Tatiana seems to be settling into an afternoon nap routine here in Paris, so I’ve been trying to catch up on my reading of journal articles. I’ve been meaning to read the Suthers, Dwyer, Medina, & Vatrapu’s (2010) article, A Framework for Conceptualizing, Representing, and Analyzing Distributed Interaction that Dan handed out copies at the Alpine Rendez-Vous 2009 and I’ve finally gotten my chance!
While I was somewhat familiar with the framework, the unit of analysis (uptake), and the representation (contingency graphs) from participating in the multivocality workshops, this was the first time I’d read in depth about the conceptual foundations of this framework of interaction analysis for distributed learning. Earlier, I’d done some work with Activity Theory (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006), but Actor-Network Theory (ACT) (Latour, 2005) is a new one for me. How appropriate that I am reading about this while living next to École Nationale Supérieur where much of the theory was developed! While I’m still trying to get my head around the notion of the agency of objects, I’m interested in this approach to understanding the process of knowledge creation in science and technology. In addition, that ANT is concerned with material-semiotic relations is somewhat comforting given my English Lit background, which included a bout with post-structuralism.
Ok, back to reading. More on this article later!
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