The Case of the iPad

In a rather lengthy email earlier this week, our publisher announced that The Case of the iPad is now out. What exactly out means is, of course, a moot point. The work, also called a book, was completed about six months ago, although at that stage it was only really a document in Word. Somewhere along the line it adopted that rather quaint epithet 'manuscript', even though it was never handwritten and only ever illuminated by the thought that went into it. The publishers (Springer) have, inevitably, worked their magic on it and in doing so it has taken on the virtual form of a published volume. It's not quite clear yet, when the printed copies will roll off the press or whether that process is complete, or how much it matters but nevertheless the book is already out...in some sense, somewhere. Things are moving. On Amazon, for example, the picture of a Union Jack t-shirt, which for some inexplicable reason had been a placeholder, has now been replaced by an image of the book, which you can metaphorically 'look inside'. You can place an order for a print copy or the Kindle version. It looks like you can have the Kindle version right away, but the print version won't itself be released for another ten days. So you get the idea that published but not yet released may have something to do with distribution, which of course is pretty much instant in digital formats. But more interesting than all of this is the fact that the book - if that word still holds any fixed meaning - is unbundled. If you are a die-hard fan of Simpson and Walsh, or Karen Wohlwend (or any other of our wonderful contributors), Springer will sell you their chapter, as a stand alone, for just shy of thirty dollars. It makes some sort of sense. If that's all you want, that's what you can get, without having to shell out for the whole volume. It probably makes sense for Springer, too. I'm sure they've done their research. For an author and editor, and possibly for a reader too, there are some down sides. People are less likely to stumble on your chapter if they take the unbundled route. One of the reasons I like edited volumes, is that you can accidentally, as it were, find yourself reading somebody or something that you wouldn't otherwise encounter. Unbundling also changes things for editorship. In The Case of the iPad we purposely gathered together scholars with different takes on mobile literacies, and we spent some time in Skype meetings, offices and hotel bars discussing what their work did, and what it did alongside the work of others. The book is an ensemble of these and I think Cathy, Alison and Maureen would agree with me, that it's greater than the sum of its parts. But that's old-school, more like a prog-rock concept album or a sampler (remember them?), when what people seem to want now is their favourite DJ using a remix of the work and artfully fading across into someone else's with approximately the same BPM. Anything really, as long as the punters come in, and the dancefloor is full. Or is that the wrong idea? Do we just become our own DJ mashing up Bergson and Baudrillard, for example? And wasn't that what good readers did best in the first place? I don't know, but something has shifted. Buy the book!

iPadology

Observational studies of children working on desktop computers sometimes drew our attention to how those particular material conditions established a new sort of physical discipline. In schools early digital literacy was predominantly a sedentary desk work with the textual display on the vertical axis. In contrast navigation, control and transcription was on the horizontal plane. As in traditional reading and writing students were seat bound but what had changed was the direction of the gaze as well as the work of the hands. So the move from page to screen involved, amongst many other things, new bodily engagements. The most challenging of these often turned out to be the keyboard and mouse operations. Young hands had to learn how to do new things - yet, perhaps unsurprising these new forms of dexterity were quickly mastered. The more recent adoption of tablet computers shifts this yet again. As always literacy practices have an embodied dimension, but now new literacies are more like the old ones in the sense that the text is portable. More or less the same weight as a print book, or notebook, the tablet has portability in its favour. And touchscreen control involves a close physical interweaving of production and consumption. In common with earlier practices this literacy involves the work of the hands, but those movements are new all over again. New for young hands, but quickly learnt. And as with other technological innovations the name of the inventor or the brand has become interchangeable with the thing itself. We tended to prefer to use the name of the Hungarian inventor 'Biro' to refer to the ballpoint pen, and like substituting the verb 'google' for looking something up, 'iPad' has come to stand for all things tablet - even though tablet computers preceded this particular product. It's as if literacies have become mobile all over again. This just could mean something new in learning situations. iPads are unlikely to blow away in a breeze, writing on them is free from blots, but you can still drop them, crack the screen or run out of power. Same same, different different!

Multimodal themes

Do we all have undeveloped areas of interest? I suspect we do, and sometimes I think it's the case that the interest is latent - we might take some time to connect the dots, to realise the interest is there in the first place! That's what it feels like reading the literature on gesture and pointing. With a long-standing hobbyish fascination with the role that hands play in literacy events, the iPads work brings this into the daylight at last. Margaret Mackey introduced me to Frank Wilson's book The Hand (watch him here), and later I read Raymond Tallis's book with the same title. An interest I never followed up. Now I'm reading Herbert Clark's chapter 'Pointing and Placing' which is in this collection which is a carefully-constructed scholarly exploration of the ways in which communicative attention incorporates gesture in 'directing to' and 'placing for'. At first it seemed to be very culturally specific, but as the chapter progresses Clark acknowledges that these are cultural conventions - his data being North American (presumably Caucasian). His use of the idea of vectors in nodding,  sweeping hand movements, general and specific pointing to objects and sites is fascinating. One dimension that needs more exploration is how this articulates with social relationships. Is it an accident that the majority of Clark's examples are of men pointing things out to women? To extend this to toddlers on iPads it raises the question of adults' attempts to direct to and place for young children - and, of course, because toddlers are so delightfully agentive, the reverse. How do they manipulate adult attention through gesture? So all this folds into the ways in which the hands are also controlling, opening apps, turning pages and the rest. More to follow!

Pointing out a myth

Watching toddlers on iPads quickly shows that the claim that the interface is 'intuitive' is quite clearly a complete myth. Not only do you have to understand the logic of haptic control, you also have to get it just right. To know that you tap or swipe is a start, but when it comes down to it, it's a matter of just how you tap or swipe. The margin of error is quite wide. Still, our data shows children engrossed in playful learning, experimenting with pointing. touching, holding and carrying tablets. I'm particularly interested in how the gestures cross from one experience to another. We have video of toddlers mixing pretend cake with a circling motion, swiping as if turning a page on a print book, and even applying some iPad gestures in other contexts, too. I'll definitely be following up on the literature on gesture. Apparently, Adam Kendon's 'Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance' (2004) is a good start. You could also get quite absorbed in the deictic gesture and the segue between pointing and pressing with the first finger. In our video data you can see plenty of fingers poised in mid-air, children guiding adult fingers and vice versa....and then apparently, I'm not the only one who somehow imagines data stuck to my finger when I'm cutting and pasting! It's all fascinating stuff which will be written up in due course, but for moment the idea that iPads are tailor-made for young children has to join the list of myths.