RE: [xmca] method of double stimulation

Mike, thanks. I did a quickie search for a definition of double-stimulation
and that's what came up. My question in response to your response: Is the
stimulus really neutral? Seems that from a Cultural-historical perspective,
it'd be an artifact that distills prior purposes and activity and so is
loaded with cultural baggage.

Peter Smagorinsky
The University of Georgia
125 Aderhold Hall
Athens, GA 30602
smago@uga.edu/phone:706-542-4507
http://www.coe.uga.edu/lle/faculty/smagorinsky/index.html

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Mike Cole
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 5:53 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] method of double stimulation

Peter-- Maybe this is off track, but I am not enamored of the definition of
method of dual stimulation from Pedro et al's paper: "convert external
assistance" totally begs the question. LSV used convert external NEUTRAL
stimulus into
a form of assistance (roughly). Of course, the stimuli (stimulus/means) may
have arrived in the environment for purposes of assisting, their is an
aspect of assistance. But
what LSV and his followers were after was humans seeking to control the
world and in doing so control themselves "from the outside." Its the
conversation from neutral to assisting that needs to be accoplished by
active agency.

mike

On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 4:50 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

> Eric, whether or not there's an intervention is probably open to
> interpretation. Most of us would agree that by introducing an outsider
> (me)
> taking notes on a laptop, there's, if not an intervention, a new variable
> to
> account for, and I try to do that when appropriate in the articles.
> Generally, I've been invited to study classes, or have gotten teachers to
> agree to have me observe and record, when the teacher is doing something I
> might be interested in, e.g., doing multimodal composing in an English
> class
> (or the Language Arts strand of an alternative school curriculum). So,
> it's
> the teacher's instruction intersecting with my research interests that
> puts
> me in the position of collecting data then and there.
>
> I also wouldn't say that my goal is to measure learning, at least since my
> dissertation when I crunched numbers in accord with the local cultural
> practice of Chicago's ed faculty at the time. I generally study people
> talking while they work as a way to make inferences about how they think
> in
> relation to task and setting. Originally I used protocol analysis in the
> in-the-head tradition of information processing, although to study writers
> in relation to instruction. But before long my goal became to expand what
> info processing folks call the "task environment" which is largely
> unfilled
> in their models but is the place to start from a Vygotskian perspective as
> I
> interpret it. So, I study either individuals talking as they work (often
> as
> they write, but also as they design houses, ranches, and home interiors)
> or
> groups talking as they work together (e.g. as they interpret a work of
> literature through art, dance, drama, music, etc.). Part of the goal is to
> document situated cognition to make the argument that nonverbal composing
> potentially has all of the virtues of writing as a medium for both
> generating and representing ideas (tool and sign functions), an idea that
> has gained traction through the popularity of first, Gardner's theory of
> multiple intelligences, and now the New London Group's notion of
> multiliteracies. I think that what I've tried to do complements both
> efforts, although I'm less convinced that technology has primacy when it
> comes to multimodal composing--the cognition required to design a house or
> interpret Hamlet through pencil- or marker-rendered drawings is no less
> complex than what it'd take to do something on a computer.
>
> Hope this help to clarify, Peter
>
> Peter Smagorinsky
> The University of Georgia
> 125 Aderhold Hall
> Athens, GA 30602
> smago@uga.edu/phone:706-542-4507
> http://www.coe.uga.edu/lle/faculty/smagorinsky/index.html
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> Behalf Of ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org
> Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2008 9:37 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: RE: [xmca] method of double stimulation
>
>
> On March 1, 2008 Peter Smagorinsky Wrote:
>
> "I don't think I'd characterize my research as employing a
> double-stimulation, if it means a situation "in which children convert
> external assistance into means that lead to task success."
> (http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327884mca0402_4) Rather, I
> study (at least in the work that Eric refers to) what I'd term situated
> cognition in a classroom setting. While collaboration does take place and
> while I attempt to situate the students' work as well as I can
> culturally-historically and in relation to the teacher's instruction, I
> don't do an intervention. Rather, I study how students work in relation to
> routine classroom instruction designed by the teacher (for the most
> part)--a
> major reason that the teacher is almost always credited as a coauthor in
> the
> publications and presentations."
>
> Such an important statement - placing practice as THE primary research
> tool. Perhaps, the intervention is so subtle it is difficult to discern?
> "student's work (unit of analysis)" being the goal of the student (?)
> "effectiveness of instruction (unit of analysis) being the goal of the
> teacher (?)
>
> the dialectic being the different unit of measuring instruction and a
> different unit of measuring learning: however, in both cases 'word
> meaning' is the methodology (?)
>
> any sense at all?????
>
> eric
>
>
>
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Received on Wed Mar 5 03:06 PST 2008