Well, Andy, the catch to using xmca as a mentoring match up system is that
no matter who does the low tech version someONE has to do it (Tammy and I
spent a couple of sessions trying to figure out a rational way to do the
connecting up and it was quite difficult- we did not like the outcome) -- .
>From my experience trying, we really need a mini-market system that is
regulated in a very light handed way or we fail. Some open software social
networking app should do the job or be modifiable quickly to do the job.
Tammy is not paid for the summer, and in general, looking to me to support
us going forward is prospect with diminishing returns. Over the coming
year,
we have to get leaner and smarter.
So far, only David's suggestion of devolving MCA is on the table; otherwise
except for your suggestion that someone at LCHC do the work for connecting
writer-readers in a mentoring club, no one has responded to questions about
improving xmca. Perhaps after the weekend.
I hope that Monday dawns beautifully over on your side of the world as
Sunday has here.
mike
On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 6:41 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
**
Mike, I appreciate your efforts to mobilise clever people to get this
system working on a proper basis. But everyone is always too busy. Would
it
be possible to ask Tammy to set up one of her Google/Excel shared
spreadsheets with two lists: one of aspiring mentees and the other of
volunteering mentors, with keywords, and a Google group listserv for
messages between mentors, so that we can work together and allocate
people.
Very lo-tech, a little taxing, but I think it could be implemented by
Tammy
in 24 hours. It is just a matter of hooking up couples.
Andy
mike cole wrote:
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
mike
__________________________________________
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__________________________________________
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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*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
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
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
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
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
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca