Le mew, Le purr, Le CHAT

Je pense en français ce semaine, après de visiter le pays. J’ai mangé trop, et je suis très fatigué, mais Paris est belle. Alor, je retourne à l’anglais maintenant. Merci pour me l’ecoute!

Mon Popplet est ici: http://popplet.com/app/#/1573054.

This week, I added information from Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and Prior et al’s remaking of the rhetorical canons into three levels of activity. I attempted to connect those three levels to Spinuzzi’s three levels: Microscopic, Mesoscopic and Macroscopic. I began to wonder if the would correspond, with acculturation and external motivations  corresponding (laminated chronotropes) corresponding to the level of strategy and the big picture of social action. I did not connect this to the social action node on my network, though, as I believe there are two definitions of social action at work throughout these texts: one that is complicit with the dominant discourse and one that is resistant.

I’m in the process of mediating and remediating my thinking via this mindmap. It is becoming a laminated chronotope of layers of my thinking, with various embodied constructs; an externalization of my internalized thoughts as I interact with the activity system created by this course. I am the subject, interacting with an object (CHAT theory) and the objective (to map my thinking), using artifacts (my computer, Popplet), guided by rules (of the assignment, of the encoded capabilities of Popplet), with a motive (understanding, good grade, esteem) and my labor is evidenced via this distributed knowledge that is the Popplet, which is part of my blog, which is part of the class blog, which includes my classmates’ blogs, which links to other content on the web. My cognitive processes are, then, mediated by this interaction.

I’m beginning to think of LARP mechanics, costumes, and utterances as “tools”, which are “embodied constructs” and maybe that is a way to think about the non-diagetic elements creeping across the game boundaries to influence play. If the tools/artifacts themselves contain these constructs, then the game is a lamination, a layering of them, brought into “play” through their use. Thus players are constantly mediated by their culture; but that would be out-of-game and in-game capital and situation.