Folks, Having been a physicist, I must say I don't mind my kind being
kicked around -- we just get used to wearing the badge of being
the_bad_guys_ of science! ;-) Without trying to set up an adversarial
stance, I'll admit my 'position' on quantitative and qualitative methods --
having been trained as an experimentalist I find value in both. Each has
strengths and weaknesses and together offer greater perspective on the
phenomena we try to understand. One the one hand, the really good
experimentalists I have known have been keen observers, even though the
success of physics has been as a quantitative science. On the other hand,
quantitative approaches provide a different set of primary and secondary
cultural artifacts with which to make sense of the world, than do
qualitative approaches.
My education research has been primarily qualitative.
David, What I do not understand is a treatment of time that breaks out
different timescales as different dimensions such as cartesian coordinates.
This is because insofar as physicist typically treat dimensions and
coordinates as orthogonal i.e. independent, timescales do not fit this
approach.
When I think of timescales of interactions and artifacts from an ecological
systems approach, I conceptualize these as causal interactions with
different time constants. Or, if feedback loops exist, the loops have
different characteristic time constants. Time is still this concept of a
continuous independent system variable, but there are aspects of the system
with behaviors that can be characterized by different scales in time.
Does this make sense?
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Technology in Education
Lesley College, 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]