What plans are like depends on how they're used. We contrast two views of plan use. On the plan-as-program view, plan use is the execution of an effective procedure. On the plan-as-communication view, plan use is like following natural language instructions. We have begun work on computational models of plans-as-communications, building on our previous work on improvised activity and on ideas from sociology.

Traditional activities change in surprising ways when computermediated communication becomes a component of the activity system. In this descriptive study, we leverage two perspectives on social activity to understand the experiences of individuals who became active collaborators in Wikipedia, a prolific, cooperatively-authored online encyclopedia. Legitimate peripheral participation provides a lens for understanding participation in a community as an adaptable process that evolves over time. We use ideas from activity theory as a framework to describe our results. Finally, we describe how activity on the Wikipedia stands in striking contrast to traditional publishing and suggests a new paradigm for collaborative systems.

Programming robots to carry out useful tasks is both a complex and non-trivial exercise. A simple and intuitive method to allow humans to train and shape robot behaviour is clearly a key goal in making this task easier. This paper describes an approach to this problem based on studies of social animals where two teaching strategies are applied to allow a human teacher to train a robot by moulding its actions within a carefully scaffolded environment. Within these enviroments sets of competences can be built by building state/action memory maps of the robot’s interaction within that environment. These memory maps are then polled using a k-nearest neighbour based algorithm to provide a generalised competence. We take a novel approach in building the memory models by allowing the human teacher to construct them in a hierarchical manner. This mechanism allows a human trainer to build and extend an action-selection mechanism into which new skills can be added to the robot’s repertoire of existing competencies. These techniques are implemented on physical Khepera miniature robots and validated on a variety of tasks.

Activities are located behaviors, taking time, conceived as socially meaningful, and usually involving interaction with tools and the environment. In modeling human cognition as a form of problem solving (goal-directed search and operator sequencing), cognitive science researchers have not adequately studied "off-task" activities (e.g., waiting), non-intellectual motives (e.g., hunger), sustaining a goal state (e.g., playful interaction), and coupled perceptual-motor dynamics (e.g., following someone). These aspects of human behavior have been considered in bits and pieces in past research, identified as scripts, human factors, behavior settings, ensemble, flow experience, and situated action. More broadly, activity theory provides a comprehensive framework relating motives, goals, and operations. This paper ties these ideas together, using examples from work life in a Canadian High Arctic research station. The emphasis is on simulating human behavior as it naturally occurs, such that "working" is understood as an aspect of living. The result is a synthesis of previously unrelated analytic perspectives and a broader appreciation of the nature of human cognition. Simulating activities in this comprehensive way is useful for understanding work practice, promoting learning, and designing better tools, including human-robot systems.

this paper, I review the history of HCI as steps toward a science of design. My touchstone is Simon's (1969) provocative book he Sciences of the Artificial. The book pre-dates HCI, and many of its specific characterizations and claims about design are no longer authoritative (see Ehn, 1988). Nevertheless, two of Simon's themes echo through the history of HCI, and still provide guidance for charting its continuing development

strategies and tools must be based on some theory of learning and cognition. Of course, crafting well-articulated views that clearly answer the major epistemological questions of human learning has exercised psychologists and educators for centuries. What is a mind? What does it mean to know something? How is our knowledge represented and manifested? Many educators prefer an eclectic approach, selecting “principles and techniques from the many theoretical perspectives in much the same way we might select international dishes from a smorgasbord, choosing those we like best and ending up with a meal which represents no nationality exclusively and a design technology based on no single theoretical base ” (Bednar et al., 1995, p. 100). It is certainly the case that research within collaborative educational learning tools has drawn upon behavioral, cognitive information processing, humanistic, and sociocultural theory, among others, for inspiration and justification. Problems arise, however, when tools developed in the service of one epistemology, say cognitive information processing, are integrated within instructional

In this paper, we identify two categories of media that are common in computer-supported collaborative learning and software in general: communication media, and information media. These two types of media map easily on to two types of social activities in which learning is grounded: dialogue and monologue. Drawing on literature in learning theory, we suggest the need for interfaces that helpstudents transition from dialogue to monologue and back again. This "middle space" between communication and information interfaces is illustrated with several examples from CSCL. We advocate filling in this middle space with software and activities that transcend some of the traditional design tradeoffs associated with information and communication interfaces. Keywords: Collaboration, Interaction & Design Tradeoffs Introduction: computers, communication & learning Computer mediated acts of communication are becoming more commonplace in today's classroom. Like all media, particular computer techn...

CSCW researchers have increasingly come to realize that the material work settings and the artifacts that populate them play a crucial role in the seamless and effective coordination and alignment of cooperative work. However, while the central role of artifacts in cooperative work has been recognized and applauded, the concept of artifact as used in CSCW is highly problematic as it often presumes mentalist notions of artifacts as simple vehicles of `information'. This paper is an attempt to depart from these notions. Based upon ethnographic studies of architectural work, we attempt to develop an understanding of the coordinative roles of artifacts which accounts for the multiplicity of artifacts and the complex interplay of particular practices and the specific material forms of artifacts.

Standard conceptions of how the environment influences the person are constrained by the dominant view of representation - and, therefore, perception, cognition, and language - as fundamentally consisting of encodings. I argue that this encoding view is logically incoherent. An alternative view of representation is presented, interactivism, and shown to avoid the incoherencies of encodingism. The interactivist model of representation provides accounts for standard presumed encoding phenomena, and highlights processes and forms of influence of the environment on the person that are obscure or entirely absent from the encoding account. The multiplicity and complexity of the processes of environmental influence acquire a theoretically coherent organization and development from within the interactive perspective.

Abstract not found