Virtual Minds and Workplace
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Subject: [PD 3888] virtual minds and workplace
From: Wrigley, Heide
Date: Wed Aug 5 15:48:30 EDT 2009
Hi, again Tom
Just to respond to the first part of your post
Nice to see that we are coming back to the idea of literacy being mediated through interactions with others and we don't just live or die by what we as individuals know and can do. Although, of course, the more you know, the more you know ..
Some years back there was a small scale study by Darrah who showed that workers very rarely consulted a manual. Instead they relied on demonstrations and help from others in figuring out how to do tasks that challenged them.
So as we prepare students for a print saturated world, it makes sense to me to prepare them to deal with multiple dimensions of literacy and environments where sometimes individual skills count and at other times, collaborative efforts.
The Darrah article Complicating the concept of skill requirements: Scenes from a workplace can be found in
Glynda Hull's book Changing Work - Changing Workers
Best
Heide Spruck Wrigley
Literacywork International
Subject: [PD 3893] Re: virtual minds and workplace
From: JoAnn (Jodi) Crandall
Date: Wed Aug 5 16:49:35 EDT 2009
Heide and Tom,
My dissertation work, of so many years ago, also confirms that manuals are
not where workers get much of their information. In fact, with the
clerical workers I studied, it was the last place they turned. I surmised
that in many cases, it was because the manuals were (unfortunately)
written for people who were like those who were writing the manual. They
were not written with their users in mind.
If this is true of clerical workers (who work continuously with
print/text), then I can imagine that it would be even more true of those
who work in less print/text-saturated environments.
Jodi Crandall
JoAnn (Jodi) Crandall
Professor of ESOL/Bilingual Education
Director, Ph.D. Program in Language, Literacy & Culture
University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)
