I found the article to be pretty
interesting. Pickering talked a lot
about human and material agency and the interconnectivity between the two. Pickering writes, “Scientists are human agents in a field of material agency
which they struggle to capture in machines.
Further, human and material agency are reciprocally and emergently
intertwined in this struggle” (pg. 21). There was also talk about tuning and how
ideas and intentions are always changing.
I thought there was an interesting parallel between the modeling aspect
of science and the randomness observed.
Just as in the NetLogo models, If you run the wolf-sheep model ten
times, every time you will get a different looking graph and outcome based on
the randomness involved. Like Pickering
says, “Modelling is and open-ended process with no determinate destination”
(pg. 19). I found the idea of human
creating these machines with specific plans and goal in mind reminiscent of the
NGSS guidelines and the idea of engineering. It seemed to make the interaction more social,
moving from the science end game being find an explanation to a question,
toward the engineering end game of find a solution to this problem (build a
machine in this case).
I would like to really unpack the
term mangle and flesh out what exactly Pickering is getting at. I did like the idea of moving away from a
black and white distinction of humanism/anitihumanism towards a posthumanist
view, but I wonder where exactly that falls on a sliding scale? These ideas are interesting and even though
Pickering says representations are important, I wonder what all of these ideas would
look like in a classroom?
I would be interested in using the
NetLogo Model Bug Hunt Camouflage to cover the standard “Environmental
factors also affect expression of traits, and hence affect the probability of
occurrences of traits in a population. Thus the variation and distribution of
traits observed depends on both genetic and environmental factors.
(HS-LS3-2),(HS-LS3-3)” To
show how different traits effect gene expression and occurrence in the
population. This could connect to
Pickering and how the different environmental or material agency effect
humanistic (or in this case bug agency).
This would be interesting to embody a bug and think where would I hide
to have the best chance at survival?
Joey, I agree that the idea of the mangle is something we need to unpack more in class, and I also wonder what that looks like in a classroom. My sense is that it looks a lot like what we have been talking about in this class and other classes, an inquiry based classroom where students are not asked to just memorize information but are instead asked to develop questions to explore through a variety of different context. PBL's and computational modeling seem to fit that idea very well.
ReplyDelete