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Papers by john brown
Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 1996
So computational backwardness cannot explain the apparent inertia in campus life over the past 25... more So computational backwardness cannot explain the apparent inertia in campus life over the past 25 years. Indeed, it's more likely that campuses are schizophrenic: combinations of high-powered computational infrastructures and highly conventional institutional practices. Moreover, ...
Page 1. - 1 - Reprinted with permission from the Winter 1991 issue of the AMERICAN EDUCATOR, the ... more Page 1. - 1 - Reprinted with permission from the Winter 1991 issue of the AMERICAN EDUCATOR, the quarterly journal of the American Federation of Teachers. COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP: MAKING THINKING VISIBLE ...
Educational Researcher, 1989
T he breach between learning and use, which is captured by the folk categories "know wha... more T he breach between learning and use, which is captured by the folk categories "know what" and "know how," may well be a product of the structure and practices of our education system. Many methods of didactic educa- tion assume a separation be- tween knowing ...
Organization Science, 2001
Page 1. PERSPECTIVE Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective John Seely Brown * ... more Page 1. PERSPECTIVE Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective John Seely Brown * Paul Duguid Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, California 94304 jsb@parc.xerox.com * duguid@parc.xerox.com ...
Human-computer Interaction, 1994
The shared use of artifacts is, we argue, supported by latent border resources, which lie beyond ... more The shared use of artifacts is, we argue, supported by latent border resources, which lie beyond what is usually recognized as the canonical artifact. These unnoticed resources are developed over time as artifacts are integrated into ongoing practice and stable conventions or genres grow up around them. For a couple of reasons, these resources may now deserve increased attention. First, because they lie outside conventional frames of reference, many new designs and design strategies inadvertently threaten to remove resources on which users rely. Second, because of the increasingly rapid proliferation of new technologies, users have less time t o develop new border resources. Consequently, we suggest, designers now need t o understand more fully the role border resources play and to work more directly to help users develop them. Meeting these goals will require more than an intensification of user-centered design. It will require a fundamental redirection of the way many designers look at both artifacts and users.
Reflections: The Sol Journal, 1999
While some work has gone into developing specific learning environments, little has gone into cla... more While some work has gone into developing specific learning environments, little has gone into clarifying the general issues that affect the acquisition of a complex skill, especially in a naturalistic setting. A study was made of an extremely complex skill, skiing, to determine why it has become so easy to learn. The goal was to analyze the features of a highly successful learning environment in order to articulate a general theory of learning environments.
Cognitive Science, 1978
A new diagnostic modeling system for automatically synthesizing a deep-structure model of a stude... more A new diagnostic modeling system for automatically synthesizing a deep-structure model of a student's misconceptions or bugs in his basic mathematical skills provides a mechanism for explaining why a student is making a mistake as opposed to simply identifying the mistake. This report is divided into four sections: The first provides examples of the problems that must be handled by a diagnostic model. It then introduces procedural networks as a general framework for representing the knowledge underlying a skill. The challenge in designing this representation is to find one that facilitates the discovery of misconceptions or bugs existing in a particular student's encoding of this knowledge. The second section discusses some of the pedagogical issues that have emerged from the use of diagnostic models within an instructional system. This discussion is framed in the context of a computer-based tutoring/gaming system developed to teach students and student teachers how to diagnose bugs strategically as well as how to provide a better understanding of the underlying structure of arithmetic skills. The third section describes our uses of an executable network as a tool for automatically diagnosing student behavior, for automatically generating “diagnostic” tests, and for judging the diagnostic quality of a given exam. Included in this section is a discussion of the success of this system in diagnosing 1300 school students from a data base of 20.000 test items. The last section discusses future research directions.
Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 1996
So computational backwardness cannot explain the apparent inertia in campus life over the past 25... more So computational backwardness cannot explain the apparent inertia in campus life over the past 25 years. Indeed, it's more likely that campuses are schizophrenic: combinations of high-powered computational infrastructures and highly conventional institutional practices. Moreover, ...
Page 1. - 1 - Reprinted with permission from the Winter 1991 issue of the AMERICAN EDUCATOR, the ... more Page 1. - 1 - Reprinted with permission from the Winter 1991 issue of the AMERICAN EDUCATOR, the quarterly journal of the American Federation of Teachers. COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP: MAKING THINKING VISIBLE ...
Educational Researcher, 1989
T he breach between learning and use, which is captured by the folk categories "know wha... more T he breach between learning and use, which is captured by the folk categories "know what" and "know how," may well be a product of the structure and practices of our education system. Many methods of didactic educa- tion assume a separation be- tween knowing ...
Organization Science, 2001
Page 1. PERSPECTIVE Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective John Seely Brown * ... more Page 1. PERSPECTIVE Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective John Seely Brown * Paul Duguid Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, California 94304 jsb@parc.xerox.com * duguid@parc.xerox.com ...
Human-computer Interaction, 1994
The shared use of artifacts is, we argue, supported by latent border resources, which lie beyond ... more The shared use of artifacts is, we argue, supported by latent border resources, which lie beyond what is usually recognized as the canonical artifact. These unnoticed resources are developed over time as artifacts are integrated into ongoing practice and stable conventions or genres grow up around them. For a couple of reasons, these resources may now deserve increased attention. First, because they lie outside conventional frames of reference, many new designs and design strategies inadvertently threaten to remove resources on which users rely. Second, because of the increasingly rapid proliferation of new technologies, users have less time t o develop new border resources. Consequently, we suggest, designers now need t o understand more fully the role border resources play and to work more directly to help users develop them. Meeting these goals will require more than an intensification of user-centered design. It will require a fundamental redirection of the way many designers look at both artifacts and users.
Reflections: The Sol Journal, 1999
While some work has gone into developing specific learning environments, little has gone into cla... more While some work has gone into developing specific learning environments, little has gone into clarifying the general issues that affect the acquisition of a complex skill, especially in a naturalistic setting. A study was made of an extremely complex skill, skiing, to determine why it has become so easy to learn. The goal was to analyze the features of a highly successful learning environment in order to articulate a general theory of learning environments.
Cognitive Science, 1978
A new diagnostic modeling system for automatically synthesizing a deep-structure model of a stude... more A new diagnostic modeling system for automatically synthesizing a deep-structure model of a student's misconceptions or bugs in his basic mathematical skills provides a mechanism for explaining why a student is making a mistake as opposed to simply identifying the mistake. This report is divided into four sections: The first provides examples of the problems that must be handled by a diagnostic model. It then introduces procedural networks as a general framework for representing the knowledge underlying a skill. The challenge in designing this representation is to find one that facilitates the discovery of misconceptions or bugs existing in a particular student's encoding of this knowledge. The second section discusses some of the pedagogical issues that have emerged from the use of diagnostic models within an instructional system. This discussion is framed in the context of a computer-based tutoring/gaming system developed to teach students and student teachers how to diagnose bugs strategically as well as how to provide a better understanding of the underlying structure of arithmetic skills. The third section describes our uses of an executable network as a tool for automatically diagnosing student behavior, for automatically generating “diagnostic” tests, and for judging the diagnostic quality of a given exam. Included in this section is a discussion of the success of this system in diagnosing 1300 school students from a data base of 20.000 test items. The last section discusses future research directions.