my vedanaMonday, January 30, 2012
Everyday
I just wrote a paper called 'Mobile practices in everyday life' - and now, stepping back from that work I find myself wondering about that hook the 'everyday'. It's been useful for a number of us working in new literacies to use the idea of the 'everyday', the quotidian, in making a distinction between what people do informally in spaces that are not structured by the institutional regimes of education or work and what they do in schools, worklife and all the rest. Colin and Michele use it as a subtitle to New Literacies - it's even the title of their blog...and I know they will often make reference to deCerteau 'The Practices of Everday Life'. Apart from reminding me of the Buddy Holly song (above), I'm now wondering about the shortcomings of the 'everyday' as a concept. Firstly, although it's useful in identifying an often neglecting aspect of literacy (neglected, at least, by educators) it does set up a dichotomy. What we increasingly witness is practices that cross the divide, that blur those boundaries, The everyday leaks into institutional life. Secondly, there's a danger that we over-generalise. maybe a lot of everyday practices are actually those of the affluent, or to put it another way, the everyday is itself segmented and diverse. Anyway that's just completely undermined my own hard work...but virtual literacies will not be so easily undermined. In fact there's every indication that it may be slowly making its way from the virtual realm into the...into the.... everyday!
Labels: digital literacy, virtual worlds, Web 2.0
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Where have I been?
My blog is like an old friend - I like to keep company with it on a regular basis - even if it's just to give narrative fragments of my (mostly) working life it seems important. Tamboukou (2010: 79) has this idea of 'nomadic subjectivities' which seems to me to capture that movement in and away from the activity of posting. So I've been at full stretch completing my part of the 'Virtual Literacies' edited book (watch this space for further details). It should be published by Routledge later this year. So, I had it mind a critique of this re-telling and privileging of book fiction, but I missed the boat; I also wanted to comment on the mixed messages of Gove's opinions on technology in education. But the moment has passed. But I was delighted to get urbanroller's permission to use his photograph. There's a genre - but this such a good version! Permission was given 4 years after my initial request. Ah, the age of instant communication.
Labels: blogs, digital literacy
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
Canada's digital literacy
In everyday uses of the word, literacy associates with being able to read and write. But making meaning, by locating, organizing, and understanding information are also implied, along with critical engagement. So literacy involves both the production and consumption of meaning. Reading Canada’s Information and CommunicationsTechnology Council’s white paper on digital literacy is interesting in this light. Just add the words digital and technology and you come to their definition Digital Literacy which is 'taken to mean the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology for a knowledge-based society. It involves a working knowledge of current high-technology, and an understanding of how it can be used. Digitally literate people can communicate and work more efficiently, especially with those who possess the same knowledge and skills.'
Labels: digital literacy;, technology, writing
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
What's cooking?
I'm not sure where the media obsession with food came from - it seems to fill the newspapers and swamp the TV schedules. Perhaps I shouldn't be that surprised. Food is, after all, the original consumer product. We consume it, we digest it....and we want more. That's as close as you'll get to a seasonal message on this blog! But I do think this particular mash-up is excellent. That's good entertainment value, and I consumed that!
Labels: music, random, YouTube
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Searching limits
At the CSU technology symposium, we were once again alerted to the ways in which our casual searching behaviours may be shaped by search engines such as the mighty Google. This time it was Judy O'Connell issuing the warnings. So we learn to be sceptical of the JFGI approach. But since then I've got interested in something else about searching - and that's related to modality. I've been using the image above a bit lately, and have got quite interested in its provenance. A contact tells me that it shows the warehouse inventory process - possibly at a shipping line. Well that's OK, so far. But what I really want to do is search for the image and find out more about it. Of course Google (can I still mention it?),will allow me to search for an image related to a word, but it won't allow me to search with an image. Hence the modality issue. So I'm wondering if anyone's come up with a way of searching with an image? Maybe they have. Since some photo apps can now recognise your friends, image matching should be possible - and of course images are tagged and labeled. I wonder.
Labels: modality, photosharing, tags
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Beyond binaries
This is actor Jack Thompson, ending with a Riverina rhyme. Many thanks to Barney Dalgarno for this link. At the risk of undermining the entertainment with some analysis, it does seem to be a good example of something that's simultaneously recognisable but different. Same/not same. So the overall form and structure make sense; the liberal use of the adjective insert (we'd recognise it as the expletive-as-infix) are familiar. But unless you've been to Tumbarumba, or tuned into the patterns of Aussie conversation, they constitute the unfamiliar. Interestingly our patterns of thought (or socio-cultural dispositions) work in these sort of binaries. But isn't there really just a continuum of familiarity? In fact could this be a wider problem? At our symposium yesterday some familiar binaries popped up at regular intervals (global/local; online/offline; actual/virtual; me/not me; material/immaterial; mobile/static). We encounter these and we rather clumsily start talking about blurring the boundaries, but even this language tends to get in the way of the fluidity we want to talk about. We need to replace the light switch with a dimmer switch. But maybe we really need a new language, or a new philosophy for doing this. Perhaps, at the end of the day, this is part of the problem with affordances. It's a sort of on/off concept, and it doesn't allow enough space for fluidity, the evolution of new practices and conventions, human agency and so on.
Labels: digital literacy, ideas, technology
Affordances symposium
I had a great day at the symposium organised by the Technology and Teaching Practice Group at CSU. The presentations were great and in fact the whole day was very stimulating. I realise that one thing I really like about technology-focused discussions is that you don't have to deal with the book fetish. Of course, there are other things to get hung-up about - but today, which was about affordances (not my topic of choice, I must admit), included some quality discussion. The fact that the symposium was held at the National Wine and Grape Industry Centre, could be misleading. But there wasn't a bottle in sight. The only nod in the direction of wine was the barrel-shaped podium. Oh, that and the vineyard outside!
Labels: digital literacy, education, technology
Monday, December 12, 2011
Schools - the future?
Deletion schools as institutions are increasingly irrelevant. As social structures strongly formed by modernist thought, they perpetuate a factory model of education, which attempts to prepare the young for a world that has long since disappeared.
Re-construction schools as they are currently conceived are incapable of delivering the kinds of understandings and skills or cultivating the habits of mind that will produce 21st Century citizens or a 21st Century workforce. A new vision of schooling is required that incorporates the new literacies and is responsive to emerging patterns of social organisation.
Reform schools are out of step with society and need to capitalise on the new literacies that children and young people engage with on a daily basis. Extensive professional and curriculum development is required to align our education systems with the lives of young people.
Labels: digital literacy;, education, technology
