trying to communicate

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Sun Feb 18 2001 - 12:05:04 PST


I was away on friday and tied up yesterday, which is enough to put me
hopelessly behind. However, I have been granted the space to read my
mail, a good deal of it from xmca this morning.

I continue to both marvel and feel distress at how complicated it is to
link the discussions in MCA to the discussion in XMCA.

I want, in particular, to address Paul's preamble to entering the discussion
of Deborah Hicks' article because it may be a more general problem, I
cannot tell.

>From my reading of the web page, there are two issues of MCA on the web.
There have been suggestions for discussion of the readings of two of those
articles and a lot of discussion of one. Paul expresses the very reasonable
concern that it seems like a lot of money to pay to discuss only one article.

If it is the case that there is only one article in two issues (one a double
issue, Ithink) that seems worth discussing, I think I need to reassess
several assumptions I have been making.

First, I assumed that there is more than one article in those two issues
that raise issues of interest to members of XMCA. Maybe this is a wrong
assumption. If it is wrong, a couple of possible implications follow:

Perhaps there is little overlap between the members of XMCA and the readership
of MCA. In that case, seems like the name of xmca should be changed and
my imagined coupleing of the two forms of discourse abandonded. It was my
thought in making the linkage that the rate of turn taking in printed
discourse is so long that a lot of scholarship is essnetially solipsistic
career building. I was hoping for something better. Maybe there is nothing
better, or maybe some other arrangements would be necessary in order for
something better to emerge.

Alternatively, perhaps there is too little of interest to warrant discussion
of MCA articles. Given my responsibility for what appears there, and my
belief that the symposium on Howie Becker or the Guberman and Saxe article
on math learning, and a lot of the articles on embodied cognition in the
inscription issue ARE worth discussing bias me against this interpretation.

Maybe we are all too busy to read articles AND discuss them such that
a norm of "one article per issue" is the most reasonable way to think
about MCA/XMCA interaction. In that case, some way around the problem
of Paul paying all that money for one article would have to be found.

I am perplexed about how to proceed.
mike



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 01 2001 - 01:01:16 PST