RE: using chat

From: Phillip Capper (phillip.capper@webresearch.co.nz)
Date: Mon Jun 11 2001 - 15:10:44 PDT


I am delighted to have made Mike squirm over that issue. Mike's description
of his discomfort seems to me to have surfaced a contradiction in the
lbe/DWR community of practice. There DOES sometimes seem to be an emerging
orthodoxy. There is some pretty good theory on cognitive
compartmentalisation which explains how that happens!!!

What Mike brought me up sharp on was the realisation that I have been buying
in to the notion of orthodoxy. Of course there isn't. I know that! What we
are engaged in is developing a theory of practice. What we don't do (but
might have started doing without Mike's rejoinder) is to blindly adopt or
reject a method in the field because of methodological orthodoxy as
recounted in Yrjo's book.

We intend to come to ISCRAT ready to nail our theses to the door (if there
is, in fact, an orthodox door to nail them to)

Phillip Capper
WEB Research
PO Box 2855
(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
Wellington
New Zealand

Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
Fx: (64) 4 499 8395

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Cole [mailto:mcole@weber.ucsd.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, 12 June 2001 03:14
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: using chat

I thoroughly enjoyed your comments, Phillip. Only one aspect made me
uncomfortable, it surfaced for me in the way Judy posed the questions, too.

It is indexed in the following:
Our starting point is that after 20 years of organisational RESEARCH (in the
case of our longest worker in the field colleague, who is Roberta) we
finally 'discovered' CHAT and DWR, and found that it provided a meaningful
body of work which was very well aligned with what we were struggling
towards in our isolation. Where that leaves us as contributors to CHAT, or
whether we are just camp followers, Yrjo and Mike (who know us well) are
best equipped to comment about.

Its the "contributors" versus "camp followers" notion that made me squirm.
It was the idea of LBE as some sort of orthodxy to follow in the way the
questions were posed that evoked the same reaction.

What camp? Yrjo and I think alike in some ways, while in others we aer
direct opposites. Knowing who is following and who is leading presupposes
someone has established a "direction." Yet we are forever posing the
question, "which way is up" even as we write about horizontal and vertical
dimensions of development.

Remember the discussion about obuchenie? The remarks made in that context
apply to this one as well.

With respect to the discussion of LBE, it is clearly on the table with
Bill B hoping to join in. Locally our academic year is ending in a flood
of bureaucratic bs and heated deadlines. Some, elsewhere, are already
on vacation and away from home and email. I will be away from home, and
most probably email, from the 14-26th. We'll see the state of play of
the discussion then, and go from there.

Thanks again for the thoughtful notes.
mike



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 01 2001 - 01:01:26 PDT