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Analysis Of The Article 'How A Cockpit Remembers Its Speed'

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One day after reading Hutchins’ How a Cockpit Remembers its Speed, I was on an airplane flying to Montreal for the weekend. I took special care to look for the raising and lowering of the slats and flaps that Hutchins described in his article – I’m happy to say I was able to give a rudimentary description to my girlfriend as to what was going on as we took off and landed! Hutchins argued that there are “many representations that are inside the cockpit system, yet outside the heads of the pilots” (pp 267). This first point I agree with; however, he goes on in the discussion to conclude that the cockpit systems “remembers its speeds” (pp 286). While Hutchins and I agree that the pilots are the focal point of the cockpit, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that cockpit remembers its speed. The cockpit is certainly a complex system, with many elements combining to create the phenomenon of an aircraft that can control its speed and maneuver the skies, but without the …show more content…

In one of my others courses, Cognition and Learning, we learned that students learn best when they are able to ascribe meaning to a memory. Rather than simply walking around a museum reading scholarly writings on the wall next to exhibits, the interactive tracing sounds like an ideal alternative. The authors also predicted possible “deleterious effects” of visitors who produced misconceptions, but argued that experts would counteract this effect by responding correctly. I think that the amount of these “deleterious effects” would depend on the type of museum. While traces may work great at a high-brow museum such as The Louvre, it may not work as well where misconceptions can run rampant, such as at a science

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