Outsiders looking in...

I know, I'm double posting...shame on me. But I did have some reflections, on Forsythe in particular, that I wanted to share since I missed some of the discussion in class. First let me say that I really liked the Forsythe chapter, in particular how she draws out several contrasts through her research.

The first of which is looking at the Lab's self-definition as scientists to avoid identifying too closely with other fields and not get credit for doing AI work.
However she calls her informants engineers based on likenesses to her perception of the "engineering ethos" which includes 1) classifying social problems as unimportant, 2) approaching problems practically (through trail-and-error) rather than theoretically, and 3) possessing poor face-to-face communication skills.

Compare this to Jonassen who writes about these very same things as being factors that make engineering problems messy and "real-world". He does not necessarily argue that engineers do have great communication skills, approach problems theoretically and classify social problems as very important. The difference is that he says the lack of these skills/tendencies is a problem, where Forsythe seems to take the attributes of the engineering ethos at face value.

The other significant contrast was in her conclusion that the difference in knowledge acquisition between social science and AI community is a direct result of how each group defines knowledge. She relates that in social science, knowledge is generally thought of as a constantly changing entity (result of ongoing construction and interpretation), thus their view is that knowledge acquisition is inherently challenging. Yet her experiences show that AI treats knowledge as static, non-situated and non-tacit, and thus get frustrated with a seemingly inefficient knowledge acquisition process.

There are certainly other ways to interpret these conclusions and other things that could be taken away from this chapter as a whole, but I think this where I will leave things for now.