Going slow

It's been a while. Perhaps it seems as if I'm a blogger on a go-slow, but really it's just the sign of a changing relationship with what I write. Recently posting has become a way of rehearsing thoughts that later become more extended pieces of writing - but somehow or other I didn't need to do that for the book Stacking Stories (out soon!). So that's where my energies have gone, writing that. But I still like the blog. I like it for its continuity, or to be precise for the way it maps change. Colin and Michele once described it as a 'wunderkammer' in their typology of blogs, but it long since changed direction. Gradually it became more performative. I tried to capture where I'd been, what I was reading and what was getting published. In other words it surfed the breaking wave of self-promoting academic identity performance (yuk!). Even quite recent posts - up to and including this one - seem to draw attention to what I've been up to in my professional life (such as this!). But I've also tried to stay faithful to the notion of capturing the main gist of what I'm thinking about, what inspires me. And it perhaps goes without saying, writing in one way or another always seems to come to the top of the pile. Producing it, consuming it, the two inextricably woven together. Everyday notes, graffiti, literature, sky-writing, logos, subtitles, digital, non-digital - the lot. That has to be the next (the last?) major project, translating that fascination into something that is both insightful and readable. Will I get round to it? I think so, although my current fascination with the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero might be trying to tell me something. His short book Empty Words and the bible-sized tome The Luminous Novel are masterpieces in exploring the many ways you can avoid writing what you really want to write - or, how that avoidance can itself become a thing of fascination. Following that model I should probably post regularly about how I'm not getting round to starting work on that substantive topic. But I don't want to make a promise that I don't think I could keep.

Doing it differently

I really enjoyed the Doing Data Differently project because it was a move out of my comfort zone and into the realms of educational data - an area that I'd previously been extremely wary of. Cathy has written a great blogpost about the project, there are several journal publications out there and some examples of the postcards and discussions can be seen here. But just like all of the projects and initiatives that I've been involved in, there's so much more to that work that can't easily be told. I notice the same phenomenon with many doctoral students I work with - it's often as if the pulse that animates the work has grown faint, or it's essence has somehow evaporated. The skill in getting a successful outcome is rather like an alchemical process of bringing something meaningful into existence even as it threatens to disappear. Educational projects are nearly always greater than the sum of their parts. And like good teaching you can never be entirely sure about what has really happened. Of course you can have plans and objectives, you can predict some outcomes, and even measure them, but then there's always the particular atmosphere and the sense of being there. Those restless modulations and mutations of affect resist clear verbal description. The complexity and heterogeneity of entangled experience baffles us, and the unanticipated, unpredictable and sometimes unknowable effects slip through our fingers. When we try to include these in our writing what was always messy, as John Law observes, seems to become even messier - and quite a number of us have fallen into that particular trap! Despite these pitfalls I think it's still worth the effort of producing accounts that acknowledge the missing elements, of trying to capture the things that get lost, and of saying the unsayable - or at least gesturing towards it. After all it's very often those very things that should be returned to, and not necessarily the detail that gets written up (although that might be important in other ways, too).

Fifteen years blogging

I thought I just might post something on the anniversary of my blog. It's exactly fifteen years ago that I registered this account with Blogger and, although the frequency of my posting and some of the old enthusiasm has waned, I still keep showing up. Why? Not for the same reasons for sure. That first day, that first post was undertaken with a particular kind of excitement. Little old me could type something on my keyboard, in Sheffield, and then, magically, there it would be on the internet for all to see! It seems rather gauche now, but back then the internet still seemed rather new and most of what you read was written by geeks or by companies that employed geeks. It felt with a blog you could get hold of the printing press and publish, just like that! But of course that feeling completely elided the fact that writers need readers - but then that small detail wasn't going to put me off either. And in fact it was only when Colin and Michele commented on my blog from Australia, Canada or Mexico, or wherever they were at the time, that I thought oh my god, people will read this stuff, too! That actually fired more enthusiasm. The posts were still highly experimental and at that stage I was more or less stringing together links about strange, quirky things on the web - a bit like the original bloggers did. Colin and Michele rather flatteringly described my blog as a wunderkammer. Perhaps that was just a kind way of calling it a mess. But all in all it meant that writing could change. Pictures, links, tags and all the rest were new. And what's more a small band of academics began exploring blogging. Working with Julia Davies, who started blogging around the same time as me, I began to write about this phenomenon. A community of literacy academics started blogging too, and there was a tangible feeling of being on the edge of something important. Then that something changed. Blogging lost its playful, experimental edge, it became popular, it became formulaic and in came the 'A-list bloggers'. Usually white, mostly male, and predominantly American, this group effectively standardised blogging. It became - dare I say it - a genre. And now commercial outfits, media companies, universities, this group, that project and just about everyone else has a blog. Slowly my own posts began to shift from that heady 'isn't the internet weird' phase into more critical and reflective pieces. I began to use my blog to try out ideas. Ideas that might later get absorbed into articles or book chapters. And that's what it has become for me - just another opportunity to write, to publish. Guess what, I'm fifteen years older and my priorities have changed! But if I've changed, so has the online environment. I care less about who reads my stuff and in that sense I'm right back to my first post. But strangely enough, I care more about what I write than I ever did before.

Slippery subjects

It must be symptomatic of something that the most searching questions that one can ask can often be met with a dismissive cynicism if not outright derision. Dan Fox, in a new book, nails this as the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism or dumbing down (see here for a review), and he could well be right. So that makes me all the more determined. Determined to return to the identity topic, and turn to the picture next to this and ask 'is this me'? Not, I hope, to provoke the reaction that by opening the topic I'm engaged in some sort of pretentious navel-gazing - although perhaps that wouldn't be such a bad thing after all?  But to interrogate what all this activity of capturing images, taking selfies and textualizing these online is all about. Really. This is not me. It's as if layers of difference have been tightly pressed together, fusing them in a process you could call lamination. Whilst there is resemblance or representation, there are also bits, bytes, and pixels. There is framing not to mention posing, cropping, colour enhancement and so on. The result may be an image of me, but that's all. Here, it's recontextualized. It enters another space, another time, juxtaposed with writing, squeezed into a template, worked into a particular form and recruited in a particular way for a particular purpose. Showing the image here becomes part of a performance, a performance that may be read off by an audience. But this me business is slippery. The image holds all sorts of other resonances, an affective dimension, a motley collection of shifting memories, the sharpness of the air, the Himalayan rock beneath my boots, the paucity of oxygen and so on - all of which may or may not be me. In current social theory this could all be seen as an emerging entanglement of affective, socio-material and discursive practices - a mouthful I know, but a sort of flowing together of bodies, things and ideas. A state of affairs in which constructions of me-ness are always contingent. If we live in times of space-time compression, of context collapse or whatever, it seems to me that we have also become slippery subjects. But perhaps I should just speak for myself, because that's what it looks like from here. I'm also aware of power geometries at work, creating conditions that allow for or provoke this slipperiness (a certain age, class, gender configuration for example). And that leads me to wonder whether some subjects are more slippery than others?

Social media: evolution and change

Over the last few years blogging has become a bit of an occasional pursuit for me, and I've been wondering why. The answer came to me last week, as I reflected on three rather different incidents - all relating in rather different ways to that question. Firstly, I was reading a paper on academic blogging that was so radically different in emphasis to the study I did with Julia Davies (review), that it made me wonder what an academic blog actually was in the first place! We had written about the first wave of blogging, and looked at how academics took up the practice and how, in quite creative ways they/we performed their academic identities online. This paper, on the other hand, took a much more limited view and addressed how academic bloggers wrote about and lobbied for change in university learning and teaching. Secondly, a round-robin email (to all staff) announced the VC's new blog post on MOOCs - one in which he makes reference to the impact of digital distribution on the music industry (draw your own conclusions). But it wasn't really about the content it was the mere fact that someone in a senior managerial position was using the blog to stimulate discussion - and canvassing readership through an institutional mailout. Like the first incident it all seemed to me very safe and mainstream, as if the edge had gone out of blogging. Then, thirdly, another completely unrelated incident. A random email from a researcher who produces materials for college students who'd read a rant on referencing I'd posted back in 2006, in the first flush of blogging. My despondency over the institutionalization and narrowing down of blogging was somewhat alleviated. Your humble blogger's voice might just be heard!

Looking forwards, looking backwards

For most of the work I've been involved in over the last ten years, the words 'technology' or 'internet' have seemed far too general. That's what prompted me to settle on the digital, particularly as it seemed to combine as a useful descriptor in such ideas as 'digital practice', 'digital communication', 'digital writing', 'digital media' and yes, of course 'digital literacy', in which familiar ideas - practice, communication and so on - were changed or re-interpreted with digital and connective technologies. Some terminology has a limited shelf-life for me; I notice I have pretty much dispensed with CMC and online communication because they don't seem to me to tell the whole story. Then of course there are terms like 'new media' (which I still like), 'Web 2.0' (which now seems rather old school) and 'social media' (which I use, but don't like - after all media is always social, isn't it?). Along with all this shifting is my own engagement or experimentation with digital spaces - chatrooms, blogs, virtual worlds and, yes, social media! I've written about all of them, and most recently with Julia Gillen on Twitter (here). What drives all this activity? Well I suppose I'm genuinely interested on how we shape and are shaped by our communicative environment - how we mean, and how we might negotiate new meanings about our lives, in the world, in the current context - which after all is a context that is infused with what Latour would call the non-human agents of digital technology. Since this is turning confessional I'd have to concede that this is my overarching interest. And since I happen to have spent most of my working life in educational institutions, I've always had a keen eye for what this might mean for children and young people. Drilling down further into curriculum stuff and the whole tangle of learning, well that regularly slips through my fingers. I feel there is so much in that whole arena that I either don't know or simply can't believe. At each turn, though, I've had an implicit tactic. First I try to understand what's going on in popular practices, and that always seems to work best by immersing myself in them, and then I start asking what that means/or might mean for education. Is that a method? I don't know, but it's what I do. Working on blogging with Julia Davies, the only way we could explain this reflexive insider approach was to call it a 'dual autoethnography', and that rather awkward term crops up again in the Twitter paper. But that's only half the journey; the second half is asking the questions. I suppose that's the buzz in the DefT project: asking those questions with a varied group of colleagues. In a way (and this might sound to them like heresy) I hope there isn't an answer, because that always seems to force premature closure. For me it's the question: what's going on and what does this mean for children and young people that propels us forward.

Google is rubbish

I've been keeping a Blogger blog for nearly 9 years now, and it suits me down to the ground. When Google bought out Blogger it didn't really make much difference to me. Gradually they've developed features and changed things around a bit, but all to the good. Then a few weeks back they just completely changed the posting and editing layout. And I must say it was much worse. Yes it was perhaps simpler, but it was certainly more of a straight jacket. I thought long and hard about migrating to Wordpress, but decided to wait awhile. And now, at the weekend I think, they send a stupid email about terminating 'legacy accounts', without really specifying what a legacy account is. I dutifully followed a link in the email, that then required me to log on. I tried this using my standard Blogger log in, but that was no good. A helpful link directed me to a forum - God, I hate them - where a very unhelpful Google statement tried to explain what a 'legacy account' is. A 9 year-old could have done it better. By the time I'd wasted 20 minutes I decided the easiest thing was to email back, asking for clarification. Guess what? You can't do that, you get a gmail error message. I suppose that happens when the big guys move in. The web changes; it loses its appeal. I think I'll move on.

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.

Daily blog?

At yesterday's ELMAC conference we played a bingo-style icebreaker with each item related to some sort of digital literacy. I got quite a lot of hits as someone who keeps a daily blog. I was rather aware of the irony, since it's over a week since I posted anything. What with a family wedding in Cyprus and an evaluation of BBC's Talkie Time to write up, life's been pretty full-on. So I kicked back on Friday night and watched the film adaptation of The Reader. It's a while since I've read the book but I was struck by the emphasis on the redemptive power of literacy. I'm not sure that it's a message I'm too happy with it. Nevertheless it's a good story - am I reading too much into it?

Blurring

It's happened before, but not in such an extreme way. At Winchester I met someone for the first time that knew lots and lots about me. My work, my house move, my family events, my sadness, interests, pets....lots of things! This blogger has followed mine (without me knowing it) for quite some time. And unlike before that hasn't been reciprocated. I've been followed without following. It was - and I must admit to it - quite a surprise, not that I mind at all, after all that's part and parcel of life online. I suppose I've embraced the blurring of private and public, and as the previous post shows, I'm not particuarly upset believing that I have nothing particular to hide. I remember in fact when working with Julia Davies on this project that we thought of blogs as being like a window onto the street. You looked out, but passers-by also looked in. You controlled what they saw, but you couldn't completely obstruct their gaze. At least if you did there would be no blog. Like all metaphors the street window goes only so far in capturing what goes on. When Colin and Michele put something different 'in their window', it still works. Somehow keeping blogging seems to be the main point, and if there are readers, even if you don't know who they are, that's got to be a good thing!

One thousand posts

I missed the exact day of my blog's sixth anniversary but this is officially the THOUSANDTH POST! So that's an occasion for some reflection on the what and why of blogging. Thinking back to the start, I was intrigued by publishing on the web. I'd done a few courses on web design, but it all seemed far too complicated, so when I came across the blog concept in late 2003 I was keen to give it a go. Pretty soon after I'd published my first posts Colin and Michele found my blog and I was dragged rather unceremoniously into what people were beginning to call the blogosphere. That spurred me on a bit, and realising that my blog might actually be read by others made me try a little harder to do something sensible for a change. So most of the time in the early days I'd use the blog to collect links to all sorts of quirky websites that I discovered in my surfing life. Colin and Michele wrote about it once and described it as wunderkammer. At the time I didn't know what that was but it sounded all right; now I do and it sounds even better. That was a fun time. Later on colleagues like Dr Joolz caught the blogging bug and soon there were several groups of academics connected to new/digital literacies who were posting stuff. That was an era of much commenting and encouragement! Some carried on, some fell by the wayside amd some became intermittent bloggers. As time went on my blog became more focused around the issues now on the header - education, new media and literacy - but I always allowed for the possibility of adding anything random that appealed. Over time its become an important way of processing what I do in my academic life, in my writing and in my research. I'm recording what's on top for me each day. Sometimes these shards of writing get absorbed into stuff that gets published; on other occasions I'll include off-cuts and often there will just be random thoughts or half-digested bits from what I'm reading. It's a way of working that suits me. At the same time I try and keep what I'm reading, listening to and watching up on the sidebar and from time to time I update the links (but that's now overdue). I don't think I really believe in blogging as a genre. I get the point, but there's so much variation in blogs it's hard to pin down. I'm not that keen on the concept of the blogosphere now either. I work across more static websites, Twitter, Flickr and a number of VLE blogs and wikis. That's the sort of circulation around my posts. I suppose I must have an 'ideal' or 'imagined' reader, but most of the time I'm motivated by doing it for me. I'm always surprised, maybe flattered when someone says 'I read your blog', but quite early on I removed the site counter because it annoyed me. Mostly my blog is work/interest related. I know family members and non-work friends sometimes read it, but I get the sense that they're not particularly drawn to it. Performance? Why, of course, there's a performance of the academic self. I'm happy with that. And, yes, there's so much to write about this topic - and lots that I haven't written about..... but one of my conventions is to keep it fairly brief, and I feel like I've already exceeded my average length. Maybe some linguistically orientated student of blogging could do a mean length of utterance!

Materiality and microblogging

So this is number two in a list of three. It's the materiality of devices. I’m drawing a bit on Daniel Miller here, who underlines the significance of material objects in cultural life. When we start thinking of web-based communication we very often get seduced by the virtual spaces that are created and forget the very basic nature of the material objects we use. As these become woven into everyday life they become normalised to the extent that they are almost rendered invisible. So today at the British Academy, the audience was connected in a variety of ways. Most notable of these ways seemed to be the presence of i-phones and Blackberrys, used to enter the Twitter backchannel and do other sorts of work, too. Handheld and discreet we are left to our own devices, but yet the devices we have (own) and their affordances are central to mobile microblogging.

Ambient sociability

Well, this is a revision in the light of Twitter feedback on the idea of ambient intimacy (see yesterday). Although one or two liked the idea, others felt that intimacy over-stated the case or over-emphasised the phatic. So, instead I'm going for ambient sociability instead. Ambience seems to catch the sense of lightweight contact that typifies microblogging, and sociability leaves it open to both the level of friendship and the sort of exchanges that are transacted. Ambient sociability can now become the first of the three. On its own its not enough though, because you can achieve this through mobile messaging and even through regular text exchanges. OK, this is theory-building in action and many thanks for the feedback (tweetback?)

What's on your mind?

The Facebook makeover successfully manages to keep social networking in the news and even in the papers! I’ve recently been thinking about the Twitter prompt, what are you doing, and the particular challenges of working in the 140 character economy. Some people do take the what are you doing prompt seriously, but most of those I’m following make no concession at all to this, unless you count some of the weird things they say, their twitpics, and the urls as kinds of doing. On the other hand the 140 characters is standard, and I’ve been intrigued by the reflective subtleties than can be shoehorned into that form. So maybe the prompt is irrelevant. Facebook, amongst other changes, have altered their prompt so it now asks what’s on your mind. A bit like a counsellor, who’s always there each day, or how often you go to the site, with the same persistent curiosity. What’s on your mind? Does this change the Facebook environment from being an action-orientated account of people’s lives and parties into a more introspective or even reflective space? Somehow I don’t think so. But then it all depends on what you have in mind.

Recency

My blog-posting seems to have suffered with the rise of microblogging. Interesting because Twitter makes you do rather different things, as you are caught in the act of reflecting, engaged in trivia, or ending up in strange places (Robin Hood Airport in my case). So it is lightweight in several senses of the word. Portable, and often more ephemeral, the tweets are less polished and often (but not always) less weighty. This could be a good thing! At the same time the increased interactivity makes it rather more compulsive as you do a quick check to see who's doing what, who's replied to your quip and so on. I've also just discovered that there's a whole host of Twitter-related stuff around. Such as the endlessly diverting whosetweet, to twisten.fm amd of course everythingtwitter. Anyway, must dash off and tweet!

Social ties

I've been investigating what it's like to keep up with my friends in what Mimi Ito describes as lightweight contact. Using mobile messaging and microblogging you end up with some rather portable friends who are doing their own thing in ways which interweave with your own everyday activities. As in more traditional forms of networking there seems to be an fluidity and an aggregation of communication, and something more substantial may emerge from that. I guess that's the sense in this post about the social web. Twitter's microblogging service, like Facebook prompts you to talk about the everyday in terms of what you are doing, giving you a semantic frame. But this is easy to subvert as friends tweet about the sites they're looking at, the projects they have in mind, and their more abstract musings. In a way, I suppose, these too are kinds of doing; kinds of doing, or ways of knowing, that form social ties in the particular kinds of networks we are anchored to.

Multiples

Lower Level 2

If you've ever had anything to do with literacies, you can't fail to be struck by the dense textual environment of Hong Kong. It's a sort of junction of so many linguistic crossings. When I hear the term multiliteracies it always brings to mind that order of richness of different practices, in different media and in different places. A kind of multidimensional diversity. This diversity seems to me to be shape of the future (or is it the present?). So it's very good to see Martin Waller launching his Multiliteracies Learning Initiative with a well designed space here. I hope this work continues to thrive!

Take five

Don't think just work

Well, it's time for a nostalgic sort of post. Time because this old blog is now five years old. And in that time it's become a part of my life as I construct this fluid and rhizomic text that weaves in and out of other spaces. Sometimes I surprise myself; sometimes I'm embarrassed. And when there's time I blog about the process over here. More than anything though it provides me with a space to give voice to some of the things that interest me, and some of those things become themes that I pick up in my published work. Other things are more transient. Dead ends leading nowhere. As bloggers come and go, vary in their posting habits, become intermittent or give up all together, I seem to carry on regardless. I must be a born blogger!

Animated graffiti?

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

If the concept of animated graffiti sparks your imagination, then this video shows it in operation. Is wall art a time-based text? I wonder. Here it certainly is (or at least the video is). I know Dr Joolz chronicles how some graffiti artists in NY capture the ways in which their work changes over time, but blu’s work authors changes in a way that animates the walls themselves. The website is attractive and describes the work as 'ambiguous animation painted on public walls'. You can see the blu blog (here). Many thanks to John for pointing to this - respect!

Risk

red berries

Just when more and more people are getting comfortable inhabiting the Facebook space, along comes the spectre of the social networking scam. Graham Cluley of Sophos is quoted in the press as saying 'Facebook has opened people up to a lot of new threats. The more friends you have, the greater the risk.' He uses a slightly more measured tone on his blog, in which he explains how Facebook identities can be stolen (one incident illustrates this). Wired were there first covering this new kind of cybercrime, but as Facebook updates its security systems and users act with due caution its probably just a storm in a teacup.