Eugene,
You wrote:
> In my view, Gal'perin's framework about "internal plane of actions"
> prioritizes "armchair scientists" over people who plan with objects at
> hands. What is such fascination with "mental abacus"? My grandma did
> very
> complex and sophisticated cooking without using receipts, measures, and
> calculations (being print "illiterate" -- I can't apply the term
> "illiterate" to my highly orally literate grandma!). For me, it is more
> interesting than "mental abacus" because her cooking dealt with
> open-ended
> and ill-defined problems in contrast to "mental abacus".
Very nice, example -- I agree the most interesting point here is
creativity in the
face of an open-ended problem.
But wasn't your grandma indeed working on an "ideal plane" -- with an
image
of the goal she wanted to achieve? Isn't that what makes a good cook?
She didn't work by trial and error with real flour and salt but had an
"internal model"
she could transform so that the first physical result (the food) was
the desired
result? Isn't this part of what Gal'perin's getting at?
Maybe the abacus example is not the best because it implies the
reproduction of
some standard result rather than solving an irreproducible problem.
Is Gal'perin's approach indeed focused on some physical action getting
folded up and standardized, to be reproduced by rote? Or is there room
for
creativity like your grandmother's in his picture?
What do you think?
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Nov 09 2004 - 11:42:57 PST