Re: [xmca] The Polls are OPEN!!

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

With respect to dis-establishing MCA and going back to a newsletter:

I did not want to start MCA in the first place. Yrjo urged its formation as
a means to
legitimate cultural-historical research, broadly conceived. To dis-establish
it would
mean that no longer could contributors use anything they published there as
a warrant for getting promotions-- the situation in this regard has become
markedly
worse in the interim, but I would be perfectly contented to see such a
devolution.
And in the process, shift media and go purely electronic.

That reverses the long push for respectibility, reached this year through a
lot of Michael's effort focused primarily on getting materials in on time
(!!). Now people
can site all the ratings they need for their academic files and MCA is just
fine. Part of the establishment.

Is this situation peculiar in some way to MCA or is it a part of that
increased acceptance and appropriation? Those who are present at ISCAR might
convey
the feel of that meeting. Maybe the entire push for cultural historical
approaches
that "take context seriously" by using the cultural-historical tradition of
understanding "activity" is itself passe? (I personally do not think so,
but, then, I would be the last to know!).

Or maybe its brightest adherents have re-deployed into such ventures as
"learning sciences" or "developmental science" (two movements I am familiar
with)? Or maybe we miss opportunities for self-development when we see them?

Personally, I was disappointed by the discussion of the special issue on
Action Research and CHAT. What my colleagues at LCHC and I do as research is
seen by some as action research, some as CHAT intervention research. To us,
the issue of theory/practice relations is really important. Seth Chaiklin's
article posed
some issues in this regard that really never seemed to get discussed, let
along answered. In this case the authors engaged, XMCA did not engage back.

Perhaps we can return to it. Again, personally, there are articles in the
current issue of MCA that seem worth discussing. Perhaps not. I have read
none of them, and like you, have to depend upon the abstracts to make my
bets.

With respect to discussing articles of people from XMCA itself.

This is really a matter that goes to the membership of XMCA. The webpage
has not gone away

                            http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/index.html

Use it or lose it. Or, help us develop a new practice that the group finds
valuable.

With respect to getting modern and more multi-modal digital to enrich the
discourse

I am all for it. With the resources at its disposal, LCHC is seeking to
propose a kind
of portal that would include a variety of modes of experssion. We thought we
had
this problem solved a year ago. We were wrong. Lets hope we have not been
wrong again.

I also always worry about the disenfranchised when those with lots of bytes
at their disposal free start using higher end technologies that make their
discourse richer. Who is being left out?

Once open a time, it was a big deal to us that we could get a free,
electronic, version of one article so that those far away who cannot afford
MCA can participate in the discourse. Then it was free for a while. But now,
guess what?  Payment is back again and none the cheaper. Going electronic
would solve that, but would it solve the ISI problems?

As I see, the finances, the ideology, and the actual organization of the
activities are all interconnected. Makes me very wishy washy.

To end by repeating what I wrote in the note to Jaki: We are doing the best
we can. If you can help, just up and offer. We all stand to learn from such
collaboration.

mike

On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 2:21 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> I can't say too much David, but I will just that it is only about now that
> we will begin to publish material in any way reflecting the new editorship
> as we inherited a couple of years of backlog. Secondly, our reviewers really
> are demanding a high standard from our authors. Since becoming an editor at
> the beginning of October I have overseen only one manuscript that made it
> through to acceptance, after revisions, though I think I am now close to my
> second. Aware of this, the editors are taking action to attract a good
> quality of mss and we just have to see if our work is successful.
>
> Peer review is like democracy: it is a terrible system, but its the best
> we've got.
>
> It may well be that if we want to do some genre bending then the lchc
> website is the best way of doing it. Personally, I would like to see web
> publication the norm and peer review used as a rating but not as a means of
> refusing publication. But it takes time. Many of our community rely on MCA
> publication for academic status and thus jobs and promotion, and this places
> an obligation on us work like any other academic journal.
>
> That is a personal view.
>
> Andy
>
>
> David Kellogg wrote:
>
>> 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<http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Journal/poll.html>
>>>>
>>>> mike
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> -- ------------------------------**------------------------------**
>>> ------------
>>> *Andy Blunden*
>>> Joint Editor MCA: http://www.informaworld.com/**
>>> smpp/title~db=all~content=**g932564744<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7Edb=all%7Econtent=g932564744>
>>> Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
>>> Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.**aspx?partid=227&pid=34857<http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857>
>>> MIA: http://www.marxists.org
>>>
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>>>
>>
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>>
>>
>
> --
> ------------------------------**------------------------------**
> ------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> Joint Editor MCA: http://www.informaworld.com/**smpp/title~db=all~content=
> **g932564744<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7Edb=all%7Econtent=g932564744>
> Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.**aspx?partid=227&pid=34857<http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857>
> MIA: http://www.marxists.org
>
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