Dataset1/Collective Remembering
From Jsarmi
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Session 4 - Team 5: Collective Remembering
This excerpt illustrates a case in which a team is collectively engaged in trying to reconstruct parts of their previous session in order to initiate their current problem solving activity. Remembering of past activity unfolds as a collective engagement in which different team members participate dynamically. Some of the current team members were not present in the previous session and yet, they are instrumental in the reconstruction of that past and in shaping its current relevance.
Last Tuesday you worked on finding a formula
This was the fourth session of team five. Towards the beginning of the session, with only two participants present (Gdo and Meets), the moderator stated that he was a "new" moderator and asked them if they were part of the chat "last time." Gdo and Meets assented and added that they remembered other people being present. Ten minutes had passed since the start of the session when the facilitator stated that maybe Gdo and Meets were going to the "the team" for the night. A few minutes later, Gdo joined the room while the facilitator was explaining general aspects of how and why the chat sessions were offered. Later on, Extrick joined the room as well.
After this introductory period, the facilitator suggested (8:22:09 PM) that during the summer the team members could work with their friends on a new problem he posted: the "circle problem." Later, he added that they could "pursue the circle questions in this chat" if they wanted or "any other questions and worlds" that they thought of. The team seemed disoriented about what to do and after more than a minute of silence the following sequence took place:
111 8:25:38 PM meets: ert
112 8:25:42 PM meets: whoops
113 8:25:52 PM meets: we're doing the problem he juts gave us right?
114 8:26:05 PM Mod: Last Tuesday you worked on finding a formula for the number of shortest paths
between any two points A and B on the grid. You explored multiple possibilities
and figured out that x+y and x^2+y^2 work (where x and y correspond to the # of units
you need to travel along x and y axis to get from A to B) but only for some points, not all.
You may want to continue exploring more cases and see if you can find a general formula.
115 8:26:31 PM Mod: or you can work on the problem i posted earlier
116 8:26:50 PM drago: ok
117 8:27:04 PM Mod: I can also post all the original questions if you would like to see them
118 8:27:17 PM gdo: post the original
119 8:27:42 PM drago: ok
(Followed by whiteboard activity by the facilitator and by Gdo, from 8:27:35 PM to 8:29:18 PM to post and arrange a textbox
with “all the original questions”)
This sequence involves a number of interesting features. In particular, the facilitator's posting on 114 employs a set of resources which seem specially relevant for our analysis of continuity. First, the posting uses the temporal marker "last Tuesday" to index a prior event which is then described using declarative assertions constructed with past-tense verbs (e.g. you worked on finding a formula, you explored multiple possibilities, you figured out that x+y and x^2+y^2 work, etc.). These assertions, in addition to weaving together an ambiguous subject "you" and a number of actions being reported, index a set of artifacts that are presented as descriptors of prior achievements: a formulas for shortest paths, points A and B, the grid, etc. All of these resources, as presented, are positioned in different ways with relation to the facilitator and the rest of the participants and, as such, can be consider to constitute the developing interactional "deictic field" (Hanks, 2005). Hanks describes the deictic field as composed of:
- The positions of communicative agents relative to the participant frameworks they occupy (that is, who occupies the positions of speaker [Spr], addressee [Adr], and others as defined by the language and the communicative practices of its speakers)
- The positions occupied by objects of reference, and
- The multiple dimensions whereby the former have access to the latter (p. 193)
Based on this description, Hanks defined "act of deictic reference" as one which takes up a "position in the deictic field" (p.193). In our case, the diectic field is being constituted by the participants to include objects of reference and communicative agents associated with a prior encounter. Line 114 attempts to position past participants and prior doings as relevant objects of reference for the current interaction. Towards the end, the posting switches from past-tense descriptions to a series of future-oriented suggestions: you may want to continue exploring more cases and see if you can find a general formula (...) or you can work on the problem I posted earlier. These combination of features in the design of the posting alert the recipients to its "bridging" construction in the sense that relevant prior activity performed by an unspecified group of participants ("you") is used to produce a set of task proposals for the current participants. The participation framework that seems to be enacted after postings 115 and 117, the facilitator setting up a set of possible tasks for the team to take on, calls for the current participants to decide for themselves on what problem to pick and, in doing so, they might need to take a stake on the positioning put forward by line 114.
Where did you guys last leave off
The uptake of the tasks proposals made by the facilitator involve a series of interesting interactional maneuvers which involve the constitution of the current situation or deictic field and its corresponding positioning. In the excerpt reproduced below, line 120 is preceded by lack of chat conversation that lasts more than two minutes. The group is not taking action on deciding on its task or might be oriented to reading the textbox on the whiteboard with the original questions. Gdog's requests a description of where the group "last" left off in line 120 and uses the terms "u guys" to address his request in a similar all-inclusive way as the original facilitator posting in 114. By using the expression "last leave off", Gdog seem to use a communicative method that allows parties in conversation to segment or index specific portions of experiences and relate them in ways that allows them to form sequences of participation and activity.
119 8:27:42 PM drago: ok 120 8:30:11 PM gdo: where did u guys last leave off (Points to Message 119) 121 8:31:20 PM MFmod: I think that the above section I wrote is where the group last was (Points to Message 114) 122 8:31:36 PM MFmod: yes? 123 8:31:42 PM drago: well 124 8:31:48 PM gdo: i dont remember that 125 8:31:51 PM drago: actually, my internet connection broke on Tuesday 126 8:31:56 PM drago: so I wasn't here 127 8:32:12 PM MFmod: so maybe that is not the best place to pick up 128 8:32:14 PM estric: i wasnt able to be here on tuesday either 129 8:32:50 PM gdo: how bout u meets 130 8:33:01 PM meets: uh... 131 8:33:11 PM meets: where'd we meet off.... 132 8:33:16 PM meets: i remember 133 8:33:22 PM gdo: i was in ur group 134 8:33:24 PM meets: that we were trying to look for a pattern 135 8:33:27 PM gdo: but i didn't quite understand it 136 8:33:34 PM gdo: can u explain it to us again meets
It is possible that Gdo was present in the prior session but left early and, as a result, wants to know about the last portion of the session that he missed; or perhaps he wasn't there but is only interested in knowing what the group discovered at the end of the session to see if they can build on it now. In either case, Gdo is orienting the group back to "last Tuesday" although his participation in such episode of interaction is still left unspecified. In contrast, after the facilitator calls for an assessment in lines 121 and 122 of whether he had described where "the group last was" in message 114, Gdo states in line 124 that he does not remember "that." At this point Gdo has position himself in a different stance in relation to the object of reference "last Tuesday" and with the description produced by the facilitator in 114. Subsequently, Drago and Estric both decline responding to the assessment called for by the facilitator, also positioning themselves as not having participated in last Tuesday's session. Meets is the only participant whose position with regards to last Tuesday's session has not been addressed and Gdo calls for him to do so in line 129. In fact, in constructing his requests to Meets further, Gdog specifies in more detail that he remembers being in meet's group so effectively, we had an asymmetrical position with regards to last Tuesday's session where Drago and Estric cannot claim direct knowledge of what was done but Drago and Meets can. Interestingly, after Meet has started his tentative recollection, Gdo attempts to reformulate Meets recollection as an explanation by requesting it to be presented to the group ("us") that way (136).
137 meets: with the square, the 2by 2 square, and the 3by2 rectangle
138 meets: sure...
139 meets: so basically...
140 gdo: o yea
141 gdo: i sort of remember
142 meets: we want a formula for the distance between poitns A and B
143 drago: yes...
144 meets: ill amke the points
145 MFmod: since some folks don't remember and weren't here why don't you
pick up with this idea and work on it a bit
146 meets: okay
147 meets: so there are those poitns A and B
148 meets: (that's a 3by2 rectangle
149 meets: we first had a unit square
150 meets: and we know that there are only 2 possible paths......
One of the things that are remarkable about the way this interaction unfolds is the fact that although it might appear as if it is Meets who remembered what they were doing last time, the actual activity of remembering unfolds as a collective engagement in which different team members participate dynamically. In fact, later in this sequence there is a point where Meets remembers the fact that they had discovered that there are 6 different shortest paths between the corners of a 2-by-2 grid but he reports that he can only “see” four at the moment. Even though Drago did not participate in the original work leading to that finding, he was able to see the six paths when Meets presented the 2- by-2 grid on the whiteboard and proceeded to invent a method of labeling each point of the grid with a letter so that one can name each path and help others see it (e.g., “from B to D there is BAD, BCD …”). After this, Meets was able to see again why it is that there are six paths in that small grid and together with Drago, they proceeded to investigate, in parallel, the cases of a 3-by-3 and a 4-by-4 grid using the method just created. The result can be seen on the whiteboard:
Despite the fact that this picture is a restrictively static representation of the team’s use of the whiteboard, it allows us to illustrate some unique aspects of this remarkable creative organization of their collective activity. First, we see again the crucial role of indexicals and referencing activity in the collective construction of the mathematical ideas of the team (e.g., through the use of labels, the witnessing of actions on the whiteboard, and the coordination of parallel activity).
The use of the whiteboard represents an interesting way of making visible the procedural reasoning behind a concept (e.g., shortest path). The fact that a newcomer can use the persistent history of the whiteboard to re-trace the team’s reasoning seems to suggest a possible strategy towards preserving complex results of problem-solving activities. However, the actual meaning of these artifacts is highly situated in the doings of the co-participants, a fact that challenges the ease of their reuse despite the availability of detailed records such as those provided by the whiteboard history.
Despite these technical limitations, we could view the artifacts created by this team as “bridging” objects which, in addition to being a representation of the teams’ moment-to-moment joint reasoning, could also serve for their own future work and for other members of the VMT online community. These particular objects are constructed in situ as a complex mix of resources that “bridge” different points in their own problem-solving and, potentially, those of others. As can be seen in Figure 4, the two team members combined the depiction of the cases being considered, the labeling and procedural reasoning involved in identifying each path, a summary of results for each case (i.e., the list of paths expressed with letter sequences) and a general summary table of the combined results of both cases. The structure of these artifacts represents the creative work of the team but also documents the procedural aspects of such interactions in a way that can be read retrospectively to document the past, or “projectively” to open up new possible next activities.
Endnotes
[*] According to Hanks (2005): “My approach to deictic practice relies centrally on the field concept, which in turn derives from three overlapping sources. The first of these is the standard linguistic sense of semantic field, which denotes any structured set of terms that jointly subdivide a coherent space of meaning. (…) The second usage of “field” was introduced by Buhler (1990[1934]), who defined speech context in terms of two interlocking fields: (I) The symbolfeld (symbolic field), made up of words, other signs, and the concepts they represent, and (2) the Zeigfeld (demonstrative field), the experiential present of utterance production, which he labeled “Here Now I.” (…) The third source is social practice theory in which the concept of field is both more abstract and more encompassing than either the semantic or phenomenological usages. According to Bordieau (1985, 1990, 1991a), a field is a space of positions and position takings in which agents (individual and collective) engage and through which various forms of value or “capital” circulate.
![[1]](https://www.ischool.drexel.edu/upload/vmt/Data/ConcertChat2005Pilot/Session4/VMT0519G5_files/WhiteboardImage.jpg){kind=link}