Elizabeth Wallace

This message is coming to you because you are a member of UCIPD and are registered in our online community.

On Sept. 13th., Nancy Randall sent out the message below to the UCIPD list.  We are posting it here in our SCoPE Special Interest Group (SIG) so the information is easily available without your having to hunt through you Inbox.  The planning team is hard at work.  If you have questions or suggestions, please reply to this message by clicking on the bottom link. You will be redirected to SCoPE and prompted for you ID and Password, then you can post your message to the group.

-----------------------------------------------

Greetings all!

Greetings!

I'm pleased to send you the first SCoPE message of the fall, inviting you to meet other UCIPD members online, and exchange ideas and information.  The UCIPD meetings offer us all an opportunity to spend time with kindred spirits, and this forum provides an ideal way to keep in contact in between gatherings. We represent Teaching and Learning centres from all over British Columbia and although geography often prevents us from meeting face to face, we can connect here at any time. 

You are invited to respond to this message and introduce yourself and your work.  Click on Reply at the bottom of this message, or use on of the other links to go to the ScoPE site.  When you reply, your message will appear in SCoPE as well as in the Inbox of all members. (You can click on your own name in SCoPE to change your preferences to Digest, if you prefer to get all messages at one time .)  I suggest you re-name the subject line in your reply, to identify your centre and location,  so that we can return and find you in the discussion thread later on.

Please tell us a little about your institution, your centre, the staff, yourself and, of course, whether or not you like cats

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Wow, JUne. I know that I'm not officially part of this anymore (and feel very guilty at having thrown in the towel) but I had to compliment you on your graphic. It actually makes the process looks like fun!

Regards,

Liz

Sorry for the delay in responding, Susanne and Paul. I've been travelling back to Vancouver from Toronto, catching up on everything that happened in my absence...and hesitating because Susanne is looking for a "reasonable" comment from me on the topic of LPP. Ah, Susanne, my life is characterized by actions and comments that are usually considered unreasonable! But here are some thoughts...

Susanne, your article from 2002, referring to GEN is quite a treasure. I admire your filing system! Your comment: "Lurking is accepted, to read only without adding any content of your own, and the explicit welcoming is a strategy of including new members" seems to locate lurkers in the apprentice role, with the expectation that they will become master participants in due time.  The position I'm leaning towards is that we shouldn't assume that lurkers will want to participate. Many, very very many, actually, are exerting their freedom of choice to stay in the margins. To ligitimize their situation only if they take the next step and contribute is problematic for me.

Paul, I've been staring at your matrix for a while and trying to come up with something intelligent (that all can pronounce - my daughter Vivienne Wallace is in Japan and responds happily to being called Bibienne Warrace!)

Forgive me for not coming up with more words. I'm going to fall back on the argument that meaning is socially constructed, so it's not so important to use different words, as to deconstruct the words already in play:-)

So to get back to Wenger and Lave's words, in their introductory comments on  LPP on pp. 34-37 of the 1991 text state that peripherality is only a positive term if it is enabled or emplowered. It is only negative if the peripheral location is disempowered, they say -- and that's what I think we do when we use the label lurker to suggest that shadowy, unwelcome stranger.  So perhaps I'm saying that it's up to each community to consider carefully the role of lurkers and reflect on whether they are respected (empowered) or dismissed (disempowered).

When I asked the question: "What do you think of when "Lurking" is mentioned?", Susanne and Paul both jumped in with their reactions, which included references to Legitimate Peripheral Participation.

Let's get Sylvia to call Etienne Wenger, because he popularized that term when he co-authored the book with that title in 1991.

Here's my thought on that...isn't it a contradiction in terms to use "legitimate" and "peripheral" in one phrase? If we're calling a someone who is partipating from the fringes legitimate, why is that person still on the periphery? Doesn't the very act of participation make the person a central contributor to the community, not a marginal player?

I'm thinking about what name I would give to someone who we are willing to accept as authentic, even though the person is not active in a community. Thinking...thinking...