ABSTRACT: A main goal of science education is to help students learn to reason scientifically. A main way to facilitate learning is to engage students in inquiry activities such as conducting experiments. This article presents a theoretical framework for evaluating inquiry tasks in terms of how similar they are to authentic science. The framework helps identify the respects in which these reasoning tasks are similar to and different from real scientific research. The framework is based on a recent theory of reasoning, models-of-data theory. We argue that inquiry tasks commonly used in schools evoke reasoning processes that are qualitatively different from the processes employed in real scientific inquiry. Moreover, school reasoning tasks appear to be based on an epistemology that differs from the epistemology of authentic science. Inquiry tasks developed by researchers have increasingly captured features of authentic science, but further improvement is still possible. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our analysis for research, assessment, and instruction.

How has the process of technological change in the Internet era influenced the way we organize economic activities? In this chapter we discuss how information technologies foster the emergent design and user-driven design of websites and other online media, as well as products and organizations offline. A cycle of testing, feedback, and innovation facilitates ongoing negotiations around making products and around organizing that production. We call the organizational state of flux that emerges from these negotiations Permanently Beta. Beta testing, open source software, and interactive communities manifest aspects of permanently beta organization. The instability associated with being permanently beta is not without social costs, but it may present opportunities for organizing broader participation in the design of products and organizations.

In recent years, it has become common for opponents of environmental action to argue that the scientific basis for purported harms is uncertain, unreliable, and fundamentally unproven. In response, many scientists believe that their job is to provide the “proof ” that society needs. Both the complaint and the response are misguided. In all but the most trivial cases, science does not produce logically indisputable proofs about the natural world. At best it produces a robust consensus based on a process of inquiry that allows for continued scrutiny, re-examination, and revision. Within a scientific community, different individuals may weigh evidence differently and adhere to different standards of demonstration, and these differences are likely to be amplified when the results of inquiry have political, religious, or economic ramifications. In such cases, science can play a role by providing informed opinions about the possible consequences of our actions (or inactions), and by monitoring the effects of our choices.

Current research on distributed knowledge processes suggests a critical conflict between knowledge processes in groups and the technologies built to support them. The conflict centers on observations that authentic and efficient knowledge creation and sharing is deeply embedded in an interpersonal face to face context, but that technologies to support distributed knowledge processes rely on the assumption that knowledge can be made mobile outside these specific contexts. This conflict is of growing national importance as work patterns change from same site to separate site collaboration, and millions of government and industrial dollars are invested in establishing academic-industry alliances and building infrastructures to support distributed collaboration and knowledge. In this paper

Here we introduce a computer-based visual display program, called MAGE. MAGE was designed to display molecules but we will explore its potential for application to the study of social networks. To do so, we will use MAGE to examine the structural properties of two data sets, friendship choices in an Australian college residence and peer choices among teenagers in a Dublin suburb. q 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.

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This paper aims to contribute to current discussions about methods in anthropological (especially ethnographic) research on the cultures of the internet. It does so by considering how technology has been presented in turn as an epistemological boon and bane in methodological discourse around virtual or online ethnography, and cyberanthropology. It maps these discussions with regards to intellectual traditions and ambitions of ethnographic research and social science, and considers how these views of technology relate to modernist discourse about the value of technology for producing a particular kind of objective knowledge. For this article, I have examined a number of monographs and methodological texts in which the internet, as both a new setting and a new technology for doing ethnography, is shown to raise new issues for ethnographic work and for theorising anthropological approaches. In this material, questions of presence, field relations (including trust and confidentiality), and new possibilities for observation are especially prominently discussed. Anxieties about whether the internet can be a field at all are also expressed. In my analysis, I place these issues and dilemmas facing the researcher in the context of the intellectual tradition of ethnography as applied to technology. The main themes found to subtend these discussions of ethnography’s ‘way of knowing ’ are the notion of ‘field’, technology, intersubjectivity and capture. The paper ends with a reflec-

This article serves as a primer for the theory of online meaning construction known alternately as conceptual blending, conceptual integration, the many space model, and the network theory. Our tutorial proceeds by analyzing novel and conventional examples of linguistic and nonlinguistic blends that pertain to topics of reference, partitioning, mapping, structure projection, and dynamic mental simulation. Principal concepts and processes of blending theory are described, including composition, completion, elaboration, emergent structure, and optimality constraints. We review recent work on blending theory from the perspective of linguistics, psychology, computer science, and neurobiology, and conclude with a discussion of potential weaknesses of the theory.

We ask, how does the organization of a technology building project impact collaboration with social scientists? We identify four elements that have structured collaborative engagements of social scientists within information infrastructure design projects. The elements we identify are (i) the state of the project relative to its development timeline; (ii) the time of initiation with social science, (iii) the participation type for social science; and (iv) the details of the involvement. Drawing from ethnographic research and grounded theory methodology, this research is based on comparison of three information infrastructure projects. We argue that the varying configurations of these elements substantially influence the possibilities for social science contributions to each project. In planning future engagements of social science within infrastructure projects careful consideration of such elements will serve to open up engagement options beyond a frequently encountered ‘response mode. ’ Our goal is to enrich and deepen awareness of modes of engagement where social research is participatory. 1.

Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation Ecole des Mines de Paris