Thank you for your reply. I will take a look at your site, because I'd
like to learn as much from your work as possible. I have been trying hard
to interpret our efforts through a variety of frameworks, because otherwise
we make decisions based only upon the intuitions formed of our prior
experience.
As the project director, I'd like to think that the overall approach I use
is similar to what Mike has called a "Positive Critical" approach (I hope I
am right here), or an extension of the "Design Experiment" approach that
Allan Collins and Ann Brown describe. But allowing for distributed
initiative and the negotiation of goals and tasks between participants
means that I remove myself from directly influencing the action. It can
offer some interesting dilemmas, of which the need for timely decisions,
pulsed by the calendar of the school year, and in recognition of funding
concerns, does not allow for comfortable reflection. On the other hand,
the curriculum coordinators, who know the school staff very well, and who
know their communities and school needs very well, and who are very good at
"making things go", have been fantastic in implementation. I have been in
awe with how they have been able to accomplish so much with so little.
Activity theory seems apt, but as the application to this kind of thing
seems so new, and so desireable of a greater theoretical foundation, I am
just making it up as I go along. Fantasy.
The project is really quite small - we have $50K for the year. Our funding
is from Bell Atlantic, a local telco, and so I do not think that
competition for funding is a problem. I will be working on an interim
report to the funder this month and I'll send you a copy. It will not be
written CHAT terms -- half baked writing of that type will be reserved for
this list.
Bill
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Technology in Education
Lesley College, 31 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]