It made me real happy to read those latest two messages from you, as I had
been gritting my teeth over your continued confusion of the perspectives of
the general xmca community with the perspectives of PCWeek hype journalists
or college students raised on simplified textbooks... when the truth is
that most of us already share your enlightened views :-) Postings
assuming things like we're all technofreaks here, always going for the
latest, may be great for provoking discussions -- evoking displays of all
the sensible positions we DO take in relation to the temptations of
technological megalomania -- but they leave at least this faraway netwoman
with fingers "speechless" from anger. I sure hope that your insight is due
to some kind of relief allowing you to "see where you are" at the xmca (not
to somebody beating the sh** out of you verbally :-)
Re: A Repressed Creation Myth
The myth I was served in the mid-eighties as a (very small) part of my
teacher education was basically "Once upon a time there was the Big Ugly
Dragon of Behaviorism, called Skinner. Then, along came the Valiant Prince
Piaget." Nowadays I think the myth of evolution in Swedish teacher training
goes from the Night of Behaviorism, through the Dawn of Piagetan
constructivism to the Noon of Vygotskian socioculturalism...
So what you picked up as a grad student looks like the next logical step in
complexification: use more names (in a particular part of the field), but
hang them onto a fairly simple structure... (Not even a map: just a few
road signs.)
The problem is when these structures are given and taken as something to
hang on to: as representations of How It Is rather than as First Sketches
of a complicated historical and cultural process. Now, I don't teach, so I
have no solutions for better apprenticeships into the field of "learning
and development" :-/ I don't even know quite when or how I learned to
"listen" to Original Writings of Great Names as stuff written as (book-size
or essay-size) statements into a dialogue within a research community (of
which, in general, I have not been a part): I don't know the people they're
talking to, but at least I'm aware of THAT fact. And "secondary" writings
(as if these could be kept apart!!) as Pictures from a Perspective (some
better done, others worse). Taken in a positive sense this sense of
incompleteness is what maintains an eagerness to learn more. But I have no
idea how to fit this kind of learning into a course framework... :-(
Re: Unpacking... (some wonderful new hardware and juicy new software...)
sorry, computer hype.
I have just been opinionated, ambiguous and generally on the limits of
Academia by presenting a research problem and some conclusions in the form
of cartoons on a poster for the EARLI conference in Athens. My co-author is
the one who will stand responsible for it down there :-\ But if you'd like
to take a look at PhD-produced funny-characters doing strange things
representing CMC it's at:
http://cite.ped.gu.se/cite/earli/rem.html
The whole thing was my response to A) being allotted to a poster session B)
Not really having the time to do the analysis I had planned (booo!!!) and
C) writing a paper proposal assuming the example collaboration I planned
using would be a sunshine story, while it in the months after turned out to
totally disenchant me... Anyway, I could not resist posing this implicit
question about how far research may overlap with artistic creativity.
What's on the Web is all the material from the A-zero poster divided up on
several Web pages -- thus ruining almost all the nice layout Erik Jonsson
did for the poster: the map and the header are his work. If you'd like to
see the pages in Erik's general Frame-work for our site (I think he did a
nice job), you can enter by:
and the click on "Forskning" (sorry, the site's all in Swedish) scroll down
until you see the REM project and there's an inlink to the poster (you
click on the inlink and you're back in Anglo country).
all the best!
Eva