I would like very much to hear more about your struggles: the more I
understand CHAT theories the more convinced I am about the importance of
particulars. The abstract level of describing an activity system like the
educational system is useful in the moments when our R&D is about
connecting our specifics to larger-scale phenomena in time&space: the
history of our local system and its "position" among other educational
systems over the world. But then in exchanges like on the xmca I think it
is very important to understand that "teachers" and "scholar
administrations" are not the same things in all our local conditions.
So I ask, please, for more "true stories". And those of you who have
already started telling something: PLEASE continue. To "celebrate" I will
offer something of my own:
=46or my first 11 years in Academia (I'm on my 12th now...) I have been
connected with research on how to use computers in education. At the
assistant stage I worked for a long time at how to "use the computer as a
tool for conceptual change" -- mostly in the area of early number concepts.
As my heart was in communication of other kinds than the I-R-F sequence
with the computer asking questions of the kids, I was not very happy during
those years... Also, those were the days when VERY few Swedish classrooms
in the grades 1-6 had computers -- this was due to central decisions on
curricula and funding. And as for networked computers, well... forget it,
mostly. Oh, there were enthusiasts here and there. Doing in the 80s with
simple means what is now in the Internet something that has the potential
to attract A LOT of funding if you know the right people or have the right
rhetoric in your application. Sweden, as you may know, is a country of many
privileges when viewed globally. At the same time our famous welfare system
is eroding. In schools it shows for example by diminishing resources for
"home language" teaching. At the same time the privilege of having a home
computer spreads in wider layers of the population (thus increasing a
difference between have:s and have-not:s). Computers and the Internet are
viewed (in rhetoric and rich but patchy funding) as not just comme-il-faut
in primary classrooms, but rapidly becoming a MUST. One of the arguments is
democratic: all children should have equal rights to the information age.
Another argument is the argument about international contacts -- a
diversity argument if you wish. BUT does it work? Or is it more like a
convenient displacement to this glorious new medium of efforts that would
be better spent with your neighbours? Ahhh... hmmm... if I made THAT into a
research application, now, who might fund THAT (I think the chances would
actually be quite good, here, for getting funded. Given the right
application rhetoric.)
Problem with a story like this is, of course, that it COULD be expanded
into a novel and I _still_ haven't told you the full story. But you can
consider every sentence as a clickable link: ask me, and I'll expand.
Jo=E3o: what forms are your discussions with the school people in? Do you
have projects with them? Or do they come for inservice training? Or do you
represent national//regional authorities in some way?
Eva