Discourse, Tools and Reasoning

Not long ago, projections of how office technologies would revolutionize the production of documents in a high-tech future carriedmany promises. The paper less office and the seamless and problem-free sharing of texts and other work materials among co-workers werejust around the corner, we were told. To anyone who has been involved in putting together a volume of the present kind, such forecasts will be met with considerable skepticism, if not outright distrust. The diskette, the email, the fax, the net, and all the other forms of communication that are now around are powerful assets, but they do not in any way reduce the flow of paper or the complexity of coordinating activities involved in producing an artifact such as a book. Instead, the reverse seems to be true. Obviously, the use of such tools requires considerable skill at the center of coordination, to borrow an expression from a chapter in this volume. As editors, we have been fortunate to have Ms. Lotta Strand, Linkoping University, at the center of the distributed activity that producing this volume has required over the last few years. With her considerable skill and patience, Ms. Strand and her work provide a powerful illustration of the main thrust of most of the chapters in this volume: Practice is a coordination of thinking and action, and many things had to be kept in mind during the production of this volume.

This volume in the NATO Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology focuses on the role of discourse in cognition, tools as constituents of cognitive activity, the social nature of reasoning, and how individuals reconstitute knowledge in social interaction.

Discourse, Tools, and Reasoning.- 1 Constructing Meaning from Space, Gesture, and Speech.- 2 Centers of Coordination: A Case and Some Themes.- 3 Animated Texts: Selective Renditions of News Stories.- 4 To Resolve a Technical Problem Through Conversation.- 5 The Blackness of Black: Color Categories as Situated Practice.- 6 Reasonable Uncertainties: Parents' Talk About Caring for Children with Chronic Renal Failure.- 7 Syncretic Literacy in a Samoan American Family.- 8 Other Voices, Other Minds: The Use of Reported Speech in Group Therapy Talk.- 9 Situational Effects in Computer-Based Problem Solving.- 10 Discourse and Development: Notes from the Field.- 11 Interactional Perspectives on the Use of the Computer and on the Technological Development of a New Tool: The Case of Word Processing.- 12 What Organizes Our Problem-Solving Activities?.- 13 Understanding Symbols With Intermediate Abstractions: An Analysis of the Collaborative Construction of Mathematical Meaning.- 14 Strategy-Specific Information Access in Knowledge Acquisition from Hypertext.- 15 Talking About Reasoning: How Important Is the Peer in Peer Collaboration?.- 16 Seeing the Light: Discourse and Practice in the Optics Lab.- 17 Learning to Argue in Family-Shared Discourse: The Reconstruction of Past Events.- 18 Discourse in the Adult Classroom: Rhetoric as Technology for Dialogue.- Author Index.

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Discourse, Tools, and Reasoning:Situated Cognition and Technologically Supported Environments, held in Lucca (Il Ciocco), Italy, November 2-7, 1993