Re: [xmca] Kevin's paper for discussion

From: Mike Cole (lchcmike@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Jun 27 2006 - 21:24:07 PDT


Hi Steve-- It appears that others have not caught up with Kevin's
interesting article which
addresses a ton of issues of relevance to xmca members who come to chat
ideas from
many different perspectives.

I have been waiting to see the video that accompanies Kevin's chapter but we
have had trouble
opening the files and are working on the issue. Meantime, of course, this
gives people an opp
to catch up on the reading.

I'll hope that Kevin will expand on the distinction between presupposing and
entailing indexicality rather
than seek to provide my own interpretation which has a great chance of being
misleading.

Instead, I thought it might be useful to take up the issue of symmetrical
and assymetrical approaches to context/activity and the
uses of the terms context and activity, which I trip over all the time and
did at various points in Kevin's article.

There is this thing about failure to learn that often worries me. I totally
agree that learning is an inevitable consequence of all
experiences in the world.... in school, in church, in a high chair, on one's
death bed, or next to one's parent's death bed, or,........
But sticking to school for a moment, its difficult for me to put aside my
own experiences, both in my own schooling and in
raising my kids (and being raised/lowered by them!). Geometry gave me a lot
of trouble. And probability theory was not a whole
lot easier for me. I worked at both, and I was, I think, not a successful
learner of the subject matter. I did learn how to get to right
answers in ways that would not genralize-- "rote memory." I do not think I
walked into these subjects with an identity of a bad learner.
I ended up with a degree in mathematical psychology and at one early point
in my grad career I actually figured our something having to
do with all or nothing learning and a simple math model that no one else in
class figured out. But I was/am lousy at math.

My 5th grade grand daughter sends me math problems that are posed as thought
problems in her class and they are tough! So I get
help from my neighbors (a chem phd and an md) and they are too tough for
them. But their 11th grader helps and we work through them
and we all communicate our understandings, and I get enough of an
understanding to try to create an explanation that might actually
be helpful to my grand daughter. And mostly, I do it in a spirit of inquiry
and fun. (Here is where the identity part comes in perhaps). I
do not her to think that math is dumb or boring but rather challenging and
interesting. Personally, if someone had explained to me why
triangles were interesting to Pythagorus, I would have found geometry a lot
more interesting. I am mr triangle locally after all.

So I worry when we dismiss something like "abilities" or "proclivities to
find certain phenomena easy to grok." (Grok is a word for the
over 40 on the list I guess, call it an identity marker). My son at the age
of about 7 found it easy to solve simple algebra word problems
that I did not find easy, nor did his sister. He got behind in college math
so far he was going to flunk until we explained to him that if he
managed to flunk out of colleged, we would wait until he figured out what he
wanted to do with his life before putting more money into
his education. At which point he sat down, solved every problem at the end
of every chapter in the book, and got the highest grade in
his class. I could not have done that on pain of a slow, painful death. But
subsequently he struggled over other problems which his
sister and I could find ways to think about productively when he could not.

All of which makes me nervous about some of the early parts of Kevin's
discussion, while not in any way questioning the usefulness of
his analysis of the students from the two institutions, the complexities of
defining THE goals in activity that apprentices presumably willingly
follow, etc. Its just to say that there was a time in my life when I
desperately wanted and work hard for an identity as a competent
probability theorist of low order and could not do it.

Where do such differences in ability to do what one is trying hard to do,
with full support, come into the analyses of communties of practice?
mike

On 10/25/06, Steve Gabosch <sgabosch@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> This tension between the Consortium group and the Institute school
> students - the struggle over who should reveal what information to
> who in the process of building the race cars - seems to touch on
> quite a hornet's nest of conflicts of interest, squabbling over
> access to resources, class differences between the students, etc. I
> liked the use of the techniques of linguistic anthropology to analyze
> the conversations and try to drive some of these tensions out. I
> have a question. I did not fully grasp how Kevin used the
> distinction between "presupposing indexicality" and "entailing
> indexicality" in his analysis of the micro truck project.
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
> At 01:16 PM 6/22/2006 -0700, Mike wrote:
> >Hello All--
> >
> >Kevin's O'conner's paper , *Communicative Practice, Cultural Production,
> and
> >Situated Learning, is
> >now<http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/KevinOConner/OConnor_CommPract.pdf>
> >on the xmca web page at http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/index.html,
> >
> >We have not been successful in getting the video up, but are working on
> it.
> >Meantime, some new bedtime reading
> >for discussion.
> >mike
> >*
> >_______________________________________________
> >xmca mailing list
> >xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
>
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Sep 05 2006 - 08:11:25 PDT