Meeting at Cindy Pease-Alvarez's house with Carol Moran,
Eugene Matusov, and Kevin from UC Santa Cruz, Alice Klien
from UC Berkeley, and Teresa Carrillo from CSUSF.
This meeting was originally organized to pass on a hard
drive which contains games and paperwork to operate La Clase
Magica. Initially, Teresa Carrillo had taken it home from her
visit to San Diego and then had passed on to Cindy. Today, we
were going to pass it on Alice. Cindy decided to invite others in
the vicinity to join us. I started out by stating that I was
hoping for an informal session where I could contribute to
clearing up any questions about involvement in the UCLINKS
project and implementation of the Fifth Dimension/La Clase
Magica activity. I also tried to point out the rationale for
involvement in what I have called the telestructure of our
efforts--the uclinks electronic conversation. The way I see
things is that we are all committed to making an impact in the
under-representation of minorities in the uc system and what
each of us contributes in expertise and foci will support each of
the local efforts. However, we need to develop a sense of
community where we can openly and actively participate in
negotiating the direction of the project without feeling that
there is a higher authority who will nix our contributions. Of
course, it will take time, to feel out the waters and feel
comfortable in bringing up sensitive issues such as not having
the time or the inclination to "writing field notes" on visits and
implementation but we have to start somewhere. I also
understand that we are all overcommitted and understaffed
and have little time to spend on email but, then again, we have
the "dp" (delete) function and could keep others abreast with
short msgs instead of "long field notes a la honorine". Anyway,
my vision is to develop a working relation among all the
participants in much the same way that this meeting turned
into: we dealt with difficult issues at Santa Cruz and then
moved on to the development of the course and site. The latter
was incredibly exciting and I will just mention one aspect of it.
Eugene Matusov related how he had asked his son for a
list of the top 20 games favored by his friends at the junior
high school. It was interesting that they considered
educational and violence as criteria in their selection without
any prompting from Eugene. Another interesting idea from
Eugene was the creation of a web page metaphor for storing
student field notes. By posting the field notes on the web page,
they would be available to all of the students for writing the
course papers. I imagine other sites could also have access. I
liked the idea of using the maze as one of the levels of entry on
the web page allowing the possibility for visitors to attached
other information on the games or activities. There are
endless possibilities for this idea and since our site coordinator
and a couple of the wizard assistance are attending a ucsd web
page course this summer, I am sure we will keep working on it.