'Do you wish to save the changes you made to the exercise



The Experience of Computer Use: Expert Knowledge and User Know-How

By: Norm Friesen

I always check my email first thing in the morning, with a cup of coffee in my hand. I often find a long list of messages from co-workers and a variety of mailing lists or Listservs. Scrolling through my new email one Monday morning, I am surprised to see a message from an old colleague and friend who had recently moved to another city. I click on it, and am somewhat disappointed to see that it is written in a rather impersonal, professional vein, posing a question about educational technology support -- our common area of professional interest. Undaunted, I click on the reply button and type in a cheery greeting, asking her how life is at her new job. I wish her all the best, and send it off. Later in the day, I check my email again, and am surprised to see that I have received a message from myself! I click on it only to see that it is the message I earlier sent to my friend. I feel the blood run to my head in an embarrassed blush as I realize what I have done: I've sent my personal greeting to all the educational technologists on the list. The message from my friend that I replied to earlier was actually one that she sent to a mailing list. By replying directly to it, I've inadvertently sent the message to all subscribers on the list. I try to reassure myself that I've communicated nothing revealing or grossly embarrassing, but can't help but feel that I've made a fool out of myself in front of hundreds of people!

Foolishness, frustration, and feelings of intellectual inadequacy seem to be common in the context of computer use. Computer books written explicitly for "dummies" and "idiots" have been runaway successes; phrases such as being computer "literate" or "illiterate" or of "dumbing down" the operation and documentation of computer systems are all commonplace. Feelings of foolishness and inadequacy seem clearly dysfunctional in our "networked" or "information" society --a social and economic order for which networks, information and the Internet itself are widely regarded as eponymous (for example, Castells; Bell; Turkle). Moreover, these feelings present an interesting contrast with what many have said about the educational potential of computers as cognitive or "mindtools" that form a close “intellectual partnership” with the learner, “amplifying” her thinking “by transcending the limitations of the mind" (Jonassen, Mindtools, 10).

One writer describes computer users as being forced to reside "on the weak side of [an] idiot/genius binary" (Johnson, 45). On the one side of this opposition, according to Johnson, are the experts and designers, whose abstract knowledge is effectively instantiated in the computer systems and software they develop. On the other is the user or "idiot", who is relegated to the role of a "mere practitioner, or someone positioned at the bottom of the proverbial epistemological ladder" (Johnson, 4, 44). The knowledge or "know-how" of the user is generally disregarded, and rarely captured in written or formal accounts. Instead, it is generally only to be found in the form of verbal anecdotes or stories of computer use --tales, for example, of mis-directed emails, of computer crashes, or lost and recovered files:

Hidden from view, almost imperceptible because they blend so perfectly into the backdrop of daily, mundane experience, are stories that beg to be told of people as they work with, against, and through technologies that abound in our lives. These silent, hidden stories have been effaced in modern times, however, as the value placed upon the stories of everyday knowledge --of "know-how"-- has given way to the "knowledge in the machine, " or the "knowledge in the system". (Johnson, 4)

By giving voice to ignored, anecdotal user "know how", and by contrasting it to more expert and theoretical understandings, I intend to shed light on how computers are experienced by users, especially in educational contexts. By presenting and analyzing a number of anecdotes of computer use, I hope to show how the acquisition of denigrated user "know-how" is actually intimately interconnected with computer expertise and with understandings of the role of computers in education. I will also show how the actual experience of computer use casts into doubt the educational efficacy of computers understood as instruments of cognitive amplification, or simply "mindtools."

"Do you wish to save the changes you made to the document?"

The above question jumps up on the screen as my computer emits an alerting "beep." I've seen the message many times before when trying to close a document or program. Usually, I just click "OK" without even really reading it. I know what it says. But in a moment of confusion --perhaps because I am in a rush to leave my desk-- the message makes me uncomfortably uncertain. I pause to look at it with a vague sense of impatience and unease. "Do you wish to save the changes you made to the document?" "No, I actually don't even want to close the document," I think to myself. I sigh impatiently and with a rapid, reflexive gesture of my index finger I hit the mouse button: "No." The document closes. "Oh no!" Immediately I realize that I did something wrong. For some reason, I had thought for an instant that "No" would somehow let me opt out of my decision to close the document in the first place. Now I realize I closed it without saving my work. I feel an acute pang of regret as I realize that I have lost an hour's worth of concentrated effort. I am irritated with myself and my own impulsive impatience. But the action is irreversible. "Oh darn, too late now," I say under my breath, and rush off. Frustrated, I try to suppress the awareness of what I just did. Again the computer has made me feel stupid.

In the literature that deals with the "usability" of computer technology or "human-computer interaction", the problem of user stupidity and frustration --and the correlative matter of designer expertise-- has been understood in particular ways: Users and software designers are often described as each having their own mental representations or "models" of the operation of the software or system in question (Norman; Cooper; Brandt & Uden). The nature and relation of these models is perhaps most clearly delineated in Donald Norman’s popular book, The Design of Everyday Things. As the diagram provided by Norman (figure 1) indicates, designers or experts are seen as developing systems based on their own “designer models.” Users, on the other hand, are generally understood as having "no knowledge of [their] own --only that knowledge that is handed down by those who made the object in question" (Johnson, 13). The “user’s model,” in other words, is devoid of content except for what the designer has communicated through the system. Norman explains:

Ideally, the user’s model and the design model are equivalent. However, the user and designer communicate only through the system itself: its physical appearance, its operation, the way it responds, and the manuals and instructions that accompany it. (Norman, 189-190)

These aspects of the system --its appearance, its explicit function and documentation-- are labeled the “system image;” and Norman underscores for his readers: “Remember the user acquires all knowledge of the system from that system image” (Norman, 190). As a result, this aspect of the system, as Norman says, is “critical: the designer must ensure that everything about the product is consistent with and exemplifies the operation of the proper conceptual model” (Norman, 190). The designer, in other words, must represent his or her knowledge in this image in a form simple and consistent enough that users can grasp it by simply utilizing and familiarizing themselves with aspects of this image. In this sense, and in Norman’s characterizations, users are taken by default to be “dummies,” and must have the interface of the technological artifact "dumbed down" to their level.

Many specialists in educational technologies understand the issue of using computers for teaching and learning in very similar terms. Central to this understanding is the language of mental models or representations. However, these educational technologists effectively invert the relationship outlined by Norman between the user's mental model and the computer or software "system image:" Instead of seeking the accurate representation of the operation of the system in the user's mind, they emphasize the possibility of computer software itself being used to represent the mental models or "knowledge structures" belonging to the learner or to a specific subject domain. As mentioned earlier, the term "mindtools" is sometimes used to designate this particular application of computer technologies:

Mindtools are computer application tools that may be used by students to analyze and represent the structure of content domains across curricula as well as to reflect their own personal knowledge structures. (Jonassen, Mindtools, 3)

Correlatively, learning has been understood as the construction of these personal knowledge structures or maps. Using the language of "nodes" and "links" that will be explored more fully later, David Jonassen characterizes this process of construction in the following way:

Learning consists of building new structures by assimilating environmental information and constructing new nodes that describe and interrelate them with existing nodes and with each other. It requires forming links between existing knowledge and new knowledge. (Jonassen, Hypertext Knowledge, 155; see also Jonassen, Mindtools, 205, 58-62)

Significantly, in this and in other characterizations of learning as a process of assembly or construction, David Jonassen makes direct reference to Donald Norman --specifically to his work in cognitive psychology that preceded his writing on human-computer interaction.

These theories of learning and of human-computer interaction rely on the notion of mental models or representations that mirror or can be mirrored by the computer system. But do these model-based or representational approaches to knowledge and learning help explain what happened in the incidents described above? Did my failure to save my work or to properly address my email message arise from a mismatch in "system" and "user" models? Did the interfaces or system models of the email or word processor software fail to indicate their actual operation? Had I failed to learn properly about their operation from what their interfaces presented to me?

My failure to save my work does not seem to arise from insufficient or inaccurate information as provided by any particular "system image." Instead, it is perhaps better explained in terms of some sort of a break in habitual action or routine expectation. Similarly, the mis-direction of my email reply to the email list didn’t arise directly from the operation of a single system that would be the domain of any one designer or group of designers. Instead, it seems to emerge from the combined effects of two systems: The email software that I have on my computer, working together with the systems that maintain lists of mail recipients and forwards messages as a part of an email list. The creation of an accurate and consistent system model in this case would require considerable coordination between the developers of both systems, and of any associated systems --and would require my own mental model to correspondingly proliferate in size and complexity to include this expanded system. Given the innumerable and complex systems that constitute the protocols, and the client and server software of the Internet, this could conceivably present a significant challenge.

If the experience of computer use is not entirely explained by reference to the mental models of the user, the designer and the system interface, how can this experience be otherwise understood? Might a different understanding of this experience have some impact on the notion of computers as "tools" capable of an “intellectual partnership” with or "amplifying the thinking" of the user (Jonassen, Mindtools, 10)? To try to answer these questions, I will now focus on one type of user experience that has received much attention as of late: hypertext.

Browsing

Searching the Web for discussions of the meaning of the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia," I come across a professional-looking site devoted precisely to these matters. Called "The Electronic Labyrinth" () it provides a definition of hypertext that is itself hypertextual, with all underlined terms functioning as links:

Hypertext is the presentation of information as a linked network of nodes which readers are free to navigate in a non-linear fashion. It allows for multiple authors, a blurring of the author and reader functions, extended works with diffuse boundaries, and multiple reading paths. (Keep, McLaughlin, Parmar)

The definition goes on for another brief paragraph, but instead of reading it all, I click on the hyperlinked term "information". I'm wondering why the authors bothered to link such a general term --one that doesn't have as clear a technical significance as the other underlined terms, "link" "network" or "nodes." The "information" link takes me to a page with the title "Node Contents":

On paper, the information encountered at a hypertext node may be either text, graphics, or a combination of the two. It is these media that we will be directly concerned with in this study. (Keep, McLaughlin, Parmar)

I read the first sentence twice, wondering why it starts with the phrase "on paper", and how this "node" is meant to speak to the matter of "information" in general. Also, the next sentence indicates that The Electronic Labyrinth is actually part of a "study." Since I had the initial impression that this Website was more of a general introduction than a particular study, I now feel compelled to get an overview of its contents, to find out exactly what kind of site it is. I click on the "contents" link in the banner at the top of the page, and access a listing of topics on another page or node that is so short it can be taken in at a single glance:

Contents:

Hypertext Terminology

Re-thinking the Book

Writing and Reading Electronic Hypertexts

Literary Formats: From Manuscripts to Electronic Texts

The Non-Linear Tradition in Literature

Software Environments

Guide to Publications

I see that the site is quite literary in orientation, referring to manuscripts, reading, writing, and literary tradition. I also get the impression that it will be difficult to get an overview of the actual, individual nodes or pages, since the topics listed seem to be quite general, and the few nodes that I have already accessed (“hypertext,” “information”) do not seem to be listed on this more general contents page.

Later, looking for an introduction to hypertext from an educational perspective, I turn to a chapter from David Jonassen's Computers as Mindtools for Schools entitled "Hypermedia as Mindtools". Flipping through the book to find the chapter, I see that it is in a section entitled "Knowledge Construction Tools" --one that I had skimmed over some months ago. The section on hypertext in this book begins by emphasizing that, as the prefix "hyper" suggests, hypertext is in some significant sense "beyond" normal text; it is "supertext:"

Hypertext is supertext because the reader has much greater control of what is read and the sequence in which it is read. [The advantages of hypertext are] based on the assumption that the organization the reader imposes on a text is more personally meaningful than that imposed by the author. (Jonassen, Mindtools, 208)

I skim further down, and notice that Jonassen also uses the terms "nodes" in speaking of hypermedia content, and that he describes "links" as joining them associatively (Jonassen, Mindtools, 208-209). On the next page, I come across a passage that I had highlighted during an earlier reading. I slow down to read it closely:

Hypermedia systems permit users to determine the sequence in which to access information (browsing), to add to the information to make it more personally meaningful, or to build and structure their own knowledge base. Like most information systems, interaction is the most important attribute. (Jonassen, Mindtools, 208)

The similarity of the descriptions and terms used in both Jonassen’s text and The Electronic Labyrinth strike me as remarkable. Both characterize hypertext and/or hypermedia in terms of "links" and "nodes." Both underscore how it "frees" the reader to navigate or browse in a non-linear manner. Jonassen takes this last point one step further by emphasizing how this freedom allows the reader to "impose" his or her own organization on the text, making it more meaningful and thereby enhancing its educational potential.

However, reflecting on the actual experience of reading these two texts --one in print and the other online-- might lead to other conclusions and characterizations. In the case of The Electronic Labyrinth, the experience of choices provided by the links in its pages text does not, first and foremost, seem to be one of imposing on this text an organization "that is personally more meaningful than that imposed by the author" (Jonassen, Mindtools, 208). Instead, the links I follow (first clicking on the term "information" to see why the authors linked it, then on "contents" to see what kind of study or text it is) seem to be an investigation precisely into the intentions and context of its authorship: I want to find out why the authors would consider the generic term "information" to be worth linking along with more technical terms like "link" and "node". I also inquire into the genre of the text as a study, and try to find out about its overall purpose and nature. After clicking on "contents," I am disappointed to discover a listing that is too general to accurately indicate where I have been and what I might yet still explore. Jonassen's remark that in hypertext, "interaction" --in other words, selecting hypertext links-- is the most important attribute, seems to be most certainly true. Following links is indeed indispensable finding out what kind of text I have before me, where I may have been earlier in reading the text, and to understand the authors' intention. But this does not happen in a way that takes it above and beyond printed text, as Jonassen suggests. Links are the only means that I am able to use to understand the relationship of any one "page" to the other Web pages that constitute the study as a whole.

By contrast, in the case of the physical artifact of Jonassen's text, I have its physical attributes (the size and weight of the book) and all of the deeply ingrained conventions of its organization (I read chapter one, part five, for example). With a book, the physical contiguity of any one page to other pages, its place within the linear order of the text itself the physical traces of other readings or readers --and other physical and conventional attributes-- all contribute to my sense of the text as a whole, and to the meaning that I would associate with any one page or passage in particular. The format of the Web pages, on the other hand, is more uniform and is unmarked by the passages of previous readers or readings. It reinforces the need to click on links as the only way of discovering such basic contextual information as genre, scope and contents.

Hypertext Disassociation

Pondering Jonassen's assertion that hypertext allows readers to "build and structure their own knowledge base" (Jonassen, 2000: 208), I suddenly recall having seen an essay that seemed directly related to this idea. I quickly flip through a pile of photocopied and printed articles that I've been working with, only to realize that the paper I'm recalling is somewhere online. I came across it, I think, while browsing a series of links posted by our professor on our course Website. Opening my browser window, I choose the course site from my bookmarks, and begin scanning the list of links for a title that will ring a bell. I find something that looks promising and familiar, and click on it. I find a much shorter list of links provided on this second site: "What's New," "Collections," "Texts," "Other Links." “What's the difference between these?" I wonder to myself. And which link is likely to lead me to the paper that I am now feeling ever less confident that I will find? Choosing "Texts" with some uncertainty, I find that it is a mix of papers and book-length pieces available both in print and online. I begin scanning the titles, and I notice a link that looks interesting: "Visual Structuring of Hyperfiction." I click on it and begin perusing the paper's abstract. But suddenly I remember my original intention. Feeling slightly irritated, I click twice on browser's "back" button and return to the list of links I accessed earlier: "What's New," "Collections," "Texts," "Other Links." I decide to check under "What's New." This page or node presents me with a list of links that have been just recently added to this Website as a whole. I breathe a sigh of relief as I spot the title of the essay I'm looking for: "Effects of semantically structured hypertext knowledge bases on user's knowledge structures," again by David Jonassen. Even though the paper itself is not new (it was originally published in 1993), I assume that it has been recently posted to this Website --hence it's listing under the "what's new" section.

Clicking on the link, my computer pauses; after a few moments, a screen appears telling me that "The page cannot be displayed" (figure 2). Not bothering to read the numerous, additional explanations that are provided on this screen, I impatiently click on the "refresh" button to reload it. Surprisingly, the document appears! Scrolling quickly up and down, and I see that it is quite long. I print it out, staple it together, and begin to read.

Citing a long list of authorities, Jonassen begins this paper by explaining that "some hypertext researchers have asserted that hypertext mimics the associative networks of human memory." Taking this as his premise, Jonassen describes how, like hypertext, the human memory is "composed of nodes or ideas and ordered labeled relationships that connect them" (Jonassen, Knowledge Bases). Perhaps significantly, Jonassen again references at this point to the cognitive theories of Donald Norman. Jonassen goes on to explain how learning occurs in the context of the nodes and associations of human memory:

Learning consists of building new structures by assimilating environmental information and constructing new nodes that describe and interrelate them with existing nodes and with each other. It requires forming links between existing knowledge and new knowledge… (Jonassen, Knowledge Bases).

Reading this, I realize the reason for the emphasis on construction in these texts by Jonassen, and by extension, in the works of others known as “constructivists” in education. I also see why Jonassen feels hypertext has such educational value: Knowledge is itself seen as taking the form of nodes and links! The construction of mental models that the likes of Jonassen and Norman describe as being mirrored in computers is understood as being the equivalent of thinking and learning itself! If one assumes that the human mind operates fundamentally like hypertext then it only follows that hypertext and other "mindtools" become indispensable for learning. For the use of these tools can easily be seen as involving the manipulation and assembly of the very structures of thought and memory:

…Just as carpenters cannot build furniture or houses without a proper set of tools, students cannot construct meaning without access to a set of intellectual tools to help them assemble and construct knowledge. (Jonassen, Mindtools, 4)

But unlike a carpenter’s tools --say, hammer, saw and nails-- mindtools do not serve to simply fit and fasten the constituent pieces of knowledge together. Instead, as indicated above, the utility of “mindtools” like hypermedia and hypertext derives from the fact that they mirror the contents of the mind.

A similar emphasis on the mirroring of mind and memory has been made quite consistently from the earliest, speculative discussions of hypertext through to much more recent analyses of the Web and related technologies (Dillon, Electronic Medium, 28). From the first imaginings of hypertext technologies by Vannevar Bush (1945) to current discussions of “semantic networks” and “systems modeling tools” (Jonassen, Cognitive Tools), the notion of nodes and associative links between them has been understood as providing a powerful means of mirroring the processes of knowledge construction occurring in the mind. If this construction is not always conceived as occurring explicitly in terms of hyperlinks and navigation between nodes, it is understood in terms of other computational means of representing knowledge --the nodes and links of “cognitive visualizations” (e.g. Jacobsen, 2003) for example, or the collaborative "knowledge construction processes" instantiated in online communication forums (Scardamalia).

In all of these cases, the mind is retrospectively understood in terms of the structures and formalisms central to computerized information representation and processing. Such a conception of learning as a construction of formalized representations can be regarded as presenting an effective "pedagogy" of computer use. At the foundation of this pedagogy lies the direct correspondence or “natural mapping” (Jonassen, Cognitive Tools, 362) between the form and construction of learners’ knowledge structures on the one hand, and computational representations on the other. In this context, the learner is understood as “blending together with the computer,” form kind of cybernetic, symbiotic whole:

learners [enter] into intellectual partnerships with the computer… instead of being controlled by it, they enhance the capabilities of the computer, and the computer enhances their thinking and learning. The results of an intellectual partnership with the computer is that the whole of learning becomes greater than the sum of its parts. (Jonassen, Knowledge Bases)

The intellectual partnership between learner and computer that lies at the heart of this “pedagogy” has further, significant implications: Glitches, omissions and errors of user judgment betraying any incongruity or incompatibility between learner and computer do not fit comfortably with this understanding. Instead, differences separating human thought and activity (on the one hand) and computational operation (on the other) are side-stepped. The implication is that the responsibility for the successful “inter-operation” of human and computer in knowledge construction lies with the human user. The ability to exploit the computer’s prodigious representational capacity appears to largely as a question of the user’s choice or control, rather than being an issue for the instructor or the software designer.

However, the accuracy and efficacy of such an understanding of learning and computation is cast into doubt by even the most common experiences of human-computer interaction. In the last example described here (re-tracing a path through a series of links to find an article) the user does not appear to blend with the technology into a single cybernetic entity. And as a user, it does not appear that I am unambiguously “in charge” of my computationally extended and amplified powers. What emerges as critical in this incident is the somewhat inscrutable intention and situation of the author of the Website who has chosen to classify under "what's new" only items new to the site as a whole (rather than those newly written or published). In a similar manner, the links in The Electronic Labyrinth served largely as a way of determining the scope and genre of the "hypertext" created by the authors --and not as means of putting myself in charge --as uniting my mind with the technology.

These experiential accounts also underscore the emphatically active and almost compulsive manner in which clicking and following links takes place. Such characterizations are given further confirmation in the common use of a phrase such as “surfing the Web” --suggesting as it does an almost unstoppable forward movement of the user swept along by "waves" of information. It is also interesting that these acts of surfing and clicking seem to run counter to the emphasis that Jonassen, Norman and others place on "node contents" and on information provided by an artifact's system image. Indeed, in an article predating the Web and the activity of surfing, usability specialist Patricia Wright emphasizes "the need for theories of NOT reading" in contexts of human-computer interaction in general. She describes with some puzzlement the fact that "people will often choose NOT to read information even when it is readily available, clearly visible and could easily be understood" (Wright, Theories, 324).

This tendency of hypertext, hypermedia and computer environments generally to invite action --rather than leading to a state of passive repose-- has been clearly registered in other recent characterizations of the Web. These are both practical and theoretical in orientation. One theoretically-oriented example is provided by Marie-Laure Ryan’s book, Narrative as Virtual Reality. There she compares the space that hypertext opens up to "non-places," describing these as spaces "that we traverse on our way to somewhere else" (Ryan, 261). These include the spaces of an

airport, subway, freeway, [as well as] the network of Information Superhighways that crisscross cyberspace, the most nonplace of them all. Cybernauts and hypertext readers spend most of their time clicking on the nonplaces of the links, never dwelling for long on a textual segment, because each of these segments is less a destination than a point of departure for other, equally elusive destinations. (Ryan, 261)

Similarly, the terms used in practical guidelines for designing Websites also reflect the nature of the Web as a passageway or conduit --rather than as an arrangement of stable nodes and links. The term "stickiness," for example, is widely used in connection with to the aim of Website designers to cause users to "adhere" to the site, rather than simply providing them with the means to go elsewhere (see ). Other terms used in the literature of Website design are equally suggestive of the need to develop a sense of place and location in the “non-place” of that is the Web. These include phrases such as “bread crumbs” “canonical location” and the “rhetoric of arrival and departure” (source). Without going into detail, it is evident that these terms underscore the centrality of motion, paths, “coming” and “going” to the Web experience. They also attempt to evoke the possibility of occasion or location in the Web. But how can we similarly adapt a language or a frame of reference that is more in keeping with the experience of using computer and multimedia technologies? Perhaps we can start to undertake this task by looking at a rather different type of human-computer interaction: the experience of gameplay and of immersion in a three-dimensional "virtual reality" environment.

Get the Knack

After three hours of sustained research, I close the Web browser and quit my word processor. From the icons or shortcuts on my desktop, I click on one called "Driver", picturing a man hunched intensely over a steering wheel. My computer screen goes black momentarily before some aggressive music begins, and a dashboard-like menu of shiny buttons appears. From this menu, I choose "Pursuit," and then "San Francisco.” In moments, my computer screen is devoted entirely to a surprisingly life-like street scene from Chinatown in San Francisco. The music has stopped and deep rumbling of a car engine is now audible from the computer's speakers. In the immediate foreground, I see the car I’ll be driving. Further in the distance, there is the car that I am to pursue. My fingers take their position almost involuntarily on the keyboard: one pair of keys is used to accelerate and decelerate; and another pair to steer right or left. I press the acceleration key. The pursuit begins. Screeching and leaving dust in its wake, the car ahead of me accelerates recklessly down the street. I try to follow as closely as possible. I screech and list as I careen between pedestrians and traffic. I fly down the precipitous slopes of the narrow San Francisco street. I brake and skid from one sharp turn to another. I feel that I can somehow sense the momentum and weight of the car, feeling the force of the engine and the breaks. I even find myself leaning slightly from one side to another in my office chair, even though I know that this is futile. Involuntarily I apply greater or lesser pressure on the keyboard buttons. The speed and action gives me a strange sense of exhilaration and freedom. After one chase ends, I click through the series of buttons needed to begin another chase: Continue? Yes. Pursuit. San Francisco. I find myself rushing through a number of chase episodes, until my accelerator finger begins to feel a little sore.

In the context of such compulsive, immediate action, questions of user knowledge, its acquisition from the expert or designer, and how it is communicated via the program's interface appear in a new light. The knowledge of the designer or expert required to create a realistic representation of the San Francisco streetscape, for example, does not seem at all important to my use of the program. Instead, it is the felt or embodied knowledge of acceleration, braking and cornering that determines my success or failure as a player. No verbose instruction manual or series of written on-screen tips that I could imagine would likely be able to increase my pleasure in playing the game.

This type of experience points to an understanding of computer use that is rather different from the one implied by designers like Norman and the one implicit in the “pedagogy” advocated by Jonassen. It is an understanding where user knowledge of the system appears as embodied, performative and emphatically provisional in nature. Explicit knowledge of the system is important only insofar as it aids my performance in the game, and as it is confirmed by my felt or embodied sense of control over the virtual car. It has little or nothing to do with the details of the game's actual operation, or of the designers' original conceptions. Something similar can be understood as occurring in some of the anecdotes provided earlier as well. For example, my response to a screen of detailed information regarding a Webpage that “cannot be displayed” is not a careful consideration of its contents. Instead, I reflexively hit the re-load button. Similarly, when I failed to save the document I had been editing, my erroneous action does not appear to be so much a question of misunderstood directions, but a break in routine or habit.

Consideration of the very commonplace act of using a keyboard (whether part of a computer or earlier, of a typewriter) might help in understanding this kind of knowledge. Writing in 1945, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes this experience as follows:

To know how to type is not, then, to know the place of each letter among the keys, nor even to have acquired a conditioned reflex for each one, which is set in motion by the letter as it comes before our eye. …It is a knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort. (Merleau-Ponty, 144)

Merleau-Ponty adds that such a “knowledge in the hands” --neither explicit comprehension nor blind reflex-- can perhaps be most effectively described as “habit.” This type of “habitual” knowledge, then, is one that arises in action and that cannot be readily described outside of the conditions under which it comes into being. Recalling, for example, where the letter “b” is on the keyboard can be most easily (or perhaps for some, only) done by moving one’s fingers above an imaginary keyboard space. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, this type of action/knowledge materializes precisely in “the motor space [that] opens up beneath my hands...” (Merleau-Ponty, 144).

A similar, habitual type of “knowledge-in-action” can, of course, find ready illustration in common experiences of computer use: Such knowledge allows, for example, for a compelling embodied connection to develop between action in a game and the use of a few simple keyboard commands; this habitual knowledge is also present in the rapid expression of one’s thoughts and feelings in an email; finally, a combination of luck and attunement to this situated habit could also help to explain my success in re-loading the Web page initially reported as unavailable. In these instances, it is not any rational decision or known “facts” that are brought to the fore; instead, it is an inseparable mixture of an almost instinctual knowing and doing that is rather difficult to reconstruct away from the mouse, keyboard and screen.

However, this situated and habitual knowledge-in-action only accounts for part of a user’s experience or facility with a computer. The examples of user experiences considered here seem to place “habitual knowledge-in-action” in the context of larger, complex situations and circumstances. These include conditions that extend to the personal or impersonal tone of an email message, to expectations associated with the genre of an online document, the unexpected appearance of a dialogue box, or one’s sense of where one has been and where one needs to go while surfing the Web. Such circumstances arise from a detailed, textured background with which one can only be more or less familiar, or be more or less attuned. Thinking also of the language of surfing, breadcrumb trails and stickiness, knowing how to act against such a background can perhaps be best understood in terms of “finding one’s place” or “keeping one’s footing” as one traverses different sites and locations. Again, this kind of “knowing” is one that is difficult to anticipate with great precision by any expert or designer --and that is likely to fall into the interstices between the facts and relationships presented in any system interface or documentation

This type of tacit, interstitial knowledge, action and habit is perhaps best evoked by informal words like "knack", "skill" or "know-how" rather than by terms like "model" "structure" or even "expertise". It is a kind of implicit or embodied and situated knowledge that does not readily lend itself even to reflection, much less explication, abstraction or formalization. As Johnson points out, such unformalized end-user "knowledge" is given expression in the ancient Greek term "metis" (Johnson, 53-58). This is a term, Johnson explains, that refers to a type of "wily intelligence" that is oriented towards quick physical action and is illustrated in the tales of Odysseus and his "cunning", or in the wiles of mythological trickster figures (Johnson, 53). Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant explain this concept further in their book-length study, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society:

Metis …combine[s] flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills and experience acquired over the years. It is applied to situations which are transient and shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic. (Detienne and Vernant, 3-4)

Detienne and Vernant emphasize how such knowledge is opposed to "unchanging," "true and definite knowledge" of philosophy or the "concept of Platonic Truth" which they say "has overshadowed a whole area of intelligence with its own kinds of understanding."

Now, in the picture of thought and intelligence presented by the philosophers, the professional experts where intelligence was concerned, all the qualities of mind which go to make up metis [are] erased from the realm of true knowledge and relegated, according to the circumstances, to the level of mere routine, chancey inspiration [or] changeable opinion. (Detienne and Vernant, 5)

Detienne and Vernant note that metis is usually "pass[ed] over in silence" by philosophy (Detienne and Vernant, 4). Except for some references to metis in the literature of organizational knowledge management (e.g. Letiche & Statler), the term does not seem to occur in discussions of the types of knowledge relevant to computer troubleshooting or the educational use of computers and networks. But at the same time, the lived experience of everyday computer use yields abundant evidence of situations where the conditions are transient and shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous. And in these situations, it is a resourceful cunning, rather than an approach reducible to any particular formula, structure or form, that is most appropriate and also perhaps most closely associated with expertise.

In understanding computer use and usability --educational or otherwise-- it is of the utmost importance to be attentive to this concrete specificity of both the situation and the user's action. So when I make the error of sending a private email message to a public email list, for example, it can be recognized that even the most careful software design might not be sufficient to prevent such a mistake. Instead, it is necessary to be attentive to a complex combination of factors including those that can be associated with the contents of the email messages themselves: the formality of its tone, the generality of its content, the sender, and any other number of factors and nuances. A similar, cunning and alert intelligence-in-action seems to be what is most needed in the experience of hypertext interaction. For the operative knowledge in hypertext navigation does not seem to be one that is communicated directly through the literal structures of nodes and links. Instead, it is a type of mental agility that is at work, finding its place in an abstract informational topography of nodes, links, and all manner of distractions and challenges.

This emphasis on cunning --combined with an acknowledgement of the inevitability of error or “breakdown”-- can also form the basis for reconceptualizations of design. In Understanding Computers and Cognition Winograd and Flores emphasize the fact that errors and system breakdowns are not experiences that can or should be entirely eliminated from software and systems design. Instead, they explain that these “aberrations” are to be consciously accommodated in systems design:

New design can be created and implemented only in the space that emerges in the recurrent structure of breakdown. A design constitutes an interpretation of breakdown and a committed attempt to anticipate future breakdowns. (Winograd and Flores, 78)

Such breakdowns, and the improvisational resourcefulness required to overcome them are indispensable to understanding expertise or facility with computers. For it is the degree of agility in one's actions and improvisations --rather than explicit modeling or knowledge-- that seems to separate those with experience from others so often labeled as "idiots" or "dummies" in their use of computer technologies. And it is exactly this same know-how --most effectively evoked by forgotten or informal terms like "metis," "knack" or “know-how”-- that has to be discovered or recovered for a truly effective understanding of educational computer use.

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