At 23.51 +0000 0-01-22, Martin Owen scrobe:
>I think it was Yrjo who makes a story about the changes in the social
>relationships in hotels by changes in door opening technology.
No, it is in Reijo Miettinen's paper on the MCA website:
http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Reijo/Reijo.html
BUT it is quoted (following all rules of the academic book) from Bruno Latour:
Latour, B. 1991. Technology is society made durable. In Law, J. (ed.) A
sociology of Monster: Essays on power, technology and domination. The
Sociological Review Monograph 38, 103-132.
As for the affordances discussion on Eufrat, I also think we did not come
to a conclusion -- but I DO think that the discussion was helpful for the
young Swede who started it, in HIS coming to a conclusion. That is how
these e-conferences normally work, I think.
Ricardo, thanks for reponding to my invitation. And yes, even though my
1996 dissertation was not in the CHAT tradition, I have LOTS of references
in it that I picked up from literature I learned about on the XLCHC/XMCA.
At 12.00 -0800 0-01-20, Mike Cole scrobe:
>Thanks Helen for commenting on the differing material bases upon
>which various members of xmca work.
Yes. This is one of the things that warrant a periodic re-floating into the
mailstream, lest we forget the conditions of this network. I agree with
your message, Mike -- except that the miracle of us who write in a language
not our first is no immaterially based miracle, either :-) ... which of
course you know oh-so-well. Let me indulge in taking myself as an example:
In my case, the Xlists have been a great arena in which to develop my own
appropriation of English throughout my days as a grad student and on. (BTW:
I like the 'appropriation' word because to me it always has this subversive
connotation of taking the law/language into one's own hands/mouth). Now,
for one thing, I wrote my dissertation as well in English -- and I should
think that by now I have produced a much greater volume of academic text in
English than in Swedish. For another thing I was pretty well in command of
English already when I returned to Academia in 1983 (to get a teacher
education) -- and when I was vacuumed into research in 1986 it was very
clear to me that both my bosses, the Prof. and the Doctor Ph., were very
oriented towards English-speaking audiences. The second one, being into
educational psychology and educational technology (and also into Vygotsky)
made regular visits to the US to keep up with the developments in the
field. The first one was working on the dissemination of his own
phenomenographic approach, succeeding pretty well in the UK and Australia,
but ever frustrated when it came to succeeding in the US market. I should
think most of the literature in our graduate program was and is in English.
And the prestigious journals.
We also had many visiting researchers from English-speaking countries...
and with guests from elsewhere, unless speaking one Scandinavian language
or another, we would also be communicating in English -- just like the
Internet, English is for better and worse a tool for interacting within
very diverse networks. I should think Martin O. will also have experienced
this in his work with networking between linguistic minorities.
Anyway, I consciously made a point of taking advantage of opportunities to
talk to our visitors for nurturing my English -- and my Xlist participation
was also part of this strategy: a place for interacting in written English.
Writing papers, as you know, is usually not a very interactive process ;-)
Of course the Xlists were also more than that. A breathing hole away from
the phenomenographic enclosure. A multidirectional Zone of Proximal
Development (I know I have been learning here, although I cannot enumerate
it -- and I know that I don't know when and if and who I will have taught
something, although I'm sure THAT I have (and please, I'm not asking for
praise: my upbringing forbids me :-/)).
Without being in the privileged situation of a project assistant
researcher, a grad student with a stipend, eventually a researcher with my
own project -- and all the time with Net access provided by my Department I
could not have done this. But I would probably also not have had the reason
to do so.
The situation of being a grad student (especially in the dissertation
writing stage) is one where people will benefit a lot from scholarly
electronic fora like the Xlists, and (at least if they are lucky) will also
have the opportunity to do so. There are and have been many of us "here".
And as for myself and my progressive appropriation of English it has been
extremely valuable to participate in the Xlist forum.
But I can also join my voice to the one of Leigh Star's poem. While I have
been appropriating English, English has appropriated ME. This relates more
to my position in the academic realm than specifically to my Xlist
participation. I mean, when most of the literature I draw upon is in
English, and when my research focus is on learning and development on the
Net -- what do you expect? Training something as thoroughly as I have done
with English, does transform you. There are many things I cannot talk about
with my colleagues (or myself) without mixing fragments of English into
what I say... anything from "mind" to "communities of practice". I often
feel much too like the affected ladies of 18th century Sweden who kept
code-switching between Swedish and French. I guess THEN it was OK for the
nobility, and it was when the habit seeped down in the class hierarchy it
got called affected... So: there is a price to pay in what one colludes to
be transformed into.
regards
Eva
PS: apologies for having fiddled with the resource fork of my Eudora,
inspired by the SFF kids I'm spending online time with.
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