[Xmca-l] Re: Reflective Discourse on XMCA

[Alfredo Jornet Gil]

Hi all,


thanks a lot for putting this together. I sometimes struggle searching in the e-mail threads to recover some discussions, and I've been copying and pasting into word documents to keep track of ideas. This practice has proven useful to me, the thread that you and Katie have made now available for example having been a source of ideas for some of the things that I am working on now. So I find this initiative very compelling. But I also anticipate that it takes time to go through the thread. I guess we should expect different dynamics to emerge when someone posts an e-mail with some points and then others respond, as compared to when the e-mail is a larger thread of ideas having emerged during a long discussion. So, perhaps we do not yet know what reflection of the kind you are making possible looks like. I'll surely need some time to go through the thread and further contribute to the interesting topics. But I am in for it.


Thanks,

Alfredo




________________________________
From: lchcmike@gmail.com <lchcmike@gmail.com> on behalf of mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu>
Sent: 13 October 2015 17:43
To: Rolf Steier
Cc: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity; Alfredo Jornet Gil; Geoffrey C. Bowker
Subject: Re: Reflective Discourse on XMCA

Hi Rolf--

>From the evidence so far, reflection in the form we have piloted has not proven a compelling activity for mca-o-phytes. I will post the remaining two topics and lets see if any public discussion follows.  Perhaps the lack of collective reflection has deeper roots than the difficulty of pulling together the relevant pieces in a single, quasi-organized file.

mike

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 5:00 AM, Rolf Steier <rolfsteier@gmail.com<mailto:rolfsteier@gmail.com>> wrote:
Thank you for putting this together! I think this will be a great resource, and I'm particularly interested in looking back at the "space/ place" and "imagination" threads.
rolf

On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 2:08 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu<mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu>> wrote:
Dear Colleagues -- From its inception, one significant feature of xlchc/xmca was that conversations seems to go on for a while and kind of peter out (if they started at all) and it was rare for participants to return to consider what they had written before and what, perhaps, collectively, might be learned from the chatting. I liken the process to Vygotskian chaining. Interesting. Individuals display what they have taken away when they write later on, I often
feel like a have learned a lot.

But still, we seem to have no way to turn around to examine the results of a given conversation, no matter how exciting it seemed at the time.

Thanks to Katie Simpson, the Comm Dept/LCHC grad student who assists in production of MCA, and thanks to the discussion that Rolf and Alfredo provided us in their discussion of the ideas of Leigh Star, maybe we have the beginnings of a socio-technical solution to what for me, at least, is a problem.

What Katie has done is to peel away all the headers and present quoted messages in different threads that
emerged during the discussion. Then she categorized these into
Introduction & Conclusion
Boundary Objects
Space and Place
Imagination

I have no idea if anyone is interested in using these materials to revisit what we discussed earlier and perhaps to
come up with a deeper understanding of the interlocking issues involved. Do the three threads, now with the
noisy pixels dissolved away, form any more general pattern? For me, for example, the role of imagination in relation to boundary objects has been very helpful. And others?

I attach for now only the introduction. I am not sure which if any of the three sub-topics people might like to discuss or in what order.

We have a while before the new and ever exciting issue of MCA comes out, so perhaps a time to pause, and reflect?

mike

--

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






--

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