[Xmca-l] Re: Why Computers Make So Little Difference

[mike cole]

It is great to see this discussion broaden out temporally to take us back
to the oldest of communications media we can manage. The question raised in
this manner is more or less what we set out to explore when we created a
Department of Communication at UCSD with checkered success.

Very interesting to see the lists and previously unspeaking voices appear,
almost as if a minicurriculum in "The history of human mediational means
and their associated lifeworlds" were lurking out there in xmca-land.

To help me understand just a corner of this vaste terrain, might you,
David, expand on these comments:

Nevertheless, the tape recorder has had an impact on pedagogy that is
almost negligible. In EFL, where I now work, it served to make a huge
amount of money for the distributors of language laboratories. But language
laboratories worked by fencing learners into cubicles, and *replacing the*

*subject-subject relation we find in natural language use with
asubject-object relation which we find in crude versions of Activity
Theory.*

Given our ongoing discussions about the varieties of and attitudes toward
different versions of "THE" Activity Theory, it would help me to understand
clear examples of a crude version
of AT and how it is applied alongside a subtle/better version of AT and how
it is applied in a different way.

I am conjecturing that if we could get some broad, "germ cell"
understanding of the issue in bold above, it might serve as an analytic
lens through which to view of the history of mediation and activity in
human life.
mike

On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 4:36 PM, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:

> Seven things I learned from What People Said About Books in 1498, by John
> H. Lienhard (http://www.uh.edu/engines/indiana.htm):
>
> 1. Sharing is a cultural invention, not a technological one. Sharing must
> be reinvented in each community and in each generation.
>
> 2. Caxton was not a cultural snob.
>
> 3. Margaret was one cool hipster.
>
> 4. Mennochio and I have a few things in common, but I hope to live to be
> an old woman and not charcoal on a stick.
>
> 5. I regret Lienhard's the analysis of Medieval scholars using
> Myers-Briggs. I wish that rubric would just die.
>
> 6. "We cannot have a clue as to what any technological future will be
> until we learn it from a new generation of users." <-- What he said!!!
>
> 7. We can only know what we know when we have an idea what we don't know.
> Which is why I love what he said about seeking our ignorance. And: "To
> impose is not to discover."  Yeah. That.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Annalisa
>
>
>


-- 
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object
that creates history. Ernst Boesch.