Hey All,

We are starting with the truly experimental part of this - trying to write papers on the web. The way this is going to work is I am going to make blog posts related to specific paper - beginning sections of them. Choose the paper you are most interested in (try and limit to one because I'm hoping to get a lot of work out of you guys) and beging commenting on it. It would be great if everybody commented, but devote your original ideas and most of your energy to just one of the papers (but follow along with all of them and offer interesting perspectives when you can). I will at various time try and put everything together in a single piece that looks something like a paper and send it around to the actual authors. Then hopefully authors will post future sections (whoever they are).

Right now I would like to start three papers

The Hyperlinks/ZPD paper I talked about with Maggie

The poverty paper that I already started with Gizem

A paper that just introduces the idea of CA to American audiences, especially those who study human development

Hyperlinks, the Zone of Proximal Development, and Freedom: A Capability Approach to Reading

Reading has become one of the flashpoints of our modern educational system. While reading has always been important as a skill, it is only recently that it has been separated from the larger curriculum and given precedence over curriculum content and considered primarily in terms of its instrumental worth (Sen 1999). Aggregate measurements of reading skills have come to dominate discussions of educational policy ( ) and and school value. Taking a decidedly utilitarian perspective (Arrow....) it is assumed that reading skills will eventually lead to higher levels of competitiveness for both the student and the society and raise income levels on an individual scale and GDP on a national scale. Emphasis has been placed on instruction and testing of reading abilities. Value of both instruction/instructor (overtly) and the student (covertly) is determined and reified through this testing process.

L.S. Vygotsky ( ) argued against using the type of direct testing often used for reading as a tool for determining the abilities of children. He argued that direct testing determined how well a child could perform at a given moment, but it missed the far more important information about how well a child could master the activity in more dynamic (and from Vygotsky's larger theoretical approach context relevant) learning conditions. Vygotsky referred to this "space" between how the child performed during a decontextualized "on-demand" test and a learning situation where the child was motivated, comfortable with the learning process, and the goal was mastery of task The Zone of Proximal Development. Three quarters of a century later the economist Amartya Sen added another idea that we believe is relevant both to the teaching of reading and Vygotsky's idea of the Zone of Proximal Development (at least as it has been used and interpreted in the United States - Glassman 2003). Sen (1999) makes the argument that rather than attempting to develop specific, measurable abilities that are easily measured and compared, we as a society should be more concerned with the development of capabilities that enable individuals to move towards what Aristotle referred to as a flourishing of the human condition. Sen often refers to literacy as a key capability, but we go further in this paper attempting to understand what literacy as a capability means and how this might affect the way that we teach and understand reading. At the core of Sen's Capability Approach (CA) is the idea of freedom - the feeling of capability is tied directly to an individual's sense of freedom in their lives. We make the argument that if you remove freedom from the development of literacy that the learner never really sees and understands it as a capability that has both substantive and instrumental worth in their lives, but as a task that is required of them, what Sen calls an unfreedom.

The Zone of Proximal Development and CA both have implications for reading and literacy -but they both have flaws as well. The difficulty with The Zone of Proximal Development is the emphasis that is put on the role of the mentor or teacher. The teacher in a ZPD scenario serves as both as facilitator and guide. The development of the child is both dependent and to a certain extent controlled by the mentor who determines direction and goals of the developmental process. This might actually have a level of efficacy when the child and the mentor share the same culture, understanding of what mediated artefacts are important, and social goals. The mentor is preparing the child for the expectations of society and the child understands and is motivated by this. But the same process can have profound consequences is the child and mentor do not share the same culture, the same experience. The Zone of Proximal Development can become a Zone of Unfreedom where development becomes drudgery. The difficulty with CA is in actually providing an environment and the tools necessary for a child to feel a sense of freedom and at the same time a willingness to develop the types of capabilities that is recognized as enhancing (rather than diminishing) those freedoms.

We believe that the concepts of ZPD and CA can be brought together, and work together in a way that is revolutionary for the child and the educational establishment as a whole, by using some of the new cyber technologies that offer a new and different type of freedom in heterogenous societies - in particular the tool of hyperlinks.