Bill,
My e-mail being a couple of days broken down, I may only now thank you for your answer to my question:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Bill Barowy <wbarowy@yahoo.com>
> To: xmca <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2001 3:11 AM
> Subject: Re: Ready to discuss Vygotsky's "Crisis in Psychology"
>
>
> > I had a chance to do a quick read of the crises paper. Unless i
> > miss my guess at this second, but brief, reading, I see in it another
> > possibility how a "design science" approach to experimentation is
> problematic.
> Bill, this critical point of yours sounds interesting, but could you give
> its somehow more detailed version?
>
> Laszlo
----- Original Message -----
From: Bill Barowy <wbarowy@yahoo.com>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2001 9:23 PM
Subject: Re: Ready to discuss Vygotsky's "Crisis in Psychology"
Hi László ,
I think you are being an excellent coordinator for the discussion of your own
paper. I have a short time to respond -- and little time over the next few
days. But I'll do what I can. There is a paper online that provides a fairly
good overview of 'design science'. One of the features of this approach is to
identify critical factors, and independent and dependent variables in order to
create design principles and theory for educational innovations. A statement
that stands out for me is:
"Similarly, a design science of education must determine how different designs
of learning environments contribute to learning, cooperation, and motivation. "
-- Collins
While this seems similar in some ways to the goals of a few chat investigators,
the CH is left out, and an ecological understanding, i.e. a framework that
addresses interdependence, reciprocality, the development of and around the
investigator(s), and so on, is missing.
Now, while fully agreeing with you as to this critical point of yours ("the CH is left out") we have to point out that within the other hemisphere of the psychology (i.e., within the one that deals not with the historical but the natural aspect; the one whos concern is not the culture but the brain) we find the same ecological approach by no means at the conservative but at the most progressive extremity of the research. Take, e.g., Gibson's ecological theory of perception.
It is a pitty, however, that the psychology, being in its actual crisis that consists in its incapability of synthetizing its brain-related and its culture-related hemispheres, it is eager instead to simply transfer its findings from one of those hemispheres to the other one. Thus, the logic of the ecological approach that is rather productive in that former part of our science gets transfered in this latter one where, however, it proves fruitless.
By the way, when I worked on the topic of the inter-relation between a brain-related and a culture-related psychology I found that that ecological logic while being unproductive in the psychology's culture-related hemisphere in itself, however, turns out to be rather usefull for linking these two parts to each other: I found such a performance, in particular, in ethology's idea about territorial behaviour of populations and in... Vygotsky school's theory of functional organs. (For more details see my keynote paper "Vygotskian implications: On the meaning and its brain" to the International Vygotsky conference celebrating LSV's centennary [e-version: www.jate.u-szeged.hu/~garai/Vymplic.htm]).
Laszlo
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