Mozuku

I’ve been reading  Acting withTechnology (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006), a book about Activity Theory and how it relates (particularly) to interface design. One of the many interesting ideas that come up in the book is the notion of curation. When I first heard it, I thought of curator, as in museum curator, and the idea of what goes on in a museum: identifying, organizing, verifying, and documenting. In Activity Theory, however, the term has a very particular meaning. According to Kaptelinin and Nardi, curation “is a deeply social process through which materials are strategically revealed to others, or hidden from them” (pg 159).

Though the situation the authors talk about is the interaction of research scientists at a company looking to develop drugs by analyzing genes, this got me thinking about language learning. There has been considerable research into the area of Willingness to Communicate (WTC) in recent years. Curation seems to me like a goal-driven social form of WTC. Curation seems to focus perhaps too exclusively on  the individual’s attempts to achieve objectives in the social situation, assuming that other factors are constant (attitudes to the company, personality, etc.). This cannot be said of students in a class. There are usually too few characteristics that are constant across learners. WTC is probably the better theory for describing the motivations and behaviors of students in a language classroom, but curation gives a nice way of talking about the ongoing process of what learners will share or not in communication with other students (and instructors). Language students have two things affecting their curation: one is the choice of what to share (often culturally determined) and the other is proficiency (what they are able to and not able to communicate).