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Practice based theories
DRAFT 1159187859

Practice based theories, for the purposes if this research, are //define//
 * Try Hislop (2005)

Actor-network theory (ANT), activity theory (AT) and communities of practice (CoPs) theory are three "social and cultural frameworks" that Mary Lea (2004, p. 11) sees as relevant to the study of literacy and learning in online environments, at least in higher education. Lea's perspective draws attention to the possibility of ANT, AT and CoPs as appropriate theoretical frameworks from which we can begin to ask how new tools can be evolved to support existing social practices.

Boundary objects, context, & content classification
Martin Weller argues that "communities [and context] are the logical conclusion of e-learning," (2006, title). Thomas Gruber (1998) argues systems can be developed with the aim of providing collaborative environments in which people collect, chare information. He suggest systems can enable the creation of "group memory" that would contain not only "information that has been //put to use//," but also capture the "//context of its use//" (1998, p. 2, emphasis in the original). Gruber, in his work with Intraspect Software, sought to develop systems that could integrate information across distributed systems, including comments and annotations about shared information objects, and also threaded discussions, the management of multiple conversations, and the mediation of external and internal message flows. Nowadays Gruber’s attention has turned to folksonomies and applications that support blogging and community forums that support semantic searching. On one hand the creation formal classifications such as ontologies is seen too justify central management (i.e. ontology_engineering. On the other hand the creation of classifications can be seen as dynamic (e.g. evolving_ontologies, or emergent semantics]. The creators of actor-network theory (e.g. Callon, 1986; Law, 1986; Latour & Woolgar, 1979) were among those to draw attention to the social construct of technology (see [[scot|SCOT) argue that the socially construction, the result of social processes that are (to varying degrees) enabled or impeded by the presence or absence of various forms of or hierarchy or power structure (Star, 1989; Suchman, 1994).

The use of online social tagging applications and similarly ontology-instance creating applications is not only a technical activity, but also a social phenomena that that can be seen as taking place in a particular context. That is, various social factors contribute to the environment in which content tagging and classification //practices// develop. When we use online classification systems our knowledge and its context impact on the tags and classifications we create. This research assumes that knowledge and practice are socially situated (e.g. Lave & Wenger, 1991), and by extension, the practice of creating tags and/or formal categories can be seen as a socially situated practice of knowledge creation.

Following Lea (2004), I suggest the use of a combination of various aspects of ANT, AT and CoPs as a beginning discourse from which we can begin to bypass the (perhaps) dominant view of technology as a "determining" (Snyder & Beavis 2004) factor in understanding computers' role in knowledge creation and sharing within communities.

[//define//] "determining"

Hislop on PBTs
Donald Hislop (2005)

Influence of J-C Spender
Practice based theories: what sort of research values?

Why practice based theories?
- for example activity theory, actor-network theory, and communities of practice? [todo] //brief answer; summarise later; change to anchors//

Why focus on communities of practice (CoPs) theory?
//Why?//

Why ANT?
According to Figueiredo and Afonso > Actor-network theory (ANT) is a social theory widely used as an intellectual framework to help in understanding networks of interests where individual actors [also called 'actants'] form alliances, mobilise other actors, and resort to artefacts to reinforce their alliances and satisfy their interests. (Figueiredo & Afonso, 2006, p. 17; c.f. Callon, 1986; Callon & Latour, 1981; Law, 1992)

Roque and Fegueiredo continue that > Actor-network theory (ANT) offers a language base for the explanation of social phenomena supported on relationships between human and nonhuman actors and on the constitution of the actors themselves. (Roque & Figueiredo, 2006, p. 46; c.f. Latour, 1999a //on recalling ANT//)

> I'm hoping ANT can help us understand how distributed networks of computer users and applications that enable so called 'social tagging' can be understood as dynamic and emergent (see ANT's ontological_categories).

Why activity theory?
> Activity theory proposes the study of human behaviour situated in a social, cultural, and historically constituted context that focus on mediation as a basic and fundamental property of human action. (Roque & Figueiredo, 2006, p. 44). And so it follows, to use the Roque and Figueiredo's words with very little modification, > [this research] proposes to a view of [the use of social tagging systems and more formal classification systems] as a sociotechnical phenomena, not only of the social interaction between human actors but also of their interaction with artefacts and of their influence on the emerging organisational patterns of behaviour. (Roque & Fegueiredo, 2006, p. 56)

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