The evolution of technology

Hello all,

Decided I would start the posting. What I hope we are going to use this blog for is determining the responsibilities to the class. This is often referred to as grading assignments - but really I am obviously not looking to grade and I don't want to assign anything. I am thinking more and more that a Malthusian, competition oriented approach to graduate, or even undergraduate work isn't really all that productive. This whole idea of individual competition is simply brutal, and it reminds me of that post I read to you guys at the beginning of class last week. What does an A mean anyway. And yet think about what motivations for the work that you do are.

Leontieve who was a student of Vygotsky broke activity down into three parts. There is operations, the things that we do as a matter of fact, without really conscious thought about it. Many of us drive as operations, we are not really thinking about the goal when we turn on the left hand signal or press the breaks when we see a red light in front of us. At the second level of activity is what Leotiev called the action. The action is goal oriented, but it is the goal at hand. It is what you do to achieve a specific goal, like driving to get to school, or writing a paper in order to get an A. The third level of activity is motivation - that is the underlying, socio-historical reason that you do something. This idea actually comes from Vygotsky who was using one of the most unique and important ideas fromthe 20th century - the idea of motivation in acting that comes from the great theatrical director Stanislavsky. This is what sort of sits as the background for everything that you do, the actual reason that you are doing something, that guides your overall action.

So why do we actually do things? My operations in writing the blog post is in just typing the letters, I type fast enough now that I don't even think about the individual letters but simply the form of the word as it appears in my mind. My action is to meet the goal of developing a blog post that you will in some way respond to. I am hoping you will write something that in some way says something about your own activities in this class. But what are my motivations. These are the most difficult to discern, but also the most important. Why do we actually do the things we do. If we don't have these do we actually really understand our operations and our actions, or at least their meanings?

I would like to explore you activities in this class in the same way and when you decide upon what you do (and it can of course be multiple things) you understand it not as a simple action but as an activity, most important you understand your motivation behind what you are doing. The way to do this according to Vygotsky is to actually score your activity, what you do, like you would a play. You want to do something and then go back and score the motivations behind what led you to the point to do this thing.

Michael