Re: [xmca] On the shape of the zpd and message in a bottle

[Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Thanks, David.

>From Seve (not in English I assume, from where I wonder):

the unrolling of the schooling process in the form of a curve and if we
proceed in the same way for the development of the psychological functions
that participate directly in school learning, we see that these two curves
do not ever coincide but instead cause very complex correspondances to
appear."
---------------------
Very interesting ideas, but....
So zopeds are endemic to schooling? Oh was LSV being an optimist!! I am
currently working on a deep structural disconnect between what teachers
teach in 3rd-4th grade arithmetic and what kids could possibly do in their
homework assignments. Outside of XMCA, where answers have been sparse, i am
beginning to identify people who have studied this problem and are working
on ways to get the curves of psych functions and the schooling process
better lined up.
-------------------------------------------

Great that the Chaiklin article is recycling.
-----------------------------------------------------

Here is what I have been worrying about with respect to LSV, Minnick
translation,
chapter 7.

Word meaning develops. Got that. Believe that.
What is the relationship between the meaning of the word develop in Ch 7 and
the meaning of this word in the works of LSV discussed in Chaiklin? Is there
a neoformation? A social situation of devlopment? etc? Or are there two
disparate
meanings of the term development (razivitie) being used when we discuss
ontogenetic development and the development of word meaning??

I am guessing they cannot mean exactly the same thing.  But overlap. I am
having a lot of trouble figuring out the overlap/distinctive parts
associated with the microgenetic and cultural historical "development" of
word meaning and the development in ontogeny.

mike
(slowly developing with temporal vertigo yesterday in Beijing, Australia,
and Korea)


On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 11:37 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> Mike, Em:
>
> But of course Vygotsky DOES use the word "curve", and it IS in the context
> of a ZPD, in Chapter Six of Thinking and Speech. For example, here in 6.4:
>
> "The process of schooling has its own progression, its own logic, its own
> complex organization. It unrolls in the form of lessons or visits or
> pedagogical excursions. Today we have certain lessons in class and tomorrow
> there will be others. In the first semester we study one thing, and in the
> second semester we will study another. The process of schooling is regulated
> by a programme and a use of time. It would be a very great error to suppose
> that certain laws external to the schooling process coincide perfectly with
> the internal laws that are proper to the structure of the process of
> development which instructed learning triggers. It would be false to believe
> that, if in this semester the schoolchild learns something in arithmetic, he
> will then do, as a consequence of the course of this semester the same
> progress in his internal development. If, precisely as we attempted to do in
> our experiments, we attempt to represent symbolically the unrolling of the
>  schooling process in the form of a curve and if we proceed in the same way
> for the development of the psychological functions that participate directly
> in school learning, we see that these two curves do not ever coincide but
> instead cause very complex correspondances to appear." (My translation, from
> Seve)
>
> What Vygotsky's referring to here, of course, is the famous "parallelogram
> of development", where the academic concept rises faster than the everyday
> concept at first and then pulls the everyday concept after it. The reason
> why the academic concept has this property is the "invisible collaboration"
> of the teacher in school, which is explicitly connected to the zone of
> proximal development, or rather, the "next zone of development".
>
> I disagree that NONE of this is connected to emotional development in
> Vygotsky, and I think that it is not explicitly connected in Chaiklin only
> because Chaiklin is really concerned with trying to disabuse us of the
> overly narrow "GAP" interpretation of the ZPD
> (generality-assistance-potential) that is used in educational circles in the
> USA. He doesn't choose the grounds on which he has to fight this fight; they
> are chosen for him already in the SHELVES of books written on the ZPD on the
> basis of p. 86 of Mind in Society ALONE.
>
> Mike and Em are of course "dead on", or rather live on, when they point out
> that LSV did not divide emotional from cognitive life; both are sublated in
> the social. But for precisely that reason, he DID divide lower psychological
> functions from higher psychological functions, and I see no reason to limit
> his distinction to cognitive life.
>
> It seems to me that almost everything he says about the development of
> academic (science) concepts in Chapter Six can equally be said about higher
> aesthetic concepts and higher ethical ones, including the "invisible
> collaboration" of the child's teachers (in school and out of it). These
> higher emotions are never biologically given; they are always the product of
> sociocultural mediation.
>
> Steve:
>
> All of the above is yet one more reason why I reject the idea that a
> chatbot or a phone tree or a computer or anything less than a living
> breathing human being can be said to communicate in any meaningful
> (literally) sense.
>
> People who believe that there is some important sense in which these tools
> "communicate" are basically using the model of telementation, of information
> transfer, and they know not what they are saying (literally, because they
> don't know what saying is).
>
> Let me give you a quick, sloppy illustration. If you are driving down the
> road, and something goes wrong with your car, you pull over and try to fix
> it. Nobody can drive and fix a car at the same time.
>
> But if you are driving down the road and having a misunderstanding with
> your wife, you keep talking (even if you pull over, which is probably a good
> idea). This is because nobody can STOP a conversation and fix the
> conversation at the same time; you fix a conversation by having it, not by
> stopping it.
>
> Now, why does this auto-repair (or rather auto-healing) capability of
> conversation work? It works because the premise of having a conversation is
> always that the other person is voluntarily communicating; that they have
> the will to say something to you, and that they have the wish that you will
> understand something by it. A chatbot cannot do this, because it does not
> know you and cannot even imagine you.
>
> That is why chatbots are REALLY BAD at repair; they change the topic
> because they cannot change your mind. To change someone's mind, you really
> have to know what a mind is, and more than what a mind is, you have to know
> the mind you are trying to change.
>
> This is actually how conversation analysis really works. We start from the
> premise that the tools for understanding and misunderstanding and fixing the
> misunderstanding is all right there in the conversation; it is not brought
> in from the outside in any way shape or form.
>
> In some ways this premise is overstated; I think there are participants who
> do not ever show their faces or speak their names in every conversation we
> have. But this makes conversation LESS like car-fixing, and not more.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
>
>
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