Girl Scout Cookie Sales & Activity Theory

As I mentioned in my last post, Natalia helped me figure out how to move back and forth between units of analysis by offering a citation to Barbara Rogoff. I just finished reading Rogoff (et al)'s 2002 paper in Social Development, 11(2) titled "Mutual Contributions of Individuals, Partners, and Institutions: Planning to Remember in Girl Scout Cookie Sales" (full-text available from UCF databases). It made me long for some Thin Mints cookies, but other than that - it was a delightful read. For example, they mentioned difficulties resulting "from siblings eating boxes of cookies they had not paid for."

This paper had several key ideas I want to remember:
* Functional pattern analysis
* Foreground and background related to focus of analysis
* Discussion on cognitive tools and their evolution
* Analysis of a key artifact (the cookie order form)

A couple of months ago, I read a blog pointing me to "Five Lenses: Towards a Toolkit for Interaction Design." It stayed in my mind as a way to look at qualitative data. It's probably not a comprehensive list, but the Rogoff article brought it to mind. His lenses include:
* mind
* proxemics
* artifacts
* social
* ecological

It seems to me Rogoff used most of these same lenses:
* mind - discussion of distributed cognition, esp. related to the order form and colors of cookie boxes and cases
* artifacts- her discussion of the order form, discussion of cookie box and case colors, and money collection envelope
* social - how tasks were distributed and roles of involvement
* ecological - I think I can make this case by pointing out Rogoff's discussion of how the authors and a number of the cookie customers had themselves participated in Girl Scout cookie sales along with a broad history of cookie sales. They even included a photo from 1932.

An interesting side note: The last sentence of the photo's caption said "(Reprinted by permission of Midge [now Mason]; if Virginia Marley's whereabouts are known, Midge would like to be in contact)." Do you know Virginia Marley?