Alred writes about semiotic ecology and its ?primary? postulate: There is no
structure in the world that comes about as it does on other conditions than
interaction or transaction of pre-existing structures.
Meanwhile Ana pulls out a section of Gordon's transcript with a discernable
IR pattern -- a structure by Alfred's definition and certainly a structure by
the definitions of discourse theorists as Gordon, and of course Stubbs and
Mehan and others.
What's neat is to see this structure emerge in the interaction of the two
girls and their picture -- this heteroglossic picture book brings the
productive labor of many over a long time to the seconds of interaction in
which the children make insights into their invention. Ana writes "I was
talking about the asymmetry of the functions, which together create
meaning - "meaning" as yet another node or wrinkle in the matrix of
relations, a matrix that simultaneously has different time scales, different
space scales, different meaning scales." And beyond the collapse of multiple
time scales that the picture book and the girls' language bring to the moment
in which the girls re-invent the harnessing of wind power, Ana also points to
the object of their dialogue, not as a tangible thing, but in relation to the
"functional unit of a network"/activity/dialogue" . -- which brings back
to my mind Durkeim's discussion in favor of function over 'goals' (Rules...,
p 123.), due to the difficulty of establishing intention...
There's creativity in the repeating blocks of IR-IR-IR, the interpersonal
back and forth/'give-and-go" much like we might see in a brainstoming session
which explicitly excludes by rule any Evaluative utterances. Ana notes the
affective overtones too -- and this continues to bring me back to structures
-- how the structure of repeating [IR], together with the girls'
"dispositions" and the picture (yet another structure in Alfred's view) make
possible their joint insight: A peer-to-peer-to-artifact system of
development. hmm.
Interesting -- I don't want to divert from this discussion, but Jay mentioned
looking at less ideal/more messy situations and I do have something old to
consider, that in fact several xmca'ers contributed to ( and for which video
data might be already in digital form). Like Gordon's episode, the discourse
occurs with the inclusion of artifacts: a graph and a diagram.
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/pp/Point26.html#AS3
Much more messy -- and to punctuate Nate's point, Peter (a pseudonym) was the
son of a local college mathematician. The other kids were from "blue collar"
families. But I had not thought throught at the time that the paper was
written about the discourse patterns that contributed to the episode. Oh
well.
bb
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 01 2002 - 01:00:07 PST