RE: Democracy, Federal Government, and Educationrch?

From: david.preiss@yale.edu
Date: Wed Dec 24 2003 - 12:24:35 PST


A friend of mine in Chile is doing research on spatiality and
education, in specific in how to arrange spaces to foster collaborative
learning. If any of you knows of key references in the area that would
be very appreciatted. If they are online, even better.

Enjoy!

Quoting Mike Cole <mcole@weber.ucsd.edu>:

> Well, Iraj, you have reinforced the "6 degrees of separation" idea,
> and very strongly. Sitting next to me is my son who is a graduate
> student
> in Geography with whom I learn about spatiality, organizational
> learning,
> and problems of distributed work organizations. And I have for a
> long
> time been up to my ears in the problem of evaluating voluntary
> afterschool
> activities.
>
> I know this latter problem is one Eugene must struggle with too. I
> like your
> ideas about how to do evaluation as collaboration, and work to do the
> same.
> But I find that in the organization I know best, Boys and Girls
> Clubs,
> the staff struggle simply to hold things together every day, almost
> no
> one is paid a living wage, turn over is rapid and endemic.
>
> In our activity system in the local club, we have found that even
> counting
> the number of kids who participate is a challenge is there is not
> someone
> other than the "person in charge" (we call him/her a site
> coordinator) to
> be sure that the counting gets done. Why? Because kids come and go
> and the
> site coordinator is sort of like a ring master who might be
> concentrating
> on helping a couple of kids solve some sort of computer glitch while
> helping
> another kid find a game while....... and it is really not possible
> to
> know what is going on behind your back.
>
> I don't recall if you posted a url for your org, but will check back
> and try
> to take a look. We can be found at www.uclinks.org or
> http://lchc.ucsd.edu.
>
> Have a nice holiday and by all means keep space in mind! After all,
> how
> can one talk about distributed cognition properly without thinking
> about
> space as well as time?
> mike
>



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