There is a distinction between school and some university "acculturation" and here I think the work of folk like Jean Lave is pretty useful. There is also a nice paper by Engstrom on this stuff as well. This perspective shifts the focus to notions of curriculum, to the reproduction of the stories and practices of particular intellectual tribes and so on. The interesting thing to me is that this view puts the "ed tech" view of technology, i.e., use computers, etc., to help with the acculturation in an interesting light. If the task was to acculturate, have peripheral would imagine that you'd like to see the peripherals see how experts use the technology to maintain and sustain the field. I'm not sure the game would be to use technology to represent expert performance for the purposes of acculturation. But I show some of my preferences here.
There are other useful questions that arise from this social perspective but I best go back and read Diana's original piece eh?
If ya don't know Lave etc. ...the refs:
Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Engestrom, Yrjo (1991), Non scolae sed vitae discimus: Toward overcoming the encapsulation of school learning. Learning and Instruction, 1(3), 243-259.