Victor, it's nice to see that you took my advice and joined the xmca list,
where I see you have become an active participant. I hope it has helped you
in your own research. I dip in and out of the conversation, sometimes
absent for long periods at a time, according to the drift of my own research.
It was a shock for me of course, your sharp response to my question, and it
forced me to re-evaluate my reading of Vygotsky. I initially got interested
in LSV c. 1980 solely from the point of view of his ideas about
linguistics, and it was only after getting involved in xmca in the 1990s
that I realised that he was such a force in pedagogy, something which
gelled with my interests at the time, working for Melbourne Uni. I
remembered that when I first read Vygotsky teaching stuff (Lois Newman) my
initial reaction was that there was a big element of "manipulation" in
these methods. However, I am not a teacher, and it remained the social
psychology and linguistics which interested me, and I still think LSV and
the school which followed after him is right up in front there. I think I
kind of merged my image of Vygotsky with my own views, and forgot about
what I didn't like!
As a youngster I was very interested in mathematics, but as I got older I
moved more and more away from that domain, and my mind just switches off
now with the kind of stuff you are doing in AI, even though there's still a
side of me which could very easily get into it! Nowadays, my focus is more
and more on ethics.
Anyway, thank you for the impulse!
Andy Blunden
Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/index.htm
"What we do should be decided by us."
(61) 3 9380 9435
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