Please note: obligatory question at bottom.
IMHO, "Community" is problematic in several ways and i prefer not to use it,
except to position "activity system" with respect to it, as a means of
comparison and contrast. Here is one contrast to make. "Posters" can be
considered those xmca'ers that write emails to xmca -- this is a problematic
category, because people do not constantly write emails and the question
emerges when people are NOT posters. Since i exert my presence fairly
frequently here, I'll serve as the example -- am I not a poster when i am
sleeping? Well, yes and no. See what i mean? Yet, the category is useful
when describing participation with a sociogram. The resolution i have come to
for the problem is rather practical, to qualify the term within a timeframe,
say days, weeks, months. Time, and the dynamics that come with it must be a
part of the picture. A nod towards timescales.
How a sociogram contrasts with "community" for xmca could be the following --
just as you said Mike, the CoP framework carries a one-dimension notion of
movement, in-out/center periphery, mostly inward moving. And how that movement
re-constitutes the community is not, to the best of my knowledge, addressed
very well. Consider instead a sociogram of xmca postings, averaged over the
timespan of 7 days, and played out (redrawn) everyday for a whole year. One
would see constant movement with people and interactions appearing, some
flowing and some flickering. In this visual thought experiment, there is no
true center, except in some dynamic sense as the core of people who have been
writing to xmca appear in the sociogram. Those people who are subscribed but
do not write are outside of this model. Disappearance from the sociogram may
be evidence of dis-identification sometimes, although that is hard to find
further supporting evidence until someone writes why they don't post, and there
has been a few. Who is "outside" and "inside" are in constant movement, with
people moving in and out, although the membership -- those who are subscribed
-- is changing in a much slower way, membership and dis-membership. And also
the internal transformations in membership, how each person is changing,
developing, may also be a consideration, as one of the ways the xmca community
becomes open to "the world" as peoples interactions outside of xmca, have been
and, are traced upon their conciousness and brought into participation here.
Referring to xmca'ers, I think the term "membership" can be defined with some
precision, meaning those people who are subscribed to xmca. Membership, if
used for the collective subject of activity system, can then be put into
relation to other categories, using Yrjö's way of framing out an activity
system. And being a member can be considered participating, even if not
posting, but by varied degrees, from reading everything, to reading nothing and
just receiving the emails.
I think there are some tensions with centrality, if one thinks about Object for
xmca as an activity system, for which there are clear differences in how people
place themselves in relation to Object of xmca, as goal direction of the
collective. I propose that Jay's description of heteropraxia carries the
notion of how people variously positioned in their interactions with respect to
the Object are exposed as conficting discourse practices on xmca. Heteropraxia
could be used to describe the ways that the diversity of xmca'ers expectations,
norms, routines, actions etc. that were traced in conciousness through
interaction outside xmca are revealed in interaction within xmca. XMCA is a
community, but it is not. It is an activity system (or 3), but it is not.
Judy D proposed thinking about xmca as "a complex heterogeneous non-unity in
which diverse participants bring a broad range of topics to bear on the CHAT
tradition and vice versa -- e.g., IS, feminism, etc. framed by and framing CHAT
--" and it's an interesting definition, because while maintaining the
diversity of individual interests, there still is orientation toward a
collective object.
(My conjecture is that) Conflicting discourse practices have been our visible
problem. What lies underneath that are some perhaps irreconcilable tensions in
xmca, in dynamic consitution of xmca's identity over the long term by its
membership, over the short term by who is posting and their relations to each
other and their positions with regard to the object of xmca. Using LBE, one
can trace these as primary and secondary contradictions. Some discussion
lists treat these kinds of tensions through a combination of what
instrumentation (ensemble of artifacts writ large, ala Cultural Psychology) and
what rules apply. For example, the K-12 System Dynamics list is configured so
all email passes through a moderator (instrumentation) and the moderator keeps
the Object in mind (discussing the adoption of System Dynamics by k-12 schools)
and those that don't match the object are not distributed. That's the rule.
Basically, when people "actively forget" the reason they are members, by way of
what they write, the moderator obviates the consequences to the membership.
What I proposed by way of a not-so-obligatory Obligatory Question, is a routine
for posting, a possibility as a uniquely xmca practice, that faciltitates an
xmca'er re-orienting with respect to the xmca Object. So what is the instance
of Object here? Eeek... very loosely defined, and taken from the official web
page (not my definition, but prefaced with my interpretation) as collective
inquiry regarding "study of human mind in its cultural and historical contexts.
Our emphasis is research that seeks to resolve methodological problems
associated with the analysis of human and theoretical approaches that place
culture and activity at the center of attempts to understand human nature. "
So I've tried to frame out the xmca situation, using the conceptual tools of
its members, rather than CoPs -- Yrjö's, Diane's, Jay's, Mike's, Judy's... and
explain the reason for the suggestion of OQ.
OQ: Does this collection of ideas from these authors make some sense? Does it
hang together with any coherence? If so, where are its weaknesses, if not,
what is better?
=====
Bill Barowy
"Everything is a becoming, without beginning or end"
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send FREE Valentine eCards with Yahoo! Greetings!
http://greetings.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 01 2002 - 01:00:19 PST