Activity System

1138 Words3 Pages

When people analyze themselves and how they interact with the community, they can find that they are a part of one or many activity systems. Activity systems are always changing, and people are going to need to transition from one system to another in order to succeed. An activity system is considered “any ongoing, object-directed, historically conditioned, dialectally structured, tool-mediated human interaction,” according to David Russell in “Activity Theory: An Introduction for the Writing Classroom” by Donna Kain and Elizabeth Wardle. Basically, an activity system is a group people who work together to form a certain community. Within activity systems are tools, subjects, motives, rules, divisions of labor and a community which they are …show more content…

These two activity systems are similar in that they have similar rules, tools, subjects, community, objective, and divisions of labor however they are still very different. A university activity system is more complex than high school. There are more moving parts, as Donna Kain and Elizabeth Wardle discussed, there are many people within a community whose “knowledge, interests, stakes, and goals shape the activity system.” There are more people to associate with and accommodate in order to succeed. There are professors whose teaching techniques or how they grade assignments, could be very different that what students are use too. Then there are the large lectures where students have to learn with a group of 100 people instead of a smaller classroom of 20. The university rules are stricter, such as with plagiarism. In high school the worst thing that could happen is a 0 for a grade on an assignment, when at a university, it could cause someone to be kicked out of the university. Students have to adapt, to become more independent than they were in high school, where teachers or their parents would be in their ear telling them what to do in order to succeed. In college students have to figure that out for themselves. It will take time to adjust, but they'll know if they are on your way to succeeding if they can pay attention …show more content…

When transitioning it’s going to take some time to become use to the new active system. They aren't going to adapt right off. They have to learn what will work and what won’t. For example, Alan needed to learn to communicate in an appropriate way for his new job, but he chose to remain communicating by email. He had been told that emails don't work because he needed to show up to a job when he was called. He needed to adapt to a form of communication that worked for this job situation he was in. Instead, he continued using the communication technique which enviably causes him to fail at transitioning. Another example would be how in the larger lecture classes at a university, just sitting there and listening to the professor talk is going to cause students to get bored and lose focus on what he is talking about. They may have been able to get away with it in high school, however in college the information students aren't paying attention to is important for them to understand the more complicated subject. Instead, they could take notes during class on what the professor is saying. This will not only allow them to pay more attention, but it will also help students retain more of the information the professor is lecturing about. People also have to be willing to change your ways to be able to succeed. Alan refused

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