One of the things I notice in Nyrup & Thomsen's report 'AIME-Perceptions and Experiences'
https://www.academia.edu/15255102/AIME_-_Perceptions_and_Experiences
is the importance f2f meetings had for the participants in the AIME inquiry. Ia m going to see AIME from the point of view of learning.
AIME is a peculiar project from the point of view of learning. On the one hand learning is relevant. Participants are asked to "domesticate" in their thought practices quite different descriptions for phenomena they have been used to describe otherwise. They are also called to use a whole group of new terminology (for example the different modes) and new concepts ( for example being-as-other). That there is a learning challenge is also obvious from the effort to support the learning process through documentation and a lexicon in the electronic edition.
On the other hand AIME is also a research project under construction. So one has every reason to think : Is the difficulty I face in understanding dew to the profoundness of what is presented here or is it just that the author does not comprehend well what goes on?
Making AIME an inquiry made things simpler. As I understand it, the Modes of Existence is a way of talking about experience (a way that transforms experience and the self) which is proposed to different communities of practice and is thus put into trial: a trial that hopefully can lead to a transformation of this discourse to something braodly available and useful.
Now since it is proposed at the same time to different communities of practice (lawyers, natural scientists, psychologists, buysnessmen...) who usually do not interact strongly with one another, it is from the beginning part of a negotiation, of diplomacy among the different communities of practice of the moderns. However one wanders which is the middle ground where this negotiation takes place (assuming that different communities will check the validity separately and then the pieces will just be put together is not very convincing to me). One would expect there a middle ground made by notable figures in the Studies of Each Domain (philosophers?).
Leaving this option aside one can imagine a broader investigation where many practitioners participate and that somehow find their way, even when they deal with choices that were motivated in another domain(since there is also a common vocabulary throughout the inquiry). This was the choice that was followed but as Nyrup & Thomsen indicate different participants had very different access to dialogic opportunities. There was a smaller number that participated also in f2f meetings. Normally out of this inner group of participants there should come forth changes in the discourse suggested by the book "Modes of Experience". Changes in concepts or in the modes (addition or deletion or changes in definition). One would normally expect something like a new version of the table in pages 488-489 of the English edition of the book. But appart from the enlargment of the electronic data base that acompanies the book there has not yet appeared something like that. So probably, for the time being the "Modes of Existence" exist at this point in various interpretations in various sub cultures of these inner-participants.
For those people who could not participate in f2f meetings and who relied on the book and the info in the website and in the opportunity to participate with contributions in the inquiry, the situation is different. It looks like a case of distant learning which is augmented with opportunities of real innitiative and interaction. The web site could be a mediating structure helping to build zones of proximal development for the participants (and opportunities of progress for the core members too).
I do not think that it worked that way for most of the distant participants and I suggest the following reasons (an interesting question is the following: what percentage of the final contrubutors in AIME did not participate in any f2f meeting):
a) the goal of the inquiry did not have smaller subgoals that could be coconstructed (that is, take into account the "funds of knowledge" that participants represented not only as if they were just distant cameras in far away social nitches but with respect ot what was important for them too). It was something like: let us see if you can find some place where what we analyze here finds an application.
b) usually there are needed opportunities for people with different levels of expertize to construct accounts of a similar situation that run in parallel and fertilize each other. I am not sure if the facilitators in the contributions played such a role of providers of alternative interpretations. They sound more as middlemen who look at the ores that simple people bring them to select which have gold and help the puryfying process. Even if they proposed their own alternative accounts and there was dialogue, this was not open. Nobody else could gain from it.
c) Since there were no open issues that were worked by different participants there also were not any opportunities for "experts" to model the use of the concepts in MOE in situations that had personal meaning for the participants. There was no public view of the process. At most one could get the final product when everything was put in proper order. Drafts of the efforts where not available, neither traces of the dialogues
To my opinion these are some reasons that made difficult for the web environment to support learning. The other obvious reason is that apart from Latour nobody else explicitely endorses the MOE discourse as "supported and used by them". For AIME to become a community of practice there is needed a core group that "owns" the MOE discourse, that are "experts" in it, that collectively nurish its progress. At this point MOE is very strongly Latour's . This does not build confidence to the whole system to an outsider. If it is so good why don't other well known people in different areas clearly endorse it? How come this core group isn't formed and it seems still one man's efforts?
https://www.academia.edu/15255102/AIME_-_Perceptions_and_Experiences
is the importance f2f meetings had for the participants in the AIME inquiry. Ia m going to see AIME from the point of view of learning.
AIME is a peculiar project from the point of view of learning. On the one hand learning is relevant. Participants are asked to "domesticate" in their thought practices quite different descriptions for phenomena they have been used to describe otherwise. They are also called to use a whole group of new terminology (for example the different modes) and new concepts ( for example being-as-other). That there is a learning challenge is also obvious from the effort to support the learning process through documentation and a lexicon in the electronic edition.
On the other hand AIME is also a research project under construction. So one has every reason to think : Is the difficulty I face in understanding dew to the profoundness of what is presented here or is it just that the author does not comprehend well what goes on?
Making AIME an inquiry made things simpler. As I understand it, the Modes of Existence is a way of talking about experience (a way that transforms experience and the self) which is proposed to different communities of practice and is thus put into trial: a trial that hopefully can lead to a transformation of this discourse to something braodly available and useful.
Now since it is proposed at the same time to different communities of practice (lawyers, natural scientists, psychologists, buysnessmen...) who usually do not interact strongly with one another, it is from the beginning part of a negotiation, of diplomacy among the different communities of practice of the moderns. However one wanders which is the middle ground where this negotiation takes place (assuming that different communities will check the validity separately and then the pieces will just be put together is not very convincing to me). One would expect there a middle ground made by notable figures in the Studies of Each Domain (philosophers?).
Leaving this option aside one can imagine a broader investigation where many practitioners participate and that somehow find their way, even when they deal with choices that were motivated in another domain(since there is also a common vocabulary throughout the inquiry). This was the choice that was followed but as Nyrup & Thomsen indicate different participants had very different access to dialogic opportunities. There was a smaller number that participated also in f2f meetings. Normally out of this inner group of participants there should come forth changes in the discourse suggested by the book "Modes of Experience". Changes in concepts or in the modes (addition or deletion or changes in definition). One would normally expect something like a new version of the table in pages 488-489 of the English edition of the book. But appart from the enlargment of the electronic data base that acompanies the book there has not yet appeared something like that. So probably, for the time being the "Modes of Existence" exist at this point in various interpretations in various sub cultures of these inner-participants.
For those people who could not participate in f2f meetings and who relied on the book and the info in the website and in the opportunity to participate with contributions in the inquiry, the situation is different. It looks like a case of distant learning which is augmented with opportunities of real innitiative and interaction. The web site could be a mediating structure helping to build zones of proximal development for the participants (and opportunities of progress for the core members too).
I do not think that it worked that way for most of the distant participants and I suggest the following reasons (an interesting question is the following: what percentage of the final contrubutors in AIME did not participate in any f2f meeting):
a) the goal of the inquiry did not have smaller subgoals that could be coconstructed (that is, take into account the "funds of knowledge" that participants represented not only as if they were just distant cameras in far away social nitches but with respect ot what was important for them too). It was something like: let us see if you can find some place where what we analyze here finds an application.
b) usually there are needed opportunities for people with different levels of expertize to construct accounts of a similar situation that run in parallel and fertilize each other. I am not sure if the facilitators in the contributions played such a role of providers of alternative interpretations. They sound more as middlemen who look at the ores that simple people bring them to select which have gold and help the puryfying process. Even if they proposed their own alternative accounts and there was dialogue, this was not open. Nobody else could gain from it.
c) Since there were no open issues that were worked by different participants there also were not any opportunities for "experts" to model the use of the concepts in MOE in situations that had personal meaning for the participants. There was no public view of the process. At most one could get the final product when everything was put in proper order. Drafts of the efforts where not available, neither traces of the dialogues
To my opinion these are some reasons that made difficult for the web environment to support learning. The other obvious reason is that apart from Latour nobody else explicitely endorses the MOE discourse as "supported and used by them". For AIME to become a community of practice there is needed a core group that "owns" the MOE discourse, that are "experts" in it, that collectively nurish its progress. At this point MOE is very strongly Latour's . This does not build confidence to the whole system to an outsider. If it is so good why don't other well known people in different areas clearly endorse it? How come this core group isn't formed and it seems still one man's efforts?
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