Bill,
I'm very interested in your reference to the dialectics of a collective and
the individual.
I assumed you were using it closely to "population and an individual" score
and that was what I was questioning. I mean the performance of a community,
population etc. is much more than the sum (average) of individual scores.
So, I guess partly what I was questioning was if we are going to talk about
dialectics if "population" in the statistical sense really captures it.
You said,
"I have been using the term 'collective' more loosely to refer to people who
are engaged in the same activity (i.e. test taking) regardless of the degree
of their collaboration. There are issues of what constitutes the 'same
activity' that arise with Lave and Wenger's LPP, or what Barker has termed
'penetration' - the latter best exemplified by a basketball game in which
the players have greater penetration into the activity than the fans."
I was not thinking about collaboration perse, but the tendency to
individualize the educational process (standurdized testing). It seem to me
that was one of the things LPP took to task (maybe even the anti-thesis of
standurdized testing). In general though I am curious how you are using
dialectic here. In particular the benefits and consequences of seeing a
community or population as an average of individual scores.
If time permits feel free to expand, I am still not clear how a dialectics
fits into a discussion of population mean and an individual score.
Nate
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