my vedanaMonday, November 09, 2009
Identity themes
Elizabeth Moje and Allan Luke have an interesting review that explores the relationships between literacy and identity in the current issue of RRQ. This follows the Special Issue of Literacy, on the same theme, that I put together with Victoria Carrington earlier this year. The Moje and Luke review explores some interesting areas and overlaps but in the end it failed to really impress. I found the most useful bits were the questions posed, and the issues raised, rather than the themes that were identified. However, the review sits well alongside the excellent Grenfell essay on Bourdieu, Language and Literacy in the same issue.
Labels: education, identity, new literacy
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Return of the flaneur
Yes, it's true, I was in Paris at the weekend. Paris is now so much closer, thanks to the Eurostar. So it's perfectly possible to be a weekend flaneur. The only problem is that it can take twice as long to get to London as it can to get to Paris. So the picture shows the flaneur at rest or, to be exact on the Metro. That's one way to spend le weekend. The next three all involve teaching. Still, musn't grumble!
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Beware the wordle tree!
I'm getting rather cynical about Wordle - what does it actually do? A glorified word count, that’s all. It doesn't really produce a tag cloud based on a folksonomy, or an aggregate of our interpretations. It scans the document and produces something that looks like a tag cloud, treating words as data rather than words as ideas. However, I did like this post on visualizing tools as an accompaniment to reading (thank you, Ian). I also came across this piece on tagging, which is really informative. Cathy Marshall investigates the up and downside of tagging in Flickr, a subject that I’ve written about (but not in such an analytical way). Her argument implies that we could be better taggers (maybe?). It would be interesting to get students to tag learning objects, such as the paper Ian refers to, after a close reading, maybe using a better tool to build a folksonomy within a more focused affinity space. Maybe that could be achieved by ‘negotiated tagging’ in a learning space like pbworks?
Labels: education, new literacy, tags, Web 2.0
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
The road ahead
I was very pleased to be asked to contribute to the University of Exeter Graduate School of Education seminar series, yesterday. This gave me an opportunity to develop my thinking about virtual world literacies in classrooms, good because I’m currently putting the final touches to a journal article on this topic. I’m also making final changes to the Web 2.0 and participation paper, which should see the light of day, soon. That leaves a book chapter on social networking and primary schools and that’ll be me done for this year. Early next year I have a chapter-length entry for The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. After that it will be time to knuckle down and do a more thorough analysis of the teen social networking data. Then I suppose we must turn our attention to publishing the outcomes of the ESRC Seminar Series!
Labels: social networking, virtual worlds, writing
Friday, October 23, 2009
After Heath
The other day I tweeted this quote, which captures an idea which has become very popular. But does written representation actually enjoy that privilege? In many ways literacy is a rather limiting description, all too often associated with schooled practices, skills and drills, and quite basic competences. Yet for many of us the idea of events and practices frees us from that trap. Heath was instrumental in showing that a strict distinction between the oral and the literate doesn't really capture our relationship to texts. Understanding the social is 'integral to participants' interactions and interpretive processes' (1982:50). In other words meaning-making doesn't happen in isolation. So any text could work in that way, whether in writing or any other modality. The only privileges that writing enjoys are those that are directly related to power structures in the job market, in business and the legal system (to name but a few). We need to give learners access to those privileges, whilst building a curriculum that takes an informed view of everday communication.
Labels: digital literacy, education, Twitter
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Virtually more
Victor Keegan writes in today’s Guardian about the 3-D web and the rush to create virtual cities. It’s techno-utopian stuff but he draws attention to the narrowing gap between social networking and virtual worlds. Interesting stuff, but when most people you meet turn their nose up at the idea of virtual worlds, you begin to wonder who signs up to all those accounts. But I’m also interested in the whole notion of what’s virtual and how it’s immediately associated with heavily technologically mediated experience and a Snowcrash-like alternate reality. So reading Nicholas Burbules (here) is food for thought.
Labels: social networking, virtual worlds
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Animoto - Morocco
It's easy to make a quick animated show with animoto. I'm hoping to be working with some enthusiastic young primary school teachers who will be using this in the classroom. For my part, I've only just started experimenting - maybe more later!
....not quite so good with video, though. Perhaps that's something to do with the size of the file, or maybe it's just the functionality. I like it as a quick way of presenting images.
....but, all things being equal, I think I'll stick to pics.
Labels: digital literacy, technology, Web 2.0
