Ipseity

1.

From the camera obscura through the "cinematograph" and now the computer, new technologies have provided metaphors for understanding how the mind works. This fact taks on special importance when these technology-based understandings of the mental are then used to discuss the educational use of technology. Consider these quotes from the early 20th century, and how technological metaphors of the mental (from mind maps to memes) operate in e-learning discourse today:

"We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind." -Henri Bergson

"Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture" - Thomas Edison

2.

Research in discursive, or more generally, post-cognitive psychology can be carried out in three basic steps (from Lynch & Bogen, 2006 [PDF, 0.9 Mb]):

1. "Investigate one or more of the topics associated with cognitive science by locating organized social settings in which these topics feature as perspicuous phenomena"
2. "Examine how the intelligibility of actions and expressions associated with these phenomena are bound to interactional, pragmatic and political contexts"
3. "Treat assessments about what goes on in a speaker’s mind
   [or in the computer] as themselves part of the social interactional field of production."

These steps assume that language is not transmission between information systems (as pictured, right), but a way of acting.

3.

Looking at actual uses of language shows that we also often treat language as action –not as the transmission of information. Looking at patterns in very specific, actual instances of conversation shows language use as a kind of work, as a way of accomplishing a set of tasks. Listen, for example, to these these "conversational openings" using the telephone (recorded and brilliantly analyzed by Schlegloff in the 1980’s): the_routine_as_achievement.mp3 (0.37 Mb).

Comparing examples like these to "artificial" chatbot conversations, this paper illustrates how discursive and postcognitivst psychological inquiry into language and thought have direct applicability to the design and research of e-learning applications and projects.