Writing, thinking, knowing

It's good to see the Second Edition of this book in print. and I think it provides a very useful overview of contemporary work in literacies. The case study I wrote with @Kate Cosgrove looks good, and the carefully-crafted introduction references the great work done by the DeFT project. It's also nice to see some acknowledgement of the Points of View paper, too. Sometimes it all seems a bit like a production line - the next lot of proposals are in, there's something new to write, something to revise, something that needs proof-reading and usually no time for reading! So, as much as I dislike New Years resolutions, this is going to be mine: read more. That's it. I'm trying to get involved in some academic reading groups, and I'm particularly interested in one Chris Bailey's setting up, in which we'll be exploring the literature on children and video games. Having just finished a chapter that deals with the topic of virtual play, I think I've just about worked out what I don't know about the topic - which is quite a lot really! And I suppose, for me, that's the whole cycle that I'm referring to - from proposal to proofs it seems like a continuous process of finding out what I don't know, working out what other people know, trying to work out what I think and then realising that there are whole lot of other things I don't know. If experience counts for anything, it must be about being quietly confident that you don't know very much at all.

New literacies around the globe

I don't usually gloat over reviews, but if we live in an age of self-promotion maybe we are compelled (?) to put things out there. So I'm quoting Sam Duncan's review of last year's edited book 'New Literacies around the Globe' (Burnett, Davies, Merchant and Rowsell, 2014) sent to us by or publisher, Routledge. I'm not sure where this review will appear but it picks up on some of the high points of that work. (Sam, by the way, is an expert on adult literacy. ) Here goes: 'Of all the literacy-related books I have managed to get my hands on this year, this is the one I am most pleased to own. By far. This is a wonderful book: stimulating, engaging, exciting, varied and just so useful. It is useful in providing new ideas for practice and it is useful in providing new perspectives on research. It begins with a foreword (by Peter Freebody) asking: “aren’t we all, perhaps, a bit tired of seeing words like ‘new’ and ‘global’”? And don’t we need to examine what exactly is ‘new’ about literacies and what is ‘global’ about literacies? Freebody’s explorations of these questions alone make this book worth reading; he examines how relationships between technical, economic and social factors produce new literacy demands, and encourages us to think about the ways in which these demands reconfigure how we may understand the local and the global, and what it means to be literate. He asks us to think about, as this entire volume asks us to think about, the relationship between ‘school’ literacies and the other, the wider, the more ‘multiple’ literacies of our lives, “because many of literacy’s riches haven’t been missed; they’ve been omitted” (p. xviii).Each chapter has something important to say about literacy development, each chapter provides valuable references and ways of expressing, imagining and reimaging puzzles of teaching and research.  Like most books concerned with ‘literacy’, the focus is more on children than adults, but there are chapters with specific foci around teenagers and young adults (for example Davies on young women’s Facebook spaces or Williams on university students’ engagement with digital texts). Yet, every single chapter addresses issues of relevance- of importance- to adult literacy educators and researchers. For example, Beavis’ chapter on ‘Literature, Imagination and Computer Games’ forces us to examine what we mean by the subject of ‘English’- something of increasing importance as adult literacy provision is labelled, by some, as ‘adult English,’ and Merchant’s chapter on ‘Interactive Story-Apps’ reminds us to keep broadening our conceptualisations of reading (that reading is not one practice or process; it is multiple and ever-evolving). Reading this volume (and I did read every chapter; I would have been unable to resist it) also reminded me that though we want, as adult literacy specialists, to emphasise differences between ‘our patch’ and that of children’s literacy, we are still part of a larger literacy context- and thank goodness. As people concerned with literacy (or literacies), we are part of a huge and extraordinarily interesting group. We have so many colleagues from whom to learn. My favourite part of this volume is in the last few pages: ‘A Charter for Literacy Education.’ Burnett et al have created nine key points, all of which are of fundamental relevance to adult literacy scholarship and practice. I’ll end with three of these: 1. An empowering literacy education involves a recognition of the linguistic, social and cultural resources learners bring to the classroom whilst encouraging them to diversify the range of communicative practices in which they participate. 2. An empowering literacy education involves a range of activities that include improvisation and experimentation as well as the production of polished texts. 3. An empowering literacy education involves a recognition of the affective, embodied and material dimensions of meaning-making. And there are six more, each helping us to understand what it means to think about what is ‘new’ and what is ‘global’ about literacy.'....Thank you, Sam!

Builders' stilts

I often think that discussions of new media place their emphasis on either representation or technology but rarely both. Thinking about the technological function of so-called everyday objects can therefore be an interesting point of departure. Colleagues whose work focuses on the digital tend to overlook the fact that technologies are implicated in such basic things as food preparation and consumption, domestic chores, and so on - indeed in the full range of daily activity. And as Latour's work implies, non-humans are therefore active in all aspects of our lives. These builders' stilts work well when plastering a ceiling and certainly reduce the labour of climbing ladders and trestles, saving on both time and effort. Whether or not they turn plasterers into cyborgs is debatable, but they do serve as an illustration of how our relationship with the world is constantly modified by the things we make and use. The plasterer isn't particularly concerned with meaning making - he's just getting the job done. Well, we might well ask whether a smartphone or laptop is any different, and why. After all, it's all stuff. In the closing minutes of the film 'Transcendence', when the internet goes down, there's a lovely image of someone using a keyboard as a doorstop. Is that act about giving new meaning to old stuff or just getting a job done? In an early paper, Latour refers to the way in which we delegate to non-humans. From this point of view, re-purposing a keyboard as a doorstop is perhaps just an act of delegation. One that uses the physical affordances of a piece of plastic with letters on it to keep a door open. On the other hand, I could thing of many other uses of builders' stilts - but keeping in touch with colleagues in Australia or Canada wouldn't be one of them!