I appreciated reading Bill's discussion of the sentencing/execution boundary
sentence and its possible meaning. There are many questions I have about
that but instead I want to take him up on his request.
>
>It would
>be nice if people who presented would send brief summaries of
>their own work, relating it to CHAT.
I am currently involved in three projects areas: research on student
pathways through community colleges, establishing a system of cyberculture
centers , and nursing along the development of community currencies. The
first I do thanks to the wonders of the internet in that virtual
collaborative space it allows. I pursue both of the latter projects in the
Humboldt Bay area of California .
All of these projects benefit from the discussions and research carried out
on XMCA from CHAT and related sociocultural approaches. My principal roles
in the cyberculture center project are grant writer and evaluation
coordinator. In the latter capacity I make proposals on how to evaluate the
success of the project. The discussions of Zones of Proximal Development in
all of the permutations that it emerges in the specific threads of XMCA or
the articles I can access via internet or afford have all provided me with
good frameworks for those proposals. Perhaps in one year I will have some
interesting research to report on. The cyberculture center project is aimed
at pre-teen and teen age youth. These kids are primarily the sons and
daughters of the last generation of people who enjoyed the blue collar
prosperity generated by the exploitation of the old growth redwood forests
that used to fill the coast and coastal mountains. Being able to get a job
at the mill, the parents generally didn't need more than a high school
degree to enjoy a good life. Their kids can't work in the mills anymore
since they're virtually closed and gone. I work on the project with a large
local arts organization, The Ink People. One part of the project will set
up public access broad band/wireless public access "cyberculture centers"
located in schools and teen centers throughout the area. Call it putting
down the piers for bridging the "IT gap", These centers will provide any and
everyone in the neighborhoods with email, webpages, and free access time.
The second part of the project will provide art based multi-media/internet
instruction at the centers primarily for the kids. We are hoping to
stimulatestimulate an interest in manipulating more symbolic, less material
tools, among these kids. Call it the developmental anthropology of
technology transfer. If I try now to explain how CHAT relates to this, I
would end up writing on and on, looking in references, etc.
The relation of CHAT to my other project areas is less direct. The
community currency system we are developing will be totally computer
mediated: smart cards for business, web and email transactions for
non-business exchanges. This approach presents some interesting issues from
CHAT perspectives. First of all, money itself is a very interesting
instrument that mediates many important relationships. The state and banks'
defacto monopoly on the creation of money leads many to not even realize
that it is tool they can create for themselves. Interestingly it is a tool
that is always overty collective in its co-creation. Second, money itself
is a funny kind of tool since it is totally symbolic but, as Marx pointed
out, presents itself in a reified form--which is why people forget that they
make it each time they accept it for payment. This shows up in funny,
culturally distinct ways. Once Americans, for example, get past the
feeling that they can't just "make money" they usually want to have
something physical and tangible: a paper community currency. This is an
interesting "cultural prejudice" since the British and Australians have
created many electronic based community currencies (LETS) which are cheaper
and easier to start and run. Three years ago I began to research the
message archives of the community currency mailing list, econ-lets, but I
was unable to follow that project up. Reading Eva's work on multilogue has
rekindled that interest but the time for it isn't available right now. But
I'm sure that as the project develops here CHAT will provide a framework
for my thinking about the activity systems chained through the creation of
the community currency.
I worked for seven years as a tie-wearing, community college institutional
researcher. I continue to work on projects in that capacity (without the
tie), the most recent being a long-term research/institutionalization
project to improve remedial education in math and english. My work in this
project is the development of computerized systems for analyzing the
movement of students within and through high schools, community colleges and
four year institutions. The level at which I work on this is both macro
and micro. One on hand I look at broad demographic relations between the
colleges and their service areas. On the other extreme I analyze specific
student transcripts (we have about 2,000,000 individual course records in
the cohort data we're currently analzying). This level of data is very
secure since one can rest assured that most students will make every effort
to ensure that the grade on their record is the correct one. Since the
geographic area studied is extremely diverse, numerous issues of teaching
and learning in such diversity arise. Here as well, and obviously, the
CHAT theories and discussions have significance. In fact Genevieve, with
whom I collaborate on the student pathways research, was the first person to
tell me about XMCA and "zoneheads" (which made me think of Dan Akroyd the
first time I heard it).
(Un)fortunately, I don't go in straight lines for very long. I burst
sporadic like the multilogues Bill models. I guess that's one reason I love
the XMCA virtual seminar: the short term collective memory, that always
nevertheless seems to circle around a basic set of topics, fits me well. In
the past week I have carefully studied both of Eva's papers, Bill's paper on
the dynamic model, and read several of Gary Shank's papers. The entire
question of the nature of the multilogue and the virtual community in
general has direct significance for my work in the cyberculture center
project. But several weeks ago, as the result of some other discussion, I
was sent in the direction of restudying Volosinov and Ilyenkov. So it goes
. . .
The question: what is learning? looms greater and greater as a central
theme reflecting in all of my work and I think CHAT and the related
approaches that are discussed on XMCA make an important contribution to
answering it, or at least formulating it more coherently.
Paul H. Dillon