Chapter five has a little bit of everything. Dourish begins with a clear problem (finally). He returns to a motivation for reading through all of this philosophy: “to understand how to approach the design of technologies” (p. 128). And “we need to understand how current approaches to software and interactive system design constrain and enable aspects of embodied interaction” (p. 128). This is how teachers should approach technology, by asking: What gets constrained and what gets enabled in this particular software system or Internet environment?

What I like about this chapter is that Dourish connects abstract concepts like “establishing intersubjective understandings” with the “design of interactive technologies” (p. 132).

Dourish refers to “the oft-repeated assertion that Eskimo languages feature dozens of words for snow… whether or not it is accurate” (p. 129)… as an example of how “our place in the world and what we do there determine how we understand the things around us” (p. 129). This made me think about all the details that teachers know and understand about the “things around us” that is unique to “our place in the world and what we do there” (p. 129). There are things we know about the uniqueness of individual students—which is why teachers should be trusted to do assessments, and paradoxically why teachers should seek out others’ views when assessing students. But I’m way off from where Dourish is going.

Dourish has helped me to understand the value of “tailorable software systems” (p. 131). Manilla is such a system, I’m beginning to understand, but it isn’t easy to “tailor,” is it? I still have to see if I can make it work for my purposes—or ways I “go about my work” (p. 131) with students.

Dourish talks about researchers who look at how language creates socially constructed understandings that allow for cooperative work. I think teachers would find it useful to “analyze linguistic communication” (p. 132) in our classrooms “in terms of the [students’ and teachers’] mutual establishment and exploration of common ground”—“a set of commonly held and mutually established facts that provide the background necessary for interpreting and understanding utterances” (p. 132). The emphasis that I like is that the common ground is established linguistically.

Dourish claims that a software designer “must somehow communicate to a user a set of constraints and expectations about how the design should be used” (p. 132), and this made me wonder if the same is true of Web site designers too. Isn’t designing a Web site similar to designing software?

If my experience with designing Web sites for students is any guide, then Dourish is at the heart of what teachers who use computer-mediated curriculum struggle with when he is discussing “the way that people [e.g. teachers and students] develop and communicate shared ways of using software systems and ways of doing their work with software systems” (p. 133).

The school where I’ll be teaching, beginning this fall has just joined eChalk, an example of an “organizational information system” (p. 133) that Dourish describes. I wonder how “tailorable” this system will be. Specifically, will students be able to put HTML pages up and will we be able to link to those pages? But before and after I get to specific questions like this, Dourish provides us with good questions to be asking at East Side Community High School as we begin to use eChalk:

What is important is not just what the system CAN do, but rather WHAT IT REALLY DOES DO for people in the course of doing their work. This includes what decisions people make about when and how to use the system, what expectations they have of when the system is useful and what sort of information it contains, what they know about what other people do with the system, and so on. When we look at what goes on, we begin to see systems as embedded within the specific practices of filing, storing, categorizing, organizing, and retrieving information that surround it. So, we encounter such issues as the collective tailoring of information schemes; the central roles that certain documents or information sources play in coordinating a range of activities; the importance of question of completeness; issues of accuracy, authenticity, and authorship; and so forth. (Dourish, p. 133)

Can’t get more practical than that! I’ll re-read this when I start wondering how to help people integrate eChalk into their work at East Side Community High School.

There are several other examples of Dourish connecting abstract concepts to technological design. For example, I really like his re-statement of Heidegger’s concept of equipment moving back and forth from being ready-to-hand to being present-at-hand: “The effective use of tools inherently involves a continual process of engagement, separation, and re-engagement” (p. 139). This fits so squarely with a learning model that emphasizes creating projects, reflecting through process logs and cover letters, them creating more projects. “Being able to disengage and re-engage in different ways… makes our use of equipment effective. It allows us to act with and to act through artifacts” (p. 139). Ah! Like “Inquiry WITH Technology.”

Another example, Dourish talks about the “dual nature of abstraction and implementation” of computers. This became important to me a few years ago. Computers began to be as physical as other tools. And I fear that this is something that many teachers do not really grasp. Instead they see computers as merely a tool of implementation (word processor) or when something goes wrong, the computer is seen as hopelessly abstract, even mysterious. The power of computing is to get the abstract aspects of the computer moving in the same direction as the implementation aspects are going.

Finally, I think that the concept of “coupling”–that Dourish describes and gives several good examples of—is very useful! The example he gives of technology in a media center interfering “with the relationship between action and meaning” (p. 148) is a good one because similar interruptions happen like this all the time with technology. And learning how to establish “new coupling over time” is a large part of what learning with computers is about.
Dourish describes the researchers in this media center example in a way that I would love to use to describe teachers involved with computers: “They were not concerned with technological development per se, but rather with exploring the new working practices that technology might afford” (p. 145). This is what teachers who use computer-mediated curriculum might think of as our purpose: to explore new learning experiences that technology might afford.