Re: Now, wait for last year (Re: Joint Activities on XMCA)

Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se)
Sun, 6 Sep 1998 21:12:16 +0200

At 08.39 -0700 98-09-06, Mike Cole wrote about problems of pace.

>How to sequence?
=2E..
>I am certain of only one thing: We plan to discuss diversity and activity
>theory in the LCHC lab meetings starting the first week of October.

Yes, looking forward to it.

But I have also looked back some more.

Throwing in my idea about going back to *Cultural Psychology* I have
skimmed through some of that material. Actually the discussion came up
because Peter Smagorinsky had been reading CP in the beginning of June and
took up a discussion about the conundrums of intervention and cultural
difference. In the course of this discussion a joint reading was suggested.
Decision making as usual in this medium was slow in coming -- until Chuck
Bazerman simply volunteered, producing focus questions on a chapter by
chapter basis, stretched out over two months (June-July)

Somewhere around Chapter 5 (where the artifacts come into the narrative)
the discussions started spinning off (in the way mailinglist discussions
tend to do) in a way that somewhat overwhelmed the joint-reading --
although there WERE messages connected to later chapters, too. PERHAPS less
of the referencing to pages etc. that people adhered to in the beginning.
And more other stuff buzzing around on the list -- a lot of it associative
spinoffs from earlier chapters. Then there was the shutdown of the weber
server for upgrading, which turned out to last for nine days.

Anyway, Mike, when you write that:
>last
>summer's discussion of Cultural Psychology stopped at the point where
>I turned from critical/historial review to examining the idea that
>a psychology would really start from analysis of everyday activities,
>so that claim never got worked over, nor the implications I drew
>from it.
-- it sounds as if you had a particular discussion in mind, which was
different from the one that happened... maybe it would be a good idea to
read the book backwards? (.od ot sgniht gnitseretni...)

What WOULD a psychology be that started from analysis of everyday
activities, (and with the psychologist cyborged into the system of the
everyday activity)?

Eva