MCA and xmca

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Sun Feb 18 2001 - 16:06:40 PST


Mike and all --

I certainly find MORE articles per issue in MCA worth discussing than I
have time to participate in discussing. I am lucky to find the time to READ
them! The subscription would be worth it at twice the price. Maybe the
cost to libraries is a little steep, but as you know, that's the pattern of
subsidy (governments and the rich to universities to libraries to
publishers to readers/writers) that makes academic publication a
sustainable institution on the scale needed to maintain the
publish-or-perish system for the large numbers of academics it takes to run
a mass system of higher ed. I could raise a LOT of rhetorical questions
about this system! :)

My experience with the list, and perhaps yours as well, over the long haul,
is that it is very hard to 'artificially' start any sustained discussion.
Most of the great discussions 'just happened', emerging spontaneously out
of previously threads, for reasons I don't think any of us understood. I'd
love to see a good dissertation that comes up with a credible model of why
some topics take off and others peter out. I'm not sure it is possible to
have an explanation for such pheneomena (so if you're a grad student, I do
not really recommend this as a dissertation topic!). Once in a while it
does happen that we agree to discuss something and we do. But even then I
often sense a certain lack of spontaneity within the discussion. Maybe we
feel a bit inhibited about digressing too far, even though it's often from
such digressions that our best discussions have come.

I'm not saying we shouldn't continue to try to stimulate discussions of MCA
articles, or people's books. These projects often fill down-time when the
spontaneous ferment has gone quiet for a while. They prime the pump. But
maybe we should just accept that sometimes they will fly and sometimes they
will sink, and we have no way of knowing which.

On the other problem -- making it easier for everyone to read an MCA
article that is up for discussion -- do you think LEA would agree to
allowing one article per issue to be put on the website a certain number of
weeks after publication? I think it would be great publicity to attract
subscribers, assuming a significant percentage of xmca'ers really aren't
also MCA-ers. Or we could consider another option that's happened in the
past: discussing a manuscript with an author prior to final revisions, or
prior to final (re-)submission to MCA. Rather like the world's biggest
online peer review!

JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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