Connecting John Seely Brown's Observations to Your Research
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| (paragraph 2) "Suddenly we had e-mail available . . . " | does your writer use e-mail? If so, has it replaced earlier forms of communication at this worksite? Has it changed the worksite, and the work your writer does? |
| (4) "The Web is a two-way, push and pull." | does your writer use the Web for work purposes? If so, how has it changed your writer's job? Does your writer both access the Web and add content to it while working (whether by writing Web pages or otherwise)? |
| (7) The Web allows and encourages "an entrepreneurial spirit toward creating new learning environments. . . " | does the Web encourage your writer to learn more on the job (in situ) than he or she did (or would have) before the Web came along? |
| (8) "[T]hese adolescents . . . the ways they think, the designs they came up with--really shook us up." | do new workers seem to think and learn differently than earlier rookies did? Have those running the worksite done anything to accomodate the different learning styles of subsequent generations? |
| (10) Older people "tend to think that kids who are multiprocessing can't be concentrating." | does your writer do more multitasking and multiprocessing than a person in that job would have done ten or twenty years ago? Also, is it possible that older people in your writer's profession haven't been raised to multitask efficiently? |
| (12) "Literacy today involves not only text, but also image and screen literacy." | in the various forms of information that your writer uses on the job, does it contain more imagery than it did for earlier generations working in this job? what forms do image and screen literacy take? |
| (13) "'Navigation' may well be the main form of literacy for the 21st Century." | when seeking important information, does your writer have to spend more time finding his or her way through other infomation than earlier workers in this job did? Did earlier workers do more reading of received, set materials? |
| (14) Thanks to the Web, much learning has become "discovery based." | does any of the learning (on the Web or otherwise) that your writer still does seem like exciting discovery? or does some of it still take the older form of absorbing received, set forms of information? |
| (16) "Web smart kids become bricoleurs."
(17) "My [older] generation tends to not want to try things unless or until we already know how to use them." |
does your writer ever notice that younger employees display different ways of learning, or of figuring out problems? does J.S. Brown's use of the concept of bricolage help to explain any such generational differences? |
| (21) In the new learning/workplace, learning occurs in situ continuously, and "intelligence is distributed across a broader matrix." | if your writer has been at this worksite long enough, does he or she know if the locations of important knowledge are less centralized than they used to be? For example, when problems are worked on and decisions are made, are the skills and knowledge of more people involved than earlier in solving the problem and making decisions about it? |
| (25) "Troubleshooting for these [tech reps], then, really meant construction of a narrative. . . " | does your writer or others there spend time seeming to chat idly, while actually exchanging stories that sometimes end up improving the workplace? If so, might a Web-based system (like Eureka, which Seely Brown describes) facilitate this "naturally occurring knowledge asset"? |
| (48) Businesses and other institutions not traditionally associated with education are finding ways to work with (some would say infiltrate) schools at various levels. | does your writer see any of this interchange occuring? If so, what forms does it take? Is it always a mutually beneficial interchange, or are there some reasons to be suspicious about it? |
| (52) A shift is happening "between using technology to support the individual to using technology to support relationships between individuals." | does your writer see this shift happening? In addition, are there ways that technology (such as two-way radios or certain types of Web sites) could further support relationships between working individuals at this worksite? |