I agree that we need to have some kind of notion of the person (not a la
Latour in his review of Hutchins an empty desk with everything farmed out).
I also agree with Bill's comments on Bakhtin and the importance of looking
at transformations (one of my own interests has been in how disciplinary
utterances are taken up by advanced graduate students as internally
persuasvie or authoritative).
Lave and Wenger's notion of situated learning as participation is one
attempt to reformulate learning from a community perspective. I
particularly like their notion that all participation affects the community
too (though the scale of the effects will vary). I am struggling to think
about communities and institutions (or eco-social systems) as really
dynamic, fluid, and temporally-spatially dispersed phenomena, not as
bounded things that people can enter into. I keep getting drawn into
reflections on language because it seems that our language fights against
these kinds of ideas. But anyway if we think about the ways communities
afford forms of participation, the patterns of transformations going on (of
participants and of the community), and the ways communities of practice
constrain and enable other communities of practice (i.e., looking at
"external" relations as well as "internal"), don't we have a way to begin
to link the development of persons and the development of communities that
could speak to what we desire politically, socially, and ethically?
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign