Bruffee questions

1) Is collaborative learning between a tutor and a tutee as affective as collaborative learning beween students of the same class?

2) Do new ways of learning (collaboration), in your experience, succeed more often than they fail? And how far can we take it? One day teachers may not be needed if we keep going.

3) Knowledge is established by communities of knowledgable peers. Once we get out of college and live and work with people of other "communities", how will that effect our previously established knowledge? Does knowledge always change depending on what community you are around?

4) What limitations do thought and conversation have and how do they effect writing?

5) When has a student mastered the "normal discourse" of a field and when is she qualified to explore/express "abnormal discourse"?

6) If the ability to socialize with others dictates one's ability to write, then why is it true that hermits and mentally disturbed people have been some of the most renowned writers in the past? (ie. Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson).

7) Thought and conversation go hand in hand, which leads to knowledge. If though is narrow, thinking will be too. But what if one's knowledge is so great that they can be narrow without it leading to lack of thinking?
In Bruffee's opinion, conversation is thought, and thought is conversation. They function largely in the same way. Through this confusing thought pattern may seem enigmatic, it really all goes in one big circle. external conversation->internalized to thought -> written to be a combination of conversation and internal thought -> collaborative conversing=normal learning discourse and vice versa.


**Last paragraph on 647 summarized in to one sentence- Conversation about what we already know and is accepted is normal discourse, development of new ideas is abnormal discourse. Abnormal comes before normal because an idea must be made up in order for it to be widely established and accepted and become normal. Knowledge is a combination of both normal and abnormal discourse. Normal discourse is to maintain knowledge that is already known (ie. history). Abnormal discourse is to make new knowledge (ie. pluto isn't a planet anymore).

Abnormal discourse can, before it's accepted, make people freak out. (Plato says- if you have been living in a cave all of your life, shadows become your normal discourse and reality is abnormal, but once brought out into the real world, after freaking out, reality becomes your normal discourse. And if some one who has seen the real world comes to the cave and tells them about reality, their ideas would be abnormal discourse to the people of the cave.)

Normal discourse = common sense, widely accepted and agreed upon ideas. A set of beliefs. Abnormal discourse can easily become normal discourse, not always but if the ideas become widely accepted, it then becomes normal discourse.