Re: was education, technology; now online discourse

[Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Bill-- I went to the XMCA web page and looked for the note from Phil on Nov 12
and could not find anything that contextualized this note for me.

Could you re-post and expand, because it reads as if there was a topic you
and phil ...... where trying to develop that got x-jacked.

Multiple threads have been a long term characteristic of xmca and they
have their
downsides, but it is not clear to me why if the headers are used
welll, as in the "Education, technology, and CHAT" thread,  many
threads cannot exist side by side
to accommodate different interests.

Other than encouraing the serious attention to content which I am
guilty of underplaying,
I have done nothing more than read on that thread. Meanwhile, on
others, I have made
more comments, or less comments.  Was this the "last block" you were
referring to?
Is my failure to promote a HIGH level of regulation part of the issue?

For a long time I have imagined that different members of the xfamily
would play sysop
for different discussions, or for diferent months of the year, but it
has never happened. We also once had separate topics on separate
sub-lists, but that collapsed. For all sorts of
reasons, intellectual, physical, insitutional, reasons,  I feel more
strongly than ever the
need for distribute collaborations in sustaining XMCA discussions. But
never, as in
not in more than two decades, has this happened. It only happend on
the CHAT course
and to excellent effect, I believe.

Could you clarity please?
mike


On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 10:38:32 -0500, Bill Barowy <xmcageek@comcast.net> wrote:
> On Friday 12 November 2004 9:08 am, Phil Chappell wrote:
> > ensuing battles and all!
> 
> Yeah, that's the way it appeared to me.  There's a violent discursive move
> I've come to call "X-jacking" after the medium in which i first encountered
> it.  X-jacking is not the introduction of a parallel topic thread (that could
> occur simultaneously online) but a forced topic change, recentering the
> discourse toward the perpetrator's intent, "jacking" it away from that which
> preceeded it, by taking away it's content, essentially victimizing it.  Kind
> of makes the inclination for sharing difficult to maintain.
> 
> I think status and power and motive have a lot to do with it.  Unlike a
> similar move, "talking out", which Jay Lemke describes in his book, status is
> more ill defined in this medium.  There is far less clear social status here
> than in the classroom, although I argue that those members of xmca that do
> know of each other well do recognize relative status among each other.
> Obtaining status, maintaining status, etc.
> 
> On another level, the unit being discourse topic, and drawing upon Durkheim,
> there is a sort of suicide that happens to online conversations when the
> medium has a low level of regulation.  In this last exchange block, unable to
> adapt to the shifting field, the call for a critical cultural historical
> analysis, the conversation just went belly up.  And it could not have
> adjusted.  Cultural historical analysis is a data-laden inquiry. It takes a
> lot of time and effort and, I argue, such a topic is not sustainable in an
> online medium in which there are rapid shifts to the center.
> 
> --------
> bb
> 
>