Mike, I appreciate your efforts to mobilise clever people to get this
system working on a proper basis. But everyone is always too busy.
Would it be possible to ask Tammy to set up one of her Google/Excel
shared spreadsheets with two lists: one of aspiring mentees and the
other of volunteering mentors, with keywords, and a Google group
listserv for messages between mentors, so that we can work together and
allocate people. Very lo-tech, a little taxing, but I think it could be
implemented by Tammy in 24 hours. It is just a matter of hooking up
couples.
Andy
mike cole wrote:
With respect to dis-establishing MCA and going back to a
newsletter:
I did not want to start MCA in the first place. Yrjo urged its
formation as a means to
legitimate cultural-historical research, broadly conceived. To
dis-establish it would
mean that no longer could contributors use anything they published
there as a warrant for getting promotions-- the situation in this
regard has become markedly
worse in the interim, but I would be perfectly contented to see such a
devolution.
And in the process, shift media and go purely electronic.
That reverses the long push for respectibility, reached this year
through a lot of Michael's effort focused primarily on getting
materials in on time (!!). Now people
can site all the ratings they need for their academic files and MCA is
just fine. Part of the establishment.
Is this situation peculiar in some way to MCA or is it a part of that
increased acceptance and appropriation? Those who are present at ISCAR
might convey
the feel of that meeting. Maybe the entire push for cultural historical
approaches
that "take context seriously" by using the cultural-historical
tradition of understanding "activity" is itself passe? (I personally do
not think so, but, then, I would be the last to know!).
Or maybe its brightest adherents have re-deployed into such ventures as
"learning sciences" or "developmental science" (two movements I am
familiar with)? Or maybe we miss opportunities for self-development
when we see them?
Personally, I was disappointed by the discussion of the special issue
on Action Research and CHAT. What my colleagues at LCHC and I do as
research is seen by some as action research, some as CHAT intervention
research. To us, the issue of theory/practice relations is really
important. Seth Chaiklin's article posed
some issues in this regard that really never seemed to get discussed,
let along answered. In this case the authors engaged, XMCA did not
engage back.
Perhaps we can return to it. Again, personally, there are articles in
the current issue of MCA that seem worth discussing. Perhaps not. I
have read none of them, and like you, have to depend upon the abstracts
to make my bets.
With respect to discussing articles of people from XMCA itself.
This is really a matter that goes to the membership of XMCA. The webpage
has not gone away
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/index.html
Use it or lose it. Or, help us develop a new practice that the group
finds valuable.
With respect to getting modern and more multi-modal digital to enrich
the discourse
I am all for it. With the resources at its disposal, LCHC is seeking to
propose a kind
of portal that would include a variety of modes of experssion. We
thought we had
this problem solved a year ago. We were wrong. Lets hope we have not
been
wrong again.
I also always worry about the disenfranchised when those with lots of
bytes at their disposal free start using higher end technologies that
make their discourse richer. Who is being left out?
Once open a time, it was a big deal to us that we could get a free,
electronic, version of one article so that those far away who cannot
afford MCA can participate in the discourse. Then it was free for a
while. But now, guess what? Payment is back again and none the
cheaper. Going electronic would solve that, but would it solve the ISI
problems?
As I see, the finances, the ideology, and the actual organization of
the activities are all interconnected. Makes me very wishy washy.
To end by repeating what I wrote in the note to Jaki: We are doing the
best we can. If you can help, just up and offer. We all stand to learn
from such collaboration.
mike
On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 2:21 AM, Andy Blunden
<ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
I
can't say too much David, but I will just that it is only about now
that we will begin to publish material in any way reflecting the new
editorship as we inherited a couple of years of backlog. Secondly, our
reviewers really are demanding a high standard from our authors. Since
becoming an editor at the beginning of October I have overseen only one
manuscript that made it through to acceptance, after revisions, though
I think I am now close to my second. Aware of this, the editors are
taking action to attract a good quality of mss and we just have to see
if our work is successful.
Peer review is like democracy: it is a terrible system, but its the
best we've got.
It may well be that if we want to do some genre bending then the lchc
website is the best way of doing it. Personally, I would like to see
web publication the norm and peer review used as a rating but not as a
means of refusing publication. But it takes time. Many of our community
rely on MCA publication for academic status and thus jobs and
promotion, and this places an obligation on us work like any other
academic journal.
That is a personal view.
Andy
David Kellogg wrote:
Your creaky memory serves you (and all the rest of us) excellently
well, Bruce. Actually, we kept discussing papers on the LCHC site as
recently as last year (I uploaded some stuff on the Psychology of Art,
and there have been wonderful papers from Andy and many others).
I recently downloaded the whole backlog of journals, and I am really
distressed by how DULL and TEPID the writing has become. It's not
surprising that the discussions we have often peter out after only a
few exchanges.
I'm not over-impressed by the abstracts on offer in this issue,
either. Normally I would go ahead and vote for the article on second
language teaching. But the abstract reads suspiciously like a
washing-powder style methodological comparison, with "SCT-CHAT" on one
side and a caricature of "SLA" on the other.
Andy is right. Going outside the system of free articles for
discussion is a good answer for the discussion list, but it does
nothing to address the main problem, which is the quality of articles
that appear in the journal.
I guess I think that the editors need to be a little more interested
in genre bending, the reviewers a little more open to "revise and
resubmit" instead of outright rejection, and we writers need to be
thick skinned and persistent. Contrary to what Andy says, rejections
are not that bad. I think I'd much rather have a rejection than to have
to put my name over some of the articles I've read lately. But then,
that includes some of the drafts I submitted mysefl!
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Fri, 7/8/11, Bruce Robinson <bruce@brucerob.eu>
wrote:
From: Bruce Robinson <bruce@brucerob.eu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] The Polls are OPEN!!
To: ablunden@mira.net, "eXtended Mind,
Culture,Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Friday, July 8, 2011, 2:14 AM
If my creaky memory serves, we did discuss non-MCA articles suggested
and mainly written by list members for a long period in the late 90s /
early 00s. There are or were indications of this somewhere on the MCA
website. Not sure why or how it stopped.
Bruce Robinson
From: "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net>
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 2:28 AM
Subject: Re: [xmca] The Polls are OPEN!!
David, I think there is a LOT of merit to taking articles posted on the
LCHC for discussion as the focus of XMCA discussion. We should not do
that *instead* of the one MCA article per quarter though. There is
plenty of time between the quarterly publication of MCA to discuss an
article on the website. We should do more of that, for the reasons you
give.
Andy
David Kellogg wrote:
Mike:
I wonder if there is any way we could include "write-ins" on the
ballot. People could upload manuscripts to the "Papers for Discussion"
at LCHC and then these could be included in the vote.
This might address several problems which seem to be dogging our
quarterly discussions.
a) It often happens that the articles on offer have almost nothing to
do with what people have on their minds and what is being discussed on
the list.
b) It sometimes happens that the authors chosen for publication in the
journal turn out to be more interested in being published than in being
discussed and do not take part.
c) It occasionally happens that people like myself clutter up the list
with long posts which really ought to be articles but which have no
chance of publication, at least not in their current form.
It may also be a good way of getting the writing mentorship project
off the ground, and it might even return us, one small but much
appreciated step, towards that pre-MCA tradition of an unrefereed and
unreviewed newsletter, with writing that is unafraid to walk on the
wild side.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Wed, 7/6/11, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
wrote:
From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: [xmca] The Polls are OPEN!!
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, July 6, 2011, 3:45 PM
A wide range of articles to choose from for XMCA discussion and private
musings.
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Journal/poll.html
mike
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-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857
MIA: http://www.marxists.org
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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857
MIA: http://www.marxists.org
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