Re: 1987

From: Judith Diamondstone (diamonju@rci.rutgers.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 05 2001 - 06:24:23 PDT


In 1987 I had begun a doctoral program on the East Coast after 7
 years in Northwest Alaska. I had been made aware,in the mid 1980s, of
email, thanks to Ron Scollon at the U of A in Fairbanks. A paper I wrote
for him that year was based on an email exchange with Father Michael Oleksa
at the Univ. of Ak Anchorage about the contrasting space-time paradigms of
Christianity and the Inuit, or something like that. The paper was itself a
scavenge through publications out of BBN about email and educational
software and the expanding horizon of possibility that the new personal
computing technology and email would introduce into public education. That
was the year I bought my Kaypro II, which traveled with me on small planes
and sleds to Saint Lawrence Island, from Savoonga to Gambell & back, not to
mention up the Kuskokwim, to Washington DC, and then Cambridge MA. where I
started a doctoral program in an elite private University with no money. I
luckily landed a job as a research assistant on work study with Sarah
Michaels, who was the Cambridge coordinator of that U.S.--Soviet Union
collaboration over educational uses of computers in schools, initiated by
Mike and his Soviet counterpart.... Under the auspices of that project, and
much to the chagrin, I think, of Mike, I gathered what later became my
dissertation data, which had nothing to do with computers. It did shape my
professional commitments, though -- redirected my interest in rural and
community-based education to urban education, race & class, and questions
of style/address/stance in authoritative writing.

At 08:15 PM 6/3/01 -0700, you wrote:
>
>I am curious about people's association with the year, 1987. What were
>various of xmca's members doing in 1987? What theories were they using
>to guide research? What research were they doing?
>
>Brief summaries would be really helpful to discusion of a book written, I
>presume, between 1985-1987.
>
>for myself, I can contribute the following.
>
>In 1986-1987 I was on sabbatical leave at the Chid Dev unit of the Britisyh
>Research Council in England. Cultural psychology, or sociocultural
psychology,
>or Vygotsky, or anything connected with such ideas was incomprehensible
>to almost all the people I talked to.
>
>I was dividing my time between trying to write a book that, 9 years later,
>was published as *Cultural psychology........*, not a title of my choosing,
>but the best that could be arranged on the spot, with 60 seconds to make up
>my mind about how to change the title I had selected.
>
>And, 18 hour a day efforts to establish "normal" working relationships with
>colleagues in the Soviet Academy of sciences using the, then, exotic medium,
>of email.
>
>I also spent a couple of months working on my book./lectures in copenhagen
>which a few faithful friends heard through from beginning to end.
>
>It would take me 10 years to finish the book which became *Cultural
Psychology....
>......." in 1996.
>
>
>In the spring of 1987 Yrjo completed his doctoral thesis which is the ms
>we have been reading, LBE.
>
>Those of us left alive at now 14 years older. We interpret the text written
>then through our respective personalities and experience.
>
>What are they? Having some idea whould help me understand the discusion.
>mike
>
>



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