Thank you for bringing me along with the language of the group. XMCA seems
a place that enables what Engestrom calls expansive cycles. Here
participants can write until their fingers turn into little stubs, and what
they receive in turn is incentive to write more!
What worries me about not distinguishing humans from other things is the
possible move toward what EO Wilson has written about, a reductionist
theory. Surely, physicists describe non-sentient things as interacting,
and even talk about them as systems. Yet, Activity Theory does not seem to
be about expanding physics to describe the cognition of people. That is
not what we are about, is it?
The quest for clarification, definition is an attempt to understand better
what is AT, a habit which clearly is influenced by my earlier career in
physics. "Interaction" is still something that seems too ill-defined. It
is not that fluidity is a problem - if the relations that are invarient are
described well - this is what I search for. It may be that what Mike and
others have done is to anticipate the emergence of 'smart' things - those
things that people interact with as if they were other humans. It is a
matter of definition - if we choose to say that we can interact with
lasagna, then the term has a broader meaning than if applied only to
people, and if we wish to describe in more detail, then we can delineate
different types of interaction.
>[clip] So think as you like, I don't seem to be able
>to think otherwise!
Your sentence is a great closing for xmca postings!
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Technology in Education
Lesley College, 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]