Habermas and Searle in University: Teaching the Language-Action Perspective to Undergraduates

The Language-Action Perspective (LAP) has attracted much interest in an information systems context. Many research approaches have been presented and discussed. However, there have been no reports on teaching LAP to students. We argue that it is of prime importance to expose students to LAP if we want to attract new researchers to the area. In this paper we will discuss the results of two courses on LAP for undergraduate students in computer science. It was found that the best way to introduce students to the area of LAP is by teaching LAP concepts in an intuitive way using every-day examples and by combining LAP with a current “hot topic” such as Business-to-Business Electronic Commerce. The copyright of this paper belongs to the paper’s authors. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage. Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on the Language-Action Perspective on Communication Modelling (LAP 2000) Aachen, Germany, September 14-16, 2000 (M. Schoop, C. Quix, eds.) http://www-i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/conf/lap2000/