Social media

Hannah and Aysha
I notice that ‘social media’ is the new buzz word in the blogosphere. Social media, aka the Read/Write Web , provides us with the potential to build and extend our knowledge and understanding, develop niche interests, and connect with others beyond our face-to-face networks. This has major implications for education, liberating it from the constraints of time and place, making it a continuing process. Well is that emancipatory or oppressive? Are we stumbling towards a ‘control society’ where nothing ever gets finished, because it’s always in process: "In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything... school is replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It's the surest way of turning education into a business." (Deleuze (1995:179).

I'll be back

sunset3
I'm heading off into the sunset for a short break, so there'll be no new posts on this blog for a few days. Have added the New Literacies Sampler pdf to the sidebar (under books), please feel free to preview!

Just a second

cat and mouse
I've been following the public debate (in so far as a blog debate is public) between Clay Shirky, Beth Coleman and Henry Jenkins around the status and significance of Second Life. I think I'm interested in Second Life for much the same reasons as Jenkins. It's what people do there - what they perform and what they produce that interests me. But, at least for the time being , I've drawn a line. First Life is too demanding, too complex and too full to even entertain the thought of having a parallel second one! That aside, Jenkins makes some powerful points. Here's a summary of the ones I find most significant:

1. SL provides a model of civic participation and cultural production;
2. The more significant uses of web-based communication lie in asynchronous written communication that frees us from the constraints of place and time;
3. SL represents a particular enactment of Bakhtinian carnival;
4. SL is keeping alive the idea that 'we might design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own culture' (see 1.)

This said, I think we need a more in depth look at how virtual worlds could provide environments for a wider variety of things - collaborative learning and dispersed problem-solving amongst them.

Attention!

weighty sign
People clearly have different motives for signing up to a photosharing site. My original motivation was to create a bank of pictures online that I could use on this blog. Since then things have changed a little - friends, family and a few online acquaintances will, from time to time, visit and comment on my photostream. I enjoy playing a small part in this community. This is quite a typical story of social networking. I’m aware that for others popularity/ attention is a strong drive. If you’re one of those, then Thomas Hawk has 10 tips for getting attention that you might like to look at. But of course it’s not a simple divide between attention-seekers and the rest. I quite regularly check on the popularity of my pics (mostly because it’s an accessible feature and partly because it’s nice to get some approval). The fastest climbing picture in my ‘views’ count is shown above. It’s a quite unremarkable picture of an icon on my daughter’s door. Posted on January 8th it’s now at Number 11 out of the 200 listed why? I guess it’s the tags. I’ve noticed ‘home’ and ‘house’ always attract attention (interesting)… ‘sign’ isn’t exactly a crowd-puller. So I guess it must be ‘weights’ and ‘lifting’. Now I’m running an experiment. I’m going to give the same tags and title to a random image and see how it goes on the ratings. There’s nothing better than a bit of attention, after all.

New literacies

sampler
Well, hard copy of the book has finally arrived and I think it really works well as a collection. There's a really good exploration of Web 2.0 stuff here, and I'm glad to be a part of it! New literacies/digital literacies is really well communicated in this short video which illustrates the changing nature of text as well as what happens behind the scenes in html, with feeds and so on. Not only informative but.. er um.. appropriately presented - ends with a great message.

Music-sharing

Is it a sock or a is it a glove?
I’ve been doing some preliminary work on music-sharing. There’s not much of a literature in this area, but I did find this which shows how music-sharing is ‘richly interlinked with other social practices.’ The authors (writing in 2001) suggest that the challenge for developers is to create technologies that enable users to strengthen existing friendships, make new friends and social contacts. It struck me that there are some key differences between music-sharing and photo-sharing. In photo-sharing you offer your interests, your activity – parts of your personal narrative, whereas music-sharing is much more about signaling affiliation and identity through consumption. The power of recommendation is, after all a significant part of group membership. So allconsuming.com achieves this through the act of naming musical tastes, but pandora.com offers this through the act of sharing files themselves. More to follow…

MySpace (again)

Souvenir table
At last some common sense! Sameer Hindujar’s study shows that teenagers are more alert than they are often given credit for. He says ‘some of the threats allegedly posed by MySpace and its ilk may be a bit overhyped.’ There’s also this on social networking, and an interesting look at tagging as an online social practice (here) Many thanks to Sarah for these!

GreySpace

door1
Not that I have a problem with it, but I found out that Neil Diamond has a MySpace page. In fact, according to this report, more than half of MySpace visitors are now age 35 or older. Why even my old friend Harry has his own page. But despite the demographic shift you can see a whole different look to these pages – different design principles are at work - and, for the most part, there’s a different business sense or purpose at work. In fact it seems less like social networking and more like putting down your marker in cyberspace.

Surfaces for writing

Butterfly tattoo
I was driving the car today when I noticed that someone had written 'I wish i had a car' in the dirt on my rear windscreen. They must have done that in mirror-writing for me to be able to read it. It's probably the simplest act of graffiti - the finger that writes on a dirty white van 'also availbale in white' or 'clean me I'm dirty' or, of course, something less polite... in a similar fashion there's writing on steamed up glass... Then, today, I read in Siri Hustvedt about 'dermagraphism' which seems to have become a generic term for a scratch on the skin that appears like a pattern. But in Hustvedt, it's more of a magical act in which passing a hand over the skin reveals a written message - a sort of psychic tattoo. Mmmm!

Ludic spray

Jez's maze
What a strange-sounding coinage! It sounds a bit kinky, but actually its not... Originating in this interview, ludic spray is defined as ‘the stuff that is inspired by a formal game but doesn't adhere to its rules.’ We could include fanfiction, the emergent economies that grow up around online games and so on. So, when Aleks Krotoski talks about ludic spray in relation to this Ofcom consultation report it begins to make sense. She says that ‘the new media revolution has highlighted that everyone plays. We surf, we tweak, we mash up, we blog. It's how we grapple with new concepts, new ideas and new experiences. Play is an essential part of how we make sense of our universe.’ I’ve been turning those words over in my mind – it’s a popular Western liberal ideology (I even wrote my undergraduate dissertation on that topic all those years back!). Play power sounds like a universal, but is it? I’m not convinced about that. Anyway it’s certainly true about new media – a world in which the boundaries between play and work are often hard to define. And I guess most of my own interests are about tracing that ludic spray into learning in informal and formal educational settings (bring on the virtual world).

Sisters online

Stylish
Here’s an interview with Danah Boyd. There’s a bit that just seems to sum up what I wrote about Hannah yesterday. ‘Most of what's happening is they're building relationships, they're engaging socially, they're seeking validation, they're seeking negotiation of status, and this is happening both on and offline in a very fluid way.’ I think that’s accurate. Now whether Ruth (in the pic) uses MySpace in the same way is a moot point.

Friends online

Me and my bag
This is Hannah when we met up in London last night. She’s going out with two MySpace friends on Saturday night. ‘We’ve known each other for over a year..’ she says – but of course that’s only online. ‘The first few minutes is a bit weird..’ she says, commenting on the initial face-to-face contact – but then ‘it’s like you’ve got so much in common..’. So this adds to all that stuff about new social networks. ‘Anyway I need to meet more people…’ is the final comment. It’s interesting that MySpace is the glue (or more accurately the gluepot). Both her new friends are same age, same sex and live within a twenty mile radius. (Reference back to this).

Spooked

living room
If you look at the photo you might just make out part of a set of Chinese paper-cuts hanging on the wall. Well, the other night one fell down and smashed. The picture cord severed in a clean break. Not only that, but a week or so earlier another one went in the same way. Readers with good memories may recall my post about a mirror falling off the wall whilst I was working at home (here). Strange! Maybe we have a poltergeist…I steady myself by looking up David Shaffer’s blog. He has a paper about learning from video games here and look there’s also Shaffer, D. W. (2007) 'How computer games help children learn' : Palgrave Macmillan (a familiar sounding title) – or if you’re fed up with learning well there’s always complete tom-foolery with the mango clip!

On the same lines

blue sky
It’s always good to think of improvements so I enjoyed reading Liz Lawley’s thoughts on Flickr friends. She says: ‘I’d love to be able to see who we have in common.’ That’s interesting because it’s rather more useful than visualizing social networks (anyway this sort of thing needs loads of contacts). Quite a lot of us signal networks across different sites. Here’s an example of this. But I’d rather like a smarter Flickr homepage – one in which you could tag and search interests, and one that you could personalize a bit. After all your profile is just a form you fill in, and up it pops on the corporate page template, hardly changed at all.

New Literacy Studies Sampler

Think Bridget Riley with a migraine
At last, Colin and Michele's NLS Sampler is out. It features Davies, J. and Merchant, G. `Looking from the inside out: academic blogging as new literacy´ - the piece based on the work Julia and I did on blogs. Unfortunately whilst it's on Amazon they say they are 'currently unable to offer this title'. So, I guess that in the meantime I'll have to wait till copies get shipped over! Perhaps by then I'll have put up a PDF link....

Dangerous signs

DSC02115
After the fun of graffiti bombing and the celebration of graffiti as art, it suddenly looks like dangerous business. One of our most subversive forms of literacy not only challenges laws and conventions, it can also be high risk. I doubt that this sad incident is going to change the picture – after all graffiti is as old as writing itself (1550 B.C Memphis, Egypt) – but I suppose we need to try to minimize the risks that graffiti-artists take (discussion here).

Unbounded

kitchen update1
Two recent media stories raise issues about unregulated media. What should we allow, what should we resist and, of course, how - are central questions. Racist behaviour is the latest of a long list of challenging issues in ‘reality’ TV. Reality has become a slippery term. This made-for-TV version of reality creates the illusion that we are looking behind the scenes at how things really are. But it’s not exactly like that (not real) but of course, there’s no denying it’s actually happening there on our TV screens (real). And then to thicken the plot in comes disrespectful behaviour (racism) which is unpleasant and all too common (real). Thousands complain, politicians get involved, but of course it’s already happened. Slightly different in some ways is the way in which supporters of Le Pen’s far right politics (real) set up an office in Second Life (differently real). Here complaint was transformed into activism, but the problem continues. Then there are rumours that UKIP (unreal) are setting up offices in Second Life. That’s just weird – a party that is obsessed with boundaries crosses the blurry boundary – at that stage I just laugh at the possibility that my virtual brother might want to have his two Lindens-worth in Second Life!

Report

reflect2
“Young people are spending their time in a space which adults find difficult to supervise or understand”. That’s the quote that heads “Their space – education for a digital generation”, the title of a report on new media from Demos. It raises some important questions for all of us. Their pitch is: "Approaching technology from the perspective of children, it tells positive stories about how they use online space to build relationships and create original content. It argues that the skills children are developing through these activities, such as creativity, communication and collaboration, are those that will enable them to succeed in a globally networked, knowledge-driven economy."

With your name

mystery red
MSN allows you to alter your personal settings and provides a window for you to write “what I’m listening to”. This often seems to become the signature of the moment. Here’s a selection from my current contact list:

1. I did actually punch one of the child actors –scuse me
2. I’m not going to tell you ‘how hot’ you are, or ‘how lovely your lips/eyes/hair/whatever’ it’s true
3. Tonight Matthew I’m going to be…A Butterfly
4. This year I’m aiming 4 the moon coz if I miss it I’ll be with the stars

And of course, my very own: *look deep into the parkah*....

The self online

hannah
Increasingly our presence online includes the visual - some sort of visual presentation of the self. I’ve recently been looking at this in three different contexts and thinking about the similarities and differences. Firstly in academic blogs, when the author wishes to be visible she/he will typically show a more or less friendly ‘talking head’ shot see this blog, Vic, Dr Joolz, and Simply Clare (Dr Kate has a slight variation on this theme). Secondly MSN pics – these usually show a ‘me with friends’, ‘me laughing’, ‘me partying’ and so on. Of course video chats offer other possibilities and the screen-grab above shows Hannah displaying a new item from her wardrobe to her jealous sister (AKA: *Some Morrocan has done a cover of my song!*). Thirdly, as we know, in virtual worlds how our avatar looks and dresses attracts attention. I was interested to note yesterday how children working in the Barnsborough environment were concerned about the gender of their avatar and offered onscreen tips on how to select a more appropriate one. But not only that, our teachers too were trying on different bodies, checking each other out, rotating etc…. ‘how does my bum look in these dungarees’! As in life, so online?