e-mail 09-Aug 1538 PEM->JW

Jack -

It might seem slightly artificial, but I thought it would be worth while summarising our recent conversation, even if it reads as if I am writing to you for the first time about my current thoughts on the BERA archive.

The archive I refer to is at <http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/archives/bera-practitioner-researcher.html>, with especial interest in the e-seminar postings for June and July. You stated the focus for contributors at the outset as an invitation:

". . . to a discussion on the contributions of our living educational theories and our evidence of our educational influences in our own learning and to the future of educational research . . ." with a further invitation ". . . to let each other know where our educational theories can be accessed and where we can see evidence of our educational influences in our own learning, the learning of others and in the learning and education of social formations."

I later focused this invitation within the action-enquiry question: "How can we develop standards of judgment that help us to understand the nature of educational theories and what counts as evidence of educational influences in learning?"

The e-seminar is now nominally at an end; the archive is essentially complete - and I am now looking for some sort of conclusion to this whole enterprise. I am, therefore, asking the question: "What are we to make of the e-seminar archive?" However, it is an enormous and multi-faceted document and my judgment is that, in its current form, it is not amenable to an interrogation that can make a comprehensible response to the original aim of the e-symposium.

I repeat my question: "What are we to make of the e-seminar archive?" I suspect that each of us - each past contributor to the archive who might respond to my question - is likely to plot their own highly individual and idiosyncratic path through the archive. However, I feel that it is important for us to respond as a 'we' and not just as a collection of separate 'I's. I am looking for consensus within dialogue.

I have already said that I do not think the current form of the archive is amenable to an interrogation adequate to respond to the original aims of the seminar. My suggestion is that we need to be able to make links between individual postings and to make references to points that seem to resonate with each other. It is almost as if we were to print out everything, paste the sheets onto a huge wall, and to then collectively to 'go at it' with highlighter pens; emphasising sections, drawing loops connecting these together and all the time critically and constructively arguing with each other. However, I think it is vital not to impose a 'reading' on the archive as a whole that seems from any given contributor's point of view to remove individual elements of meaning from their original context. As I have said elsewhere, I do not think it is good enough for one person ('the reviewer') to write a linear commentary ('a review') that strings together extracts ('quotations') from the archive ('the literature') - or for a 'gatekeeper' to nominally collate comments from contributors.

Proposal (i.e. 'how's about this?'). . . I shall convert each posting into an HTML browser-readable (webpage) document and place them on Jack's server. I shall then construct a skeleton of a start of the process that I hope will lead to a consensus view. That skeleton will take the form of a sequence of hyperlinks between sections of the archive that I think respond to the original aim of the e-symposium. (I shall use Dreamweaver to set up these links - software that perhaps few of us possess - but I can see no other way to effect the desired format.) Somehow or other, we then need to correspond with each other to modify the structure of this skeleton and then to add flesh to it - until we can finally say "this is what we have made of the archive" as a response to the question: "How can we develop standards of judgment that help us to understand the nature of educational theories and what counts as evidence of educational influences in learning?"

Any comments?

- Pete.