Immersion and ambiguity

Britta ended her talk on Friday with this provocative video 'Immersion', originally featured on the New York Times site. It's the second time I've seen it and I can't help feeling that it seems like a criticism of new media because of the way in which some of the gleeful expressions are juxtaposed against violent audio tracks from the videogames. For me it also edits out some important features like reflection, decision-making, problem-solving and, of course, collaboration. But interestingly not everyone sees it like that. Others I talked to on Friday just see the level of immersion - and maybe the idea that gamer kids have other (newer?) pleasures, and I think that was Britta's reading of it. On reflection it's a real test case in multimodality, because somethings are clearly communicated but others are open to interpretation. Should we care about the author's intentions? Or, even if we knew them, would they be relevant? Presumably a written account of the topic of immersion in videogames would require some point of view, and perhaps a more closed set of meanings (interestingly, point of view has an alternative meaning here). I'm not arguing that that would be better, of course. Just different. Any views on the video?

Mind blending

Yesterday was the fifth in the ESRC Seminar series 'Children's and young people's digital literacies in virtual online spaces ' and brought the focus onto classroom innovation. It was a fascinating combination with Angela Colvert on ARGs in school, Steve Thompson on children producing internet radio (using Audacity in Wordpress), Martin Waller on ClassroomTweets and other interesting things and Britt Pollmuller on animation and Machinima (she's using Fraps and Second Life). Here's more detail on the programme. Uniting themes for me were the emphasis on playful and creative meaning-making across a number of virtual/actual and digital/traditional textual spaces. So, although I never liked that whole bandwagon of 'blended learning', the presentations actually showed us different sorts of blending - or a weaving together of semiotic systems to create what Margaret Mackey has described as slippery texts. All told a very stimulating day as one of the participants observed.

Hope?

One can only wonder whether our new coalition government’s package of education reforms will do anything at all to reduce the inequities of our system. The market logic of the proposed increase in academies (schools deemed to be successful through accountability measures) doesn’t seem particularly promising. And in Higher Education, despite widening participation, we learn from Sir Martin Harris, the Director of Offa, that the ‘most advantaged 20 per cent of the young population are now around seven times more likely than the most disadvantaged 40% to attend the most selective institutions’ (here). Reading this against Annette Laureau’s well-written and nuanced account of unequal childhoods in America just reinforces the view that inequality is deeply embedded in both cultures, and is just lightly touched by the rhetoric of hope and opportunity.

Questions of identity

Wandering around the Lodo district of Denver is like remembering a past with its imposing warehouses which stored the spoils of intense agricultural and industrial activity. Each of these brick-built buildings now repurposed as loft accommodation with boutiques and smart cafes at ground level bears the fading painted sign of the former proprietor - each an identity lost in time. It seemed like a fitting end to a conference in which identity was often mentioned yet never fully explored. And that set me thinking that apart from developing more powerful theories of identity we need to ask why it so often enters the contemporary discourses of social and cultural theory, of literacy and education research. Is it simply a circulating discourse with no identifiable origin, or is it part of the post-modern condition, a state of affairs where we no longer have religion to tells us who we are, in which we no longer play a part in the grand narratives of the industrial age, where we are no longer embedded in close-knit communities, and increasingly less anchored to time and space? This is the sort of position that Giddens articulates in his conception of late modernity and provides the conditions for the obligation to continuously perform narratives of the self. A considerable amount of the commentary on youth online and analyses of new digital literacy practices appears to provide evidence of this as studies reveal how their participants produce and perform identities in remixes and collages of popular culture. But this sort of activity clearly varies across populations, and in some cases the real identity work is a struggle to enter this world whilst remaining faithful to a more deep-rooted sense of one's social position. For me, the idea of identity and particularly identity and meaning-making remains central, but it seems to invite further interrogation.

High-Tech Tots

Went to an early session today - High-Tech tots explored the intersections between literacy and technology in early childhood. Marina Bers work (see above) on robotics in the early years was fascinating. She described how young children might first understand some basic principles by a role-play of programming their teacher...a metaphorically loaded idea. But on the more practical level she and her colleagues help young children to programme robots with 'smart' wooden blocks and that's impressive work. Nicola Yelland was also very good on problematising play as a concept. This enriched yesterday's reflections on playful spaces. In these cases play was presented in terms of adult designed spaces populated by material objects (also designed by adults) in which children were encouraged to engage in creative and informal activity. They varied to the extent to which adult intentions might impact on children's learning. The book which showcases the work is called High-Tech Tots, so I went straight to the publishers' stand at AERA to grab a copy. There I was told it was for display only, so I helped myself to some promotional lip-salve as recompense!

Finding a space

Why Cecilia Henriquez and Jessica Robles' work on expert identities in table-top games was placed with our work on SNSs under a title of Digital Identities is a mystery only AERA organisers could solve, but interestingly the juxtaposition was useful not least because it set us thinking of how apparently dissimilar topics shared some commonality. Both constitute social spaces in which relational and identity work is done, and in which learning is not directly related to curricular content areas. And in this sense they also share some similarities with virtual worlds. So are there spaces in school in which these kind of activities can find a comfortable home? There seem to be two kinds of responses to this. One is trying to open some spaces in educational contexts which are not so driven by curricular constraints, and in sensitive ways, so that when the cool enters school it doesn't cease to be cool. The other is to do pioneering work like Sasha Barab in which transformative play gets linked to curricular goals. Both seem worth exploring.

Connecting sites

Ruth sent me this political comment on a hung parliament today via Blackberry Messenger. It was a good reminder of nearly-now connectivity and family networking. It didn't need a comment, she knew I'd like it. The theme continued for me as I tried to keep track of AERA delegates I know via mobile phone and text messages. And then I enjoyed listening to Amy Stornaiuolo and Glynda Hull talking about the Kidnet project. This is work that draws on social networking to create extra school/ school-based links between students in the US, India, South Africa and Norway. The issue of using literacies and multimodal representations to communicate cosmopolitan understandings across sites in an 'educational' way is interesting. I'm not sure at what point it ceases to be social networking and becomes educational networking, particularly when the public dimension often seen as a hallmark of Web 2.0 is removed. You can learn more here, where you log in with 'guest' and use 'space2cre8' as password.

A sense of one's place

Restricted networks might serve to entrap socially excluded young adults. In a previous post I suggested that all the hype around Web 2.0 could be irrelevant to these young people. SNSs often thicken existing ties in localized networks and face-to-face friendship groups and so may simply compound social inequities. I felt uneasy with the concept of ‘restricted networks’ because of the deficit implied. In a way it could be more about a misapprehension of a ‘sense of one’s place’ which Bourdieu argues leads one to exclude oneself from places one is excluded from (1984:471). Then perhaps the discourses of exclusion circulate and solidify social position. The high point of an otherwise tedious transatlantic flight was reading Reay, Crozier and Clayton’s lucidly argued piece on working-class students in HE. From a very different perspective it deals with some similar issues about shifting identities, social networks and the tensions involved in crossing boundaries.

Virtual World Watch

Last night after I'd finished teaching on Adobe Connect I took a few students along with me to the Infolit iSchool in Second Life to listen to a talk by John Kirriemuir who runs Virtual World Watch. monitored the use of environments such as Second Life by academics in UK universities and colleges. Virtual World Watch monitors the use of environments such as Second Life by academics in UK universities and colleges. You can see the slideshow here. John (Silversprite Helsinki in SL) had lots of interesting things to say and some great examples. I was quite struck by how he said that most UK universities had some sort of a presence - or at least some kind of activity in Second Life. You couldn't say the same about schools.

Digital Literacy

Cassie Hague and Sarah Payton Of FutureLab have done some great work in providing guidance and examples of digital literacy in the classroom. Their handbook and I quote - aims to introduce educational practitioners to the concepts and contexts of digital literacy and to support them in developing their own practice of digital literacy in classroom subject teaching and in real school settings. The handbook is supported by video case studies of digital literacy in practice. Great stuff, and it's good to see plenty of reference to Web 2.0 for Schools (Davies and Merchant, 2009)!

JECL anniversary!

Yes, the tenth anniversary issue of the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy is out! It's got some great articles by Anne Dyson, Jim Anderson and colleagues, Kathleen Roskos and Elaine Reese and is well worth the read. We've had our ups and downs but its been a really productive venture. I've just got journal business cards from Sage, and they come with the little promotional quote 'a distinctive, leading voice in research in early childhood literacy, with a multinational range of contributors and readership' - well that just about sums it up! Congratulations to all who've been involved, contributing, reviewing and editing. And upcoming (10:3) we have a great Special Issue on Literacy and Technology. Watch this space; read JECL!

Risk and experimentation

I have a chapter on UK teens' social networking as new literacy in this fine-looking volume edited by Donna Alvermann. As I'm looking back over the data ahead of this year's AERA conference in Denver, I've been struck by how the teenagers in my study were poised between the overlapping discourses of risk and experimentation. Their engagement with Facebook and Bebo was marked by caution. The social networking of some was monitored by their parents and they were all aware of the public nature of what they wrote - how universities, employers or new friends might read their pages in different ways. And they were also aware of some of the potential difficulties associated with friending 'randoms', particularly in the light of high profile media stories of stalking, grooming and worse. The teenage girls were accutely aware of how they presented themselves in their profile pictures. 'Pouting' was described as 'ridiculous' and some thought a head-and-shoulders shot should include some evidence of clothing 'just in case'. At times, reading the data, it almost felt that they were hypersensitised to risk through repeated doses of e-safety. Yet, interestingly, at the same time there was evidence of innovative and creative activity, playfulness as well as careful attention to managing sensitive social relationships and how these might be enriched, supplemented or mediated by their digital practices.

Collaboration?

I still keep a few curriculum publications going. Earlier this year I did this on writing sci-fi stories, but the one above which Scholastic just brought out has a different history. It's based on my original ideas, developed at a primary school in Rotherham, but it's been updated by Pam Dowson. So it's only right and proper that it acknowledges the joint authorship. What does seem a bit strange though is that I've no idea who Pam is and, as far as I know we've never met! That's rather different from other things I've jointly and collaboratively written, which have involved lots and lots of discussion. I'm not complaining, I love collaboration but although this is clearly a joint enterprise I don't think it involved any real collaboration!

Lounge rocks

In a short break from the more serious blog reflections, here's YouTube working its magic again - lounge music from the archive, complete with some helpful subtitling. It makes it so accessible across all imaginable cultural divides. Well, most anyway!

Connect-ing

I really enjoyed the Futurelab event on Web 2.0 and enjoyed meeting so many enthusiastic educators. The discussions sparked a number of reflections about the role of Web 2.0 in education. Probably the most interesting was the realisation that it's a term I don't use much any more. Has it reached the end of its usefulness, or is it something that has simply been absorbed into my own repertoire? As more and more digital spaces follow the 2.0 trend perhaps it is becoming too familiar to us. It may in fact be more helpful to think about what not-2.0 is like and how that works. So the screenshot is last night's Adobe Connect session. 2.0-not, but slick and quite useful for that online meeting/learning and of course in a single session we'll quite seemlessly link to 2.0 stuff. That's OK; horses for courses. So in Wednesday's debates I was also struck by the tendency of the enthusiast to introduce a sort of moral imperative. My colleagues ought to do Web 2.0 stuff. That caused me to tweet again on the topic! Finally, I appreciated the re-introduction to the concept of personal learning networks and how this may or may not articulate with digital sources of professional development. Think on!

The heterogeneous text

The rise of the personalised screen view constitutes an interesting challenge to our definition of text. For most of the history of digital texts we have had the capacity to alter the size, the shape and often the order in which we read on screen. But the rise of socially interactive web spaces has led to the emergence of the heterogeneous text. By this I mean textual spaces like Facebook and Twitter in which what is seen on screen is dependent on who you are - your unique point of view. Of course there is some stability and uniformity at a general level of layout, but the particular configuration of status updates or tweets is dependent on who's in your social network. Although it would be possible to create two identical pages through a contrivance, your page is esentially your own. So even one space is textually heterogeneous, and of course has a level of instability dependent on the regularity of updates. The unique point of view is an interesting departure from one-to-many print texts and their web equivalents. In the latter the 'look' may vary, but the text retains a certain authority. My blog page looks slightly different in reduced view, through Safari, Firefox or Explorer, but the text has a certain integrity. In common with gaming and virtual worlds, SNS pages are by contrast, marked by point of view - and of course that can lead us to ask 'What is the text, then?' Too big a question for here, but we could perhaps look to a modified genre theory to give an account of this heterotextuality. As I say, in an SNS, the basic design or template clearly has certain fairly stable structural features. They help us to distinguish a Facebook page from, say, a Flickr page. The macrostructure needs to be fairly stable for exactly these reasons. When Facebook alters this, as it does from time to time, there are reactions - short run debates with an 'I liked it how it was, why did they have to change it' to 'this is better, much better tone' to them. But what about the smaller stuff, the bits of social meaning, the updates themselves? Here, Bakhtin's notion of micro-genres is helpful, because it helps us to identify the patterning inherent in individual updates...well potentially, anyway. I expect there's probably some born again linguist out there doing a PhD on the generic features of tweets as we ...speak! Good luck to them. For now I'm just pondering on how the heterotextual nature of digital texts is another facet of 'newness'.

Mobile interstices

Dr Joolz has a good post on the Pew Internet Survey and some commentary on the wireless world. It strikes me that the real shift is happening in the world of mobile technology (at least here in the UK). The implications for social networking are very interesting - your friends are always with you until your battery dies OR until you delete them. So the virtual and the real are interwoven in new ways. You are present and you are not present; here and almost here; now and nearly now. All of these but in a perfectly ordinary, everyday sort of way. This is from the Horizon 2010 report: ‘Mobiles as a category have proven more interesting and more capable with each passing year, and continue to be a technology with new surprises. The mobile market today has nearly 4 billion subscribers, more than two-thirds of whom live in developing countries. Well over a billion new phones are produced each year, a flow of continuous enhancement and innovation that is unprecedented in modern times. The fastest-growing sales segment belongs to smart phones - which means that a massive and increasing number of people all over the world now own and use a computer that fits in their hand and is able to connect to the network wirelessly from virtually anywhere. Thousands of applications designed to support a wide range of tasks on virtually any smart-phone operating system are readily available, with more entering the market all the time. These mobile computing tools have become accepted aids in daily life, giving us on-the-go access to tools for business, video/audio capture and basic editing, sensing and measurement, geolocation, social networking, personal productivity, references, just-in-time learning - indeed, virtually anything that can be done on a desktop.’ My Masters students tell me how they are doing some of their coursework at the bus stop, in between meetings and so on. They can connect to their studies, to others in that particular affinity space, in the interstitial moments of their daily lives. Is that new, or is it new? I guess it's nearly new!

Restricted networks

Gergen describes social networks as being 'typically composed of persons who share a particular interest or category, who make their identity public, and participate in communication with others in the network' (2009:400) and so adds to the celebratory literature on SNSs by describing them as enriching relational processes and demonstrating an investment in 'inclusive participation.' But given that there's growing evidence that SNSs mostly thicken existing social ties - particularly with teens and young people - acting as an additive to face-to-face interaction, is the globalizing, emancipatory discourse about SNSs just another iteration of evangelical technologism? I've been reading this on socially excluded young adults and note that the authors conclude that although these people's social networks are very supportive, the sort of social capital embedded in them not only binds them but also traps them and closes down opportunities. Then, it begins to look as though those most likely to benefit from the affordances of SNSs already possess considerable social capital and maybe more adept at using them to secure further advantages. MacDonald et al's work does not look at SNSs, but I'm just putting two and two together.

Pivotal point?

Flicking through duGay’s OU text 'Production of Culture/Cultures of Production' gives a great insight into fin de siècle media studies. I’m interested in the way in which the emphasis comes down heavily on cultural practices rather than texts, and this is particularly relevant with respect to yesterday’s ramblings. In fact there’s very little direct analysis of texts in the book. The closest thing is Gendron’s entertaining critique of Adorno which uses plenty of examples from doo-wop and rock ‘n’ roll to problematise ‘On popular music’. The pivotal point, for Gendron, is the construction of meaning (and identity) as he talks about ‘a constant struggle at the meeting point of production and consumption between the evocation of entrenched codes and the insinuation of alternative meanings.’ (in duGay, 2002: 117). Leaving aside for the moment the blurring of production and consumption in some new media environments, this pivotal point easily generalises to a whole range of encounters with texts.

Decentring the text

The study of literacy has given pride of place to the text for much of its recent history. Whether in the social construction of meaning through the study of genre or in the shift in focus from the author's design to the role of the reader in literature, the central point of interest is still the text. The NLS perspective with its emphasis on how textual practices are embedded in social events has offered a richer understanding of how literacy works in everyday life, often describing events in which texts are more peripheral to action and interaction than in the more formal contexts of literacy education and literary study. Reflecting on this has made wonder what happens when we decentre the text in the description of literacy events. I imagine that this leaves us with situated interaction, the negotation of meaning, relationships with material objects and actions, and Discourse (in Gee's sense of the word). Two examples may serve to flesh this out a bit. In studying SNSs as a particularly topical site for digital literacy, my academic background predisposes me to examine the actual 'texture' of Facebook pages - features such as the organisational layout, their multimodality, the languages used, the interactive patterning and so on. But I find myself stepping back from that to gain a sense of what Facebook means to teens, what they are doing and what they think they are doing, and its significance in their lives. That's a subtle shift of emphasis which begins to reveal how the textual space has a leavening effect on friendships and wider social relationships. In a second example I imagine what a study of classroom literacy might look like if we turned our attention away from the text. Perhaps we would describe interactions differently - for example the configurations of adults and children in classroom spaces, their actions and activities around significant objects (boards, screens, paper, books and so on), the way they are positioned and the positions they adopt. Would we begin to see how literacy practices help to reify social relationships and suggest possible identity performances more clearly? I'm not suggesting that the attention given to the text is wrong or misguided but just considering how shifting our gaze may bring other things into sharper focus.