Tony, thanks for the advice.
My own areas of interest: political economy and social organization (more or less the same subject in Marxist thought), social psychology and general systems, are also somewhat distant from those of most of the contributors to XMCA, but their discussions are generally interesting and often relevant to my own concerns. (At the moment I'm working up a critical analysis of the socialist program based on the history of the kibbutz movement. On the one hand I've considerable access to data and have much personal experience in both areas and on the other it promises to be an interesting test of the kinds of systems I'm trying to develop).
Vygotsky, like Ilyenkov, made wide contributions in the development of constructionist social psychology. Like with Hegel, Marx and other really fertile thinkers, there is so much in Vygotsky's work, that it is easy to grab a few ideas and use them without realizing that by doing so we distort beyond recognition the whole contribution.
Victor
----- Original Message -----
From: Andy Blunden
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu ; xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2003 7:45 AM
Subject: xmca
Victor, it's nice to see that you took my advice and joined the xmca list, where I see you have become an active participant. I hope it has helped you in your own research. I dip in and out of the conversation, sometimes absent for long periods at a time, according to the drift of my own research.
It was a shock for me of course, your sharp response to my question, and it forced me to re-evaluate my reading of Vygotsky. I initially got interested in LSV c. 1980 solely from the point of view of his ideas about linguistics, and it was only after getting involved in xmca in the 1990s that I realised that he was such a force in pedagogy, something which gelled with my interests at the time, working for Melbourne Uni. I remembered that when I first read Vygotsky teaching stuff (Lois Newman) my initial reaction was that there was a big element of "manipulation" in these methods. However, I am not a teacher, and it remained the social psychology and linguistics which interested me, and I still think LSV and the school which followed after him is right up in front there. I think I kind of merged my image of Vygotsky with my own views, and forgot about what I didn't like!
As a youngster I was very interested in mathematics, but as I got older I moved more and more away from that domain, and my mind just switches off now with the kind of stuff you are doing in AI, even though there's still a side of me which could very easily get into it! Nowadays, my focus is more and more on ethics.
Anyway, thank you for the impulse!
Andy Blunden
Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/index.htm
"What we do should be decided by us."
(61) 3 9380 9435
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