ABSTRACT
We focus on representational infrastructures that allow people to render, manipulate, and explore aspects of complex natural systems (e.g., the foraging behavior of a colony of termites on the forest floor or the ecology of a closed pond). By contrasting routine and innovative uses of representational infrastructure, we seek to understand how opportunities for learning are distributed in project work that is enabled by infrastructure, while that infrastructure is, itself, under development. We report on a comparative analysis of how learning and infrastructure are related in a field entomology research group and in a 6th grade integrated science and mathematics classroom.
