RE: [xmca] method of double stimulation

Peter,
 
I think part of the reason for the double stimulation method, at least from my reading of Cultural Development of the Child is to measure the developmental progression from neutral to non-neutral. Early on when the pictures are presented with objects to be remembered, the child uses the pictures but in arbitrary ways, so that they serve as a mediating force but a limited one because there is really no organization beyond one to one correspondence - the mediating object is neutral. As the child grow older she is able to use aspects of the picture itself that are familiar to remember the objects. There is something beyond the one to one correspondence that is leading to the use of the picture as a mediating force greatly increasing its power in memory. So in this case the picture, the mediating object is not neutral.
 
>From a sociogenetic perspective you might be able to recognize this is the book Ape, Primitive and Man. One parcular episode strikes me as particularly salient. The messenger who was going to forty different villages to tell them their fines. He used neutral pieces of paper to remember the amounts - as a matter of fact he started with pieces of leaves and then his boss changed them to paper and they didn't miss a beat. Compare that to the way individuals started using pieces of strings on a more social level, and different length strings came to mean different numbers. Far more efficient. It is part of the move I suppose from primiitive thinking to modern thinking.
 
Michael

________________________________

From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Peter Smagorinsky
Sent: Wed 3/5/2008 6:05 AM
To: mcole@weber.ucsd.edu; 'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'
Subject: RE: [xmca] method of double stimulation

Mike, thanks. I did a quickie search for a definition of double-stimulation
and that's what came up. My question in response to your response: Is the
stimulus really neutral? Seems that from a Cultural-historical perspective,
it'd be an artifact that distills prior purposes and activity and so is
loaded with cultural baggage.

Peter Smagorinsky
The University of Georgia
125 Aderhold Hall
Athens, GA 30602
smago@uga.edu/phone:706-542-4507
http://www.coe.uga.edu/lle/faculty/smagorinsky/index.html

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Mike Cole
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 5:53 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] method of double stimulation

Peter-- Maybe this is off track, but I am not enamored of the definition of
method of dual stimulation from Pedro et al's paper: "convert external
assistance" totally begs the question. LSV used convert external NEUTRAL
stimulus into
a form of assistance (roughly). Of course, the stimuli (stimulus/means) may
have arrived in the environment for purposes of assisting, their is an
aspect of assistance. But
what LSV and his followers were after was humans seeking to control the
world and in doing so control themselves "from the outside." Its the
conversation from neutral to assisting that needs to be accoplished by
active agency.

mike

On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 4:50 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

> Eric, whether or not there's an intervention is probably open to
> interpretation. Most of us would agree that by introducing an outsider
> (me)
> taking notes on a laptop, there's, if not an intervention, a new variable
> to
> account for, and I try to do that when appropriate in the articles.
> Generally, I've been invited to study classes, or have gotten teachers to
> agree to have me observe and record, when the teacher is doing something I
> might be interested in, e.g., doing multimodal composing in an English
> class
> (or the Language Arts strand of an alternative school curriculum). So,
> it's
> the teacher's instruction intersecting with my research interests that
> puts
> me in the position of collecting data then and there.
>
> I also wouldn't say that my goal is to measure learning, at least since my
> dissertation when I crunched numbers in accord with the local cultural
> practice of Chicago's ed faculty at the time. I generally study people
> talking while they work as a way to make inferences about how they think
> in
> relation to task and setting. Originally I used protocol analysis in the
> in-the-head tradition of information processing, although to study writers
> in relation to instruction. But before long my goal became to expand what
> info processing folks call the "task environment" which is largely
> unfilled
> in their models but is the place to start from a Vygotskian perspective as
> I
> interpret it. So, I study either individuals talking as they work (often
> as
> they write, but also as they design houses, ranches, and home interiors)
> or
> groups talking as they work together (e.g. as they interpret a work of
> literature through art, dance, drama, music, etc.). Part of the goal is to
> document situated cognition to make the argument that nonverbal composing
> potentially has all of the virtues of writing as a medium for both
> generating and representing ideas (tool and sign functions), an idea that
> has gained traction through the popularity of first, Gardner's theory of
> multiple intelligences, and now the New London Group's notion of
> multiliteracies. I think that what I've tried to do complements both
> efforts, although I'm less convinced that technology has primacy when it
> comes to multimodal composing--the cognition required to design a house or
> interpret Hamlet through pencil- or marker-rendered drawings is no less
> complex than what it'd take to do something on a computer.
>
> Hope this help to clarify, Peter
>
> Peter Smagorinsky
> The University of Georgia
> 125 Aderhold Hall
> Athens, GA 30602
> smago@uga.edu/phone:706-542-4507
> http://www.coe.uga.edu/lle/faculty/smagorinsky/index.html
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> Behalf Of ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org
> Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2008 9:37 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: RE: [xmca] method of double stimulation
>
>
> On March 1, 2008 Peter Smagorinsky Wrote:
>
> "I don't think I'd characterize my research as employing a
> double-stimulation, if it means a situation "in which children convert
> external assistance into means that lead to task success."
> (http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327884mca0402_4) Rather, I
> study (at least in the work that Eric refers to) what I'd term situated
> cognition in a classroom setting. While collaboration does take place and
> while I attempt to situate the students' work as well as I can
> culturally-historically and in relation to the teacher's instruction, I
> don't do an intervention. Rather, I study how students work in relation to
> routine classroom instruction designed by the teacher (for the most
> part)--a
> major reason that the teacher is almost always credited as a coauthor in
> the
> publications and presentations."
>
> Such an important statement - placing practice as THE primary research
> tool. Perhaps, the intervention is so subtle it is difficult to discern?
> "student's work (unit of analysis)" being the goal of the student (?)
> "effectiveness of instruction (unit of analysis) being the goal of the
> teacher (?)
>
> the dialectic being the different unit of measuring instruction and a
> different unit of measuring learning: however, in both cases 'word
> meaning' is the methodology (?)
>
> any sense at all?????
>
> eric
>
>
>
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