learning to program?

• Why do you feel that way?

• What do you think learning to program would do for you?

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Reading Questions

• Papert– What is computation? What does it enable us to do?– What assumptions have you had about computing

and mathematics that Papert is challenging?– How do you use computing today to enhance your

learning at Berkeley?– How could you use computing differently than you do

today to enhance your learning at Berkeley?– Why is programming not taught in the English

department? Should it be? If it were, how would your understanding of language, computation, and New Media change?

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Computation and Learning

• Computer-aided instruction– The computer is being used to program the

student

• Constructionism– The student programs the computer– Objects to think with– Microworlds

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Computers as Cognitive Tools

• It is possible to design computers so that learning to communicate with them can be a natural process– Like learning to speak a language

• Learning to communicate with a computer can change the way other learning takes place

• Computers can influence how people think, how they conceptualize the world

• Computers can enable children and humanists to participate in and shape the “computational cultures” of science, mathematics, and engineering

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Devin Blong on Papert

• Papert begins by characterizing an education system in which children are deprived of connection with the sciences, going as far as to declare the sophisticated elements of society to be “mathaphobic”. As a result, he says children are steered away from them. In your experience, is this true? Has it changed from the time this book was written?

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Devin Blong on Papert

• Papert makes a constant comparison between programming and speaking. He repeatedly compares mathematics to a language that can be learned through programming. Do you believe this is an accurate comparison in terms of semiotics?

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Devin Blong on Papert

• In discussing the possible ways funding could be provided for implanting this computer based learning, Papert makes the point that with computers in place, students need less individual attention. In an age where class size and personal attention are major issues, do you believe this is more conducive to learning?

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Devin Blong on Papert

• Papert repeats the idea that when children are taught to program, they are more self directed and active. – “By contrast, when a child learns to program, the process

of learning is transformed. It becomes more active and self directed. In particular, the knowledge is acquired for a recognizable personal purpose […].The new knowledge is a source of power and is experienced as such from the moment it begins to form in a child’s mind.”

• This is juxtaposed with the idea that programming is a normal, rather than strange and foreign skill for a child to learn. Why then is this knowledge more powerful than other types of knowledge?

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Devin Blong on Papert

• What good is a language if it is not spoken?• How does the programming process of

constantly debugging relate to communication metaphors?

• What are some of the self-imposed barriers that keep technology from moving forward today (e.g., QWERTY) ?

• How does lacking a “vocabulary” in a particular area affect your understanding and learning in that area?

2005.02.03 - SLIDE 26IS146 - Spring 2005

Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check Ins– Assignment 2: Group Formation– Assignment 3: Documenting Artifact Usage

• Review of Last Time– Ethnography and Design

• Today– Computation: History and Ideas

• Preview of Next Time– Computation: Programming Concepts

2005.02.03 - SLIDE 27IS146 - Spring 2005

Readings for Next Time

• W. Daniel Hillis. The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work, New York: Perseus Books, 1999, p. 39-59. – Discussion Questions

• Andrea Brown