Phillip,
Yes. I think you're right.
Actually, the thread in question (the conversation) did go a different
direction. The following are the closing comments from a person who wrote
an extensive evaluation of the first posters many messages in the thread:
"In any case, praise to Simon! I disagree on several points, but I applaud
the effort and care of your presentation."
I only said that the "tone" of the first message could be construed as
saying "what you're ...". Apparently the other posters in that mailing list
didn't interpret it in the same way as I had indicated. Many possible
interpretations.
> my thoughts only - i've always seen trust as a primary value in any
> community of practice, and i don't believe that the tone of the sample
> posting leads to trust.
Three important issues: community of practice, tone, and trust.
When one looks at the overlapping and discrete relations that might be used
to determine exactly which community of practice one is talking about, xmca
seems to be some kind of multi-dimensional, kleinian set structure . I
don't think the totality of xmca members represent a single community of
practice apart from their common membership to the mailing list itself.
There are definitely well-defined communities of practice represented in
relationship to the practical and theoretical content of members academic
work in education, psychology, communications, and other academic fields as
well as specific directions within these different fields.
The question of tone seems to me to be eminently one of genre: it refers to
a quality within a framework used to interpret the utterance. Communities
of practice have their own genres. Insofar as xmca contains many
communities of practice . . .
On what basis shall it be determined which genre will be used to evaluate
the "tone" of any utterance or to assign it greater or lesser significance
to the ongoing, polydimensional discourse? I've heard it said many times on
xmca that this is an ongoing process of negotiation.
I do think the question of the meaning of "trust" on xmca is worth
exploring. What kind of trust? Clearly I can't just ask everyone on xmca
to trust me enough to lend me $50. Presumably people don't violate
confidences or privacy. We should be able to trust people not to be
insulting and rude. To do this we evaluatethe content and the tone of
their posts to the list. Once again we come back to the question of
multiple communities of practices, shared meanings, and genres.
What do you think?
Paul H. Dillon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Mar 07 2000 - 17:54:02 PST