John Seely Brown and Lucy Suchman

I read Michael J. Streibel's (1989) "Instructional Plans and Situated Learning" today. A bit dated on the instructional technology front, but still full of important points on *stuated learning*. Basically, Lucy Suchman (1987) and John Seely Brown (1988) argue (and Streibel echoes) that we don't act according to what the "cognitivist paradigm" terms a "plan", which Streibel asserts are the cognitive scientist's "essence of human action" (p. 145). (Remember, this article is a 1989 piece; since then the field of situated cognition has sort of taken center stage in Cognitive Science, as seen in the emergence of the Learning Sciences). We may start with a plan, and intend to use it, but in the thick of the situation we act according to our embodied/lived experiences. Afterwards, in retrospect, we may reconstruct our actions and call it a "plan", but it's merely a generalized reconstruction that represent our actions.

Is this a spitting of semantic hairs? Let me argue for their point. When I make plans to travel, I take into account the amount of luggage I typically take, the time typically needed at the airport I fly out of (In my experience, Madison's check-in is generally faster than O'Hare), how lazy (or not) I am, and how much time I typically like to spend doing one thing or the other. Then, since I don't consider myself an "expert" traveler, I factor in a lot of "squish" time to cover things like missing a bus, traffic jams, getting flagged for the cavity search, etc. If you make a plan to travel based on mine, you're going to be very frustrated. Likewise if I made plans based on yours, I'd probably be frustrated because we both have different lived experiences that guide our plans (and actual actions). Since we make our own plans, we have (hopefully) a margin of patience that we give ourselves. But even if we took travel plans from Frommer's or Lonely Planet, we would choose which one based on our lived/embodied experience, and then we'd modify according to what we actually experienced.

More coming...