> I stayed away from it but decided to reduce my comments to few
> reference points
Referring to my half-baked distinction between push and pull
technologies, you say:
> ... and of course there is also a *point of view*: if no theory is
> disinterested then no reference book, or article, is not at the
> same time a textbook - a push technology, in your terms. Bourdieu
> would say that no theory can be descriptive without being
> prescriptive. And in this sense if the proof is in the pudding
> then again the function of the textbook boils down to the role it
> is attributed by its users, i.e. to a point of view.
Yes, this is quite true -- there's no text which can't function
either way (though it may more readily afford one or the other).
What I'm trying to attend to is the way the text is treated and
framed: whatever the text _is_, if it's used as a reference source
it tends toward pull technology. But as Jay says, elaborating on
your point, it's trying make something of you at the same time as
you think you're making something of it. Even the encyclopedia
(though I'm not quite so sure of a table of logarithms . . . ).
My concern is for the dominant texture of the event: does it feel
mainly pushy or mainly pully? In the case of treating the text as
textbook ("Read chapter three for Thursday; there'll be a quiz") it
feels strongly as though the institution is pushing this piece
of language.
My colleague Doug Vipond taught me to put all the textbooks side by
side on the reserve shelf and tell the students, "Go see what two or
three of them say about early language development." That seems to
me to inscribe the text into a much less pushy role -- to treat it,
in fact, as a reference text.
It's the same text in each case, but it's a different utterance, as
Bakhtin might say.
-- Russ
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