I do think the grad student support is a nice idea, yet would like to think
about how newbies in general can ease into participation by posting -- take the
case of a bill barowy kind of guy who joins the list with only a paper by
leont'ev, and a book by Newman et al. in hand. At that time there were several
folks who were very responsive and supportive, but have since fallen mostly
silent on xmca. It is a theoretical view that movement by folks into more
frequent posting role significantly changes the communication ecology -- and
changing its collective identity -- one can visualize this at a basic level as
the growth of a new node in a sociogram of interaction. I think with some care
I (perhaps with help) can find supporting evidence for this assertion -- and
probably would end up making a lot of qualifications to it, in terms of what
patterns, and under what "conditions", those changes occur. The reason for
raising this issue is that we are not presently (to the best of my knowledge)
directing actions collectively to how we can co-shape the new ecology as a
poster emerges -- rather in a fashion that can be considered a different genre
of "american problem" we are mostly reactive. Perhaps (following some
analysis) a we could discuss the ins and outs of various strategies, for
example a proleptic-like process.
A quick note of concern about the signup -- having folks email on a web page
can make it prone to being scooped up and used for spam mail. I'm presently
running a background task to get frequent spam from seoul stopped, and it's
possible that my email address was obtained by the spammer from a website at
the University of Pretoria...
Anyway, this new form of societal woe takes collective effort. If anyone else
is having this annoyance, I suggest a proactive approach. Several states
already have antispam laws, there is federal legislation about it, but nothing
is really happening on an international level. Here is a web page of some
references to learn more about spam and to do something about it.
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/c7100/Spam.html
And i recommend *careful* use of the spamcop resource as an easy way to begin
complaining to network administrators who host spammers. i'd be happy to help
anyone thru the process.
(maybe more later)
bb
--- Mike Cole <mcole@weber.ucsd.edu> wrote:
>
> I gather that my attempt at minimum xmca signup passes everyone's muster
> and that two people other than myself are interested in problem of
> supporting grad students and diversity.
>
> Will act accordingly unless corrected.
> mike
>
=====
Bill Barowy
"Everything is a becoming, without beginning or end"
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 01 2002 - 01:00:19 PST