Re: [xmca] The Polls are OPEN!!

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Hi Jaki--

As a former editor MCA  I can report that a fair number of the manuscripts
that are
received by the editor(s) appear to have been written for another journal,
rejected,
and re-circulated. They are from discourses so distant from MCA it seems
clear that
the authors have never read the journal. I sent those back without sending
them
to reviewers.

I believe that Andy, Jorge, and Martin have made abundantly clear their
desire to
promote the development of articles that are relevant, but deemed in need of
serious
work.

I have been promising to get a workable mentor-novice writer group going but
have
been held up waiting for a promised facility at lchc that would not be a
burden on
people and help them to find each other in a timely way). In this
connection, it is worth emphasizing that good, bad, or indifferent,
reviewers, many of whom are members of the board, are inundated with such
requests.

LCHC could use some help here. We have been unable to come up with a
reasonably designed "match making" scheme. We know they have to be out
there, but the responsible people have had other fish to fry.

Perhaps some soft-ware savvy members of xmca could help. I could put you in
touch
with the people to implement it and there is a stellar caste of mentors
ready to go.

I hope this note helps clarify what is involved. I defer to Andy, Jorge and
Martin with respect to questions about selection procedures currently in
place.

mike

On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 4:31 AM, patrick.jaki@gmail.com <
patrick.jaki@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am not sure I understand the meaning of out right rejection but does this
> not assume that everyone is an expert. What about mentoring so that juniors
> learn from seniors, i.e., papers are returned with varying degrees of
> revision and resubmitted.
>
> My two cents. Thanks.
>
> Jaki
> Sent from my Nokia phone
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Kellogg
> Sent:  09/07/2011, 9:20  AM
> To:
> Subject: Re: [xmca] The Polls are OPEN!!
>
>
> Your creaky memory serves you (and all the rest of us) excellently well,
> Bruce. Actually, we kept discussing papers on the LCHC site as recently as
> last year (I uploaded some stuff on the Psychology of Art, and there have
> been wonderful papers from Andy and many others).
>
> I recently downloaded the whole backlog of journals, and I am really
> distressed by how DULL and TEPID the writing has become. It's not surprising
> that the discussions we have often peter out after only a few exchanges.
>
> I'm not over-impressed by the abstracts on offer in this issue, either.
> Normally I would go ahead and vote for the article on second language
> teaching. But the abstract reads suspiciously like a washing-powder
> style methodological comparison, with "SCT-CHAT" on one side and a
> caricature of "SLA" on the other.
>
> Andy is right. Going outside the system of free articles for discussion is
> a good answer for the discussion list, but it does nothing to address the
> main problem, which is the quality of articles that appear in the journal.
>
> I guess I think that the editors need to be a little more interested in
> genre bending, the reviewers a little more open to "revise and resubmit"
> instead of outright rejection, and we writers need to be thick skinned and
> persistent.
>
> Contrary to what Andy says, rejections are not that bad. I think I'd much
> rather have a rejection than to have to put my name over some of the
> articles I've read lately. But then, that includes some of the drafts I
> submitted mysefl!
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
> --- On Fri, 7/8/11, Bruce Robinson <bruce@brucerob.eu> wrote:
>
>
> From: Bruce Robinson <bruce@brucerob.eu>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] The Polls are OPEN!!
> To: ablunden@mira.net, "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity" <
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Friday, July 8, 2011, 2:14 AM
>
>
> If my creaky memory serves, we did discuss non-MCA articles suggested and
> mainly written by list members for a long period in the late 90s / early
> 00s. There are or were indications of this somewhere on the MCA website. Not
> sure why or how it stopped.
>
> Bruce Robinson
>
>
> From: "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net>
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 2:28 AM
> Subject: Re: [xmca] The Polls are OPEN!!
>
>
> > David, I think there is a LOT of merit to taking articles posted on the
> LCHC for discussion as the focus of XMCA discussion. We should not do that
> *instead* of the one MCA article per quarter though. There is plenty of time
> between the quarterly publication of MCA to discuss an article on the
> website. We should do more of that, for the reasons you give.
> >
> > Andy
> >
> > David Kellogg wrote:
> >> Mike:
> >>  I wonder if there is any way we could include "write-ins" on the
> ballot. People could upload manuscripts to the "Papers for Discussion" at
> LCHC and then these could be included in the vote.
> >>  This might address several problems which seem to be dogging our
> quarterly discussions.
> >>  a) It often happens that the articles on offer have almost nothing to
> do with what people have on their minds and what is being discussed on the
> list.
> >>  b) It sometimes happens that the authors chosen for publication in the
> journal turn out to be more interested in being published than in being
> discussed and do not take part.
> >>
> >> c) It occasionally happens that people like myself clutter up the list
> with long posts which really ought to be articles but which have no chance
> of publication, at least not in their current form.
> >>  It may also be a good way of getting the writing mentorship project off
> the ground, and it might even return us, one small but much appreciated
> step, towards that pre-MCA tradition of an unrefereed and unreviewed
> newsletter, with writing that is unafraid to walk on the wild side.
> >>  David Kellogg
> >> Seoul National University of Education
> >> --- On Wed, 7/6/11, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> >> Subject: [xmca] The Polls are OPEN!!
> >> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> >> Date: Wednesday, July 6, 2011, 3:45 PM
> >>
> >>
> >> A wide range of articles to choose from for XMCA discussion and private
> >> musings.
> >>
> >> http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Journal/poll.html
> >>
> >> mike
> >> __________________________________________
> >> _____
> >> xmca mailing list
> >> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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> >> _____
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> >> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> > --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > *Andy Blunden*
> > Joint Editor MCA:
> http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744
> > Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> > Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857
> > MIA: http://www.marxists.org
> >
> > __________________________________________
> > _____
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> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
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