How open is open?

In 1996, when Peter Gabriel released the ground-breaking game Eve, he hit on a novel concept - players could remix, albeit in a rather basic way, some of the world music samples and accompaniments he had collected. The concept of interacting with, and then changing the music you listened to made the work more open and more playable. In a way, Brian Eno's app Scape does the same thing, combining all the wizardry of touch screen technology with Eno's characteristic creative flare. Scape is basically an album of 13 or so tracks of ambient music. But it's an album with a difference in which the themes and functions are open and playable. You quite easily become an active player of ambient music by rearranging the colourful shapes and abstract symbols against a background 'mood'. Here, Eno is developing the same sort of logic that lies behind his oblique strategies, in which you generate selections and combinations from limited sets of themes to create something novel. It's an appealing metaphor for openness. If a 'traditional' piece of ambient music is closed - closed in the sense that you have to listen to it in the way in which it was composed and recorded, then maybe Scape is open, because you have some creative degrees of freedom in how you play it. But of course, at the end of the day, it's always Scape and perhaps after the first half hour, breaking your ambient trance, you may decide that although it's pretty good, it's not really that open. What would be more open, then? A day in Eno's studio, perhaps. More realistically, more open would be working with the samples themselves - adding your own found sounds (using GarageBand?) or maybe working with the code behind it all. The capacity to customize, to alter, to modify, to remix or play the text is a key theme in new media, but it usually happens under certain constraints. Genuine openness must, by definition, be unconstrained and is perhaps creative at a more fundamental level. I don't want to belittle the advent of new levels of interactivity or the move towards openness with such a low entry cost, but I just want to suggest that there are some interesting subtleties in this whole debate; if indeed it really is an open debate.

Qualitatively funny

Academic re-mix, or what - I laughed at this! It's not of course that we want to draw hard and fast lines between quantitative and qualitative paradigms, but some of the lines rehearse very familiar conversations - conversations that I've found myself with colleagues and friends. It seems like 'scientism' can be very emotive topic, and that's where the mash-up hits home. The emotive tone combines with excellently timed sub-titles. Just a diversion from real work, of course, just like fooling around for hours on Gif Control or plotting your moves on Path.

Digital literacies pizza slice

In preparing the open textbook for DefT we want to avoid getting mired in the seemingly endless debate over definitions of digital literacies (see here for example). So the pizza model shown in draft form is just an explanatory model for the ways in which digital literacies has been operationalised by project participants. Partly because of the concentration of literacy folk on the project team, there is some sort of desire to hold on to a view of literacy practices to describe those social interactions and negotiations of meaning that occur with, in and around semiotic systems. In the central region, what is referred to as core is the most conservative rendering of this - that is practices that depend upon alphabetic representation. So that is intended to include not only basic decoding and encoding, but also the whole range of communicative practices, sense-making, textuality etc whether this is on screen, paper-based or both. Although it is core, we are not, of course, privileging it in any way, merely indicating that is the most simple definition. The second ring acknowledges the way in which practices - and particularly, but not exclusively, screen-based ones - are increasingly seen as being multi-modal. This constitutes an expanded view of literacies. Ever since David Barton drew our attention to metaphorical uses of the word literacy we have had a useful way to describe terminology like 'emotional literacy', political literacy, 'scientific literacy' and so on. This sort of language is generally used as a metaphor to describe a sort of competence - and it's clear that's how some people see digital literacy and that's what's represented in the outer ring. So in the light of these ways of thinking about the way the word literacy is used (core, extended and expanded) we are able to conceive of digitally-mediated practices as literacies in different ways. When related to the case studies in our project work we can then see that teachers located their work in one or another of the concentric rings. However, in so doing their activities nearly always included stuff in the other rings (as well as work outside of the slice).

Don't think twice (it's all right)

Ever since I came across this apparently innocent, 'off-duty' pic of our PM, I've been thinking about the issues it raises. You have to be of a certain age to connect it with the original album cover, but it's quite clearly a visual quote from Dylan's Freewheelin' cover which was released some 49 years ago. Visual quotes have become quite a theme in contemporary visual art and, of course, cinema too - Woody Allen is probably the leading exponent of this, but my personal favourite is Luis Bunuel's 'Last Supper' scene in Viridiana. (I'm not sure, by the way, whether to describe this as quote, parody or remix, but like citation, imitation and plagiarism in the written form, it's a phenomenon that is certainly worthy of academic scrutiny). But all this aside, what exactly is going on here? According to the Guardian newspaper, the photograph has been carefully set up by Tory party publicists as an explicit attempt to capture our leader in casual mode. That's the point at which all this becomes very subtle. So, assuming this is true - and there's no reason to doubt it - we have to begin questioning even the most seemingly innocent media image, that is to question its level of authenticity. The 'loving couple' in Dylanesque embrace may have just 'popped out for a curry' but the artifice suggests an attempt to create more....but more what? More of a sixties type counter-culture figure, surely not! Or is it trying to tap into something deeper, like a subliminal tilt at youthful romance by riffing off an iconic image deeply lodged in the memories of mature voters? If this is the case, then we might quite rightly recoil at an intention to subtley massage our political opinions. Actually, having said that, I'm not completely convinced  that is likely to alter my own attitudes to Cameron or to sway my anti-coalition political leanings, but maybe that's a different point. OK, well there's just one other avenue that opens up, and it's one that gives more positive credit to the photographer - a more innocent view. How clever, and how ironic to draw this visual parallel. All told, then, the image raises all sorts of questions; but of course the answer is blowing in the wind!

Screen panic

Journalists have latched on to Aric Sigman's polemic about the health risks of screen time on young children with gusto, even though it's widely acknowledged that negative effects are only 'possible'. The best response is buried in this report, in which Dorothy Bishop observes that 'His comments about impact of screen time on brain development and empathy seem speculative in my opinion, and the arguments that he makes could equally well be used to conclude that children should not read books.' So, maybe this isn't the end of civilization as we know it, we're not all going to hell in a hand cart. Let's here it for Peppa Pig!

The reading hands

The Effect of a Book, Extending Beyond The Form from João Machado on Vimeo.

This little video that draws attention to what our hands do when we read re-kindled my interest in the topic. It was shown yesterday by Doug Belshaw at the DefT conference, and it reminded me of when I tried to map out some of the new motor skills that constitute emergent literacies 2.0 (in 'Barbie meets Bob the Builder'), an interest I've shared over the years with Margaret Mackey. At that time I was just drawing attention to tapping keys, pointing and clicking and so on. But now, as our attention begins to shift to touchscreen technology, and in particular that associated with iPads and iPods we see a changing repertoire that includes pressing, tapping and swiping. As I've discovered, watching my 2 year-old grandson, these are quite nuanced movements. If you don't cleanly tap the icon of an app, you'll end up with a swipe - and a different result. I'm not suggesting that this is at all problematic, but it just underlines the fact that different literacy tools require different kinds of movements. I'm always getting my iPad gestures mixed up with my Kindle ones! 

DeFT OER conference

I've been on leave for a while, but back in time for the DeFT project conference which was a raging success! I'm sure there'll be more about the day on the project blog, but this is just to give a preview of Jack's excellent video record of the day and to capture a few things that might otherwise be forgotten. For me, an important message was the imperative to change practice in an environment in which changing policy might be more challenging. At the very heart of what we've been doing is encouraging active learning in which pupils and students produce and consume new meanings with technology. I've observed that the extent to which old or new literacies were used in project activity varied enormously, but was always there as teachers and their pupils merged the online/offline, teacher/learner, home/school, in-classroom/out-of-clasroom spaces. And they all exemplified safe, ethical and advantageous practice which invariably opened opportunities for critical digital literacies. OERs seem to me to have an important part to play in taking this work forwards. There are two important aspects of this: firstly, OERs foster the kinds of participation that are intimately connected with the 'mindset' and practices of web2.0 and digital literacies in that they enable us to personalise, remix, and add to knowledge and secondly,  in a rapidly changing environment in which resources and practices are fluid and ephemeral, they offer the possibility of regular updating and new forms of sharing. But beyond all this, there may be a deeper, political edge - in a time in which education is increasingly marketised, constrained and reduced, the open participative ethos of these environments may assist grassroots connection between teachers who are all too often separated by sector, by region, and by national boundaries.

The Legendary Mr Santos

Mr Santos. I hope it's not his real name. We heard about Mr Santos on Wednesday afternoon, and I've been thinking about him, on and off, ever since. He's a familiar figure in work on digital literacies in education - maybe we all know, or have heard of a Mr Santos. His (or her) story begins in school, as a fairly conservative classroom teacher, dependent or even over-dependent on face-the-front didactic pedagogy. Computers, ICT training and so on have arrived, passed and left no lasting impression. Mr Santos isn't particularly techno-savvy in his leisure time, too - or so it seems. But then, with just a little help and encouragement, everything begins to change. He feels the need, usually as the result of an external force, to produce something digital - and being rather challenged by this he hands it over to the kids. They get fired up, they work things out, they use resources and learning from home, they work together and produce creative stuff that surprises Mr Santos. Their enthusiasm and the way they approach the task so impresses him that he begins to re-evaluate his practice. More collaborative work ensues, and more digital stuff is allowed into the mix. It's not that technology itself has changed anything, but perhaps a combination of external encouragement, pupil motivation and the softer side of Mr Santos. And so it goes. Well, I don't think anyone has really got to grips with the story of The Legendary Mr Santos and his companions - those who crop up in digital narratives in all sorts of different contexts. He is popular, I think, because his 'change' chimes with some basic liberal-progressive educational discourses (pupil autonomy, collaboration, creative production, non-ICT-ICT etc) and of course his story is positioned against the dark forces of neo-liberal reform (lock-step individual progress, prescriptive curricula, accountability, direct teaching etc etc)...but there's probably other stuff going on here, too. I suppose, and in fact I dearly hope that Mr Santos is not the only story we hear. We need more about the doubters, the knock-down enthusiasts and all the others, too!

Visiting

Visitors can bring something fresh, or even something familiar seen from a different perspective. I suppose both seemed to be true listening to today's seminar, in which Christine Edwards-Groves spoke about the multiliteracies project in the Riverina, New South Wales. It's nearly a year since I was over there, and I was interested to hear again how the digital was locally inflected. It was good to be reminded of the work of Hutchby and Moran-Ellis and the role that technology plays in mediating the relationship between the user and others. So visiting and being visited is a sort of trading relationship in academia - long may it thrive!

On books

In writing about popular literacies and digital culture there is often a need to underline the ways in which the dominant discourses and practices of print literacy are privileged by schools and wider society. Quite specific adult-child interactions with picture story books have been normalised in the literature of early literacy, and because of this some educators (myself included) have emphasised the importance of other ways of meaning-making and other kinds of literacy. By adopting broader and newer definitions of literacy it may sometimes seem that we are against traditional forms - but this is actually not the case. With a new project on the use of interactive storybooks on iPads, some of these misapprehensions may clear. Here we'll be looking at young children doing book-sharing with adults - differently mediated of course - but arguably the same thing. Last year I worked with colleagues evaluating a Booktrust project based on book gifting for 11 year olds. The evaluation of this, the Booked Up project, is here. And currently I'm working with a team who are looking at Bookstart (aimed a younger children). So these conjunctions between new, traditional, narrow and broad definitions of literacy are very much on my mind. Although the study of children's literature sometimes seems to be a bit of a rarefied discipline, it continues to make an important contribution. Perhaps there is a need for more discussion between some of the factionalised camps of literacy educators. Reading Michael Rosen on Sunday, I was struck by how his idea that what we call children's literature '... are interventions in society's debate about bringing up children' would be an excellent starting point. What other literacies make such interventions? Critical literacies, digital literacies, multiliteracies....

In print

Finally, the Virtual Literacies book is going to press. It's been a delight to work so harmoniously with co-editors Julia Gillen, Jackie Marsh and Julia Davies as well as with a talented bunch of contributors. I know it sounds decidedly old-school, but it'll be great to get my hands on the hard copy! And, to add to the flow of publication my paper 'Mobile Practices in Everyday Life' is now online with BJET. That's the second of my forrays into what I see as the world of ICT. Now it's probably time to regroup with my literacies colleagues!

Peppa Pig pedagogy

The first word my grandson said was 'Peppa'. An inveterate fan from 18 months, the Peppa Pig series is available to him on TV, a choice of iPhones and iPads, and on his own DVD player more or less on demand - and he demands quite a lot! And of course there are Peppa Pig toys, interactive books, and magazines at his disposal too. For his birthday, his mother plans to make a Peppa Pig cake. So Peppa and George are available across media platforms and his everyday experience is mediated (sometimes in advance) through Peppa Pig. Yesterday he did 'jumping in muddy puddles', and as is the way with popular narratives, his family were quick to cross-reference this to a pig episode he was already familiar with. The animated pig family sits at the centre of a web of meaning-making practices through which very young children are introduced to their social world. The self-aware pig family features Peppa, her younger brother George, the over-confident and often inept Daddy Pig and the can-do Mummy Pig who regularly flies the flag for competent women. Social and cultural values are woven into the fabric of the Peppa narratives, and alongside parents and caregivers, they are the young child's first teachers. But its not a single-track road. Dylan, my grandson, has appropriated the word 'peppa' so that it stands for a range of things. Prior to his mastery of 'herro' it worked as a greeting, and more recently it has started featuring as a term of approval: something is 'peppa' if it is cool (just as 'go' is not good at all, and usually accompanies separation from his mother). Some may bemoan what they see as the corrosive influence of popular media culture, but actually it seems to me that Peppa Pig is a pretty sophisticated teacher. Meanwhile Dylan's mother won't need a cookery class to make that cake, she's already found a YouTube tutorial. And Dylan's early years teachers may face some pretty stiff competition in the coming years!

Psychogeography again

I haven't written about psychogeography for a while, but my interest was rekindled by the recent broadcast of walking with attitude which included segments from favourites (Iain Sinclair in particular) as well as some learned commentators. Referencing back to Guy Debord was carefully done and the presenters did a thorough job of underlining the political nature of these ramblings, connecting up with magico-marxism (he! he!) in interesting ways. Using the map of one place to explore another, or adopting an algorithm like first left second right may seem a little bit left field at first sight, but what it actually enables you to do is to make new connections, to trespass, to chance upon an otherness and eventually to see how the landscape is patterned by power, ownership, neglect and erasure. If that sounds confessional...it is!

On hold

The phonebox, or public payphone, is quickly becoming a historic trace, an archeological remnant of earlier patterns of communication - of a time before the mobile phone. Gleick's book 'The Information' draws our attention even further back, to a time of telegraph stations and semaphore masts. In a similar way, they left their mark on the landscape. But because 'the phonebox that works' still exists in living memory, we can watch its slow slide into redundancy. The modern phonebox is like a scar on the urban landscape. A scar that has not yet healed. And yet we can still remember the strange social space that was defined by the phonebox: a place to queue, a place to wait, a place for teenagers to congregate, a place to shelter from the rain. The unique aroma; the opportunity for vandalism; the forgotten purse; the cryptic message scrawled on the damp directory and so much more. And of course, in the real world as well as the world of the imagination, the phonebox became the way to connect with distant places. The phonebox became the tardis, Dr Who's gateway to other worlds. Attempts to revive the phonebox have failed, because it has had its day. This one, discovered on a recent derive, is a hopeless case. All the windows are smashed. The door was removed a long time ago. Even the graffiti is sun-bleached. It promises 'text', 'email' and so on in a lost hope to move with the times. Perhaps an earlier version was a hub for the local community, but now there are better places to hang out, easier ways to communicate.

Return of the Trashmaster

I'm putting the final touches to my paper on the The Trashmaster machinima, and its been fun returning to this. There's a delicate balancing act between writing about The Trashmaster and referring to GTA IV. I had to underline the moral panic surrounding the latter and in researching this found the following - in a recent case it was suggested that a 19 year old convicted of a number of attacks on women ‘may have been influenced by the virtual reality game’. The Sun newspaper reports how ‘A copy of Grand Theft Auto was found at his home by police’. Just take a look at the report (spare a few minutes to stare at The Sun) and you'll see how the report is interspersed with a number of images from GTA game series as if to highlight the media effects, rather than the actual suffering and the complexities involved.

No success like failure

Over the last fifteen years literacy education has been marked by two contradictory influences. On the one hand attempts to conceptualise significant social changes have led to an opening out of what we mean when we refer to literacy and literate behaviour, and on the other attempts to implement wide-reaching education reforms based upon simple and measurable pupil performance have led to a narrowing down of what constitutes schooled literacy. Of the first, the work of educational theorists and researchers with a sociolinguistic orientation has been particularly significant, whereas in the second the influence of neo-liberal politicians has been notable and often notorious. At its most extreme the former move has led some to question whether literacy itself might have ceased to become a useful term to describe sophisticated acts of meaning-making, as its boundaries with other semiotic practices begin to fray, whereas the latter may have reached its apogee in the idea that pupil progress can be successfully measured by a ‘non-word’ reading test administered to children at the end of their first year of compulsory schooling. There has, of course, been much useful negotiation between these two extremes, witnessed in the accounts of creative and innovative teachers and close studies of the literacy practices of children and young people. But such discrepancies in the ways in which we see literate students throw definitions of success and failure into disarray......

Digital competence

In some ways last week's Digital Literacies meeting at JISC confirmed my suspicion, that our current terminology is reaching the end of its shelf-life. Nobody seems sure whether to yield to Paul Gilster, who probably has the longest standing definition, whether to go for a new definition (which one?), or whether to find a new term altogether. Predictably, I thought the literacy folk held the trump card in returning to fundamental questions about meaning and representation. Anusca Ferrari, with the European Commission perspective, explained how digital competence has become the key concept for them - partly because digital literacy has become tied up with issues of inclusion and exclusion. So once again literacy associates with a deficit! Reading some of the documentation (the JRC work and the latest JISC leaflet), I'm struck by the ways in which digital literacy/competence is constructed as: a) a constituent part of employability - enhance your CV, get a job, contribute to the economic future and b) an ingredient of new knowledge practices (much vaguer in definition but suggesting that the way we access, use, create and disseminate knowledge has changed). Ideas that are found in other iterations of digital literacy, such as creativity, participation, social change and citizenship are not so much in evidence here. What happened to the fun? Of course, that has to be excluded....

All about phonics

The phonics screening test is one of the absurd initiatives brought in by the current government in the UK. Teachers involved have been invited by UKLA to complete an independent survey. There have been nearly 450 responses so far, and the survey is open for one more week. If you're involved, or know anyone who's involved, it only takes a few minutes and can be found online here. Michael Rosen has been a vociferous opponent, and you can read about what we've learnt on his blog. His open letter series in the Guardian has also focused on the test (here). Rumours that Gove will be moved from education in a government re-shuffle are rife, but it's probably unlikely that there will be major shifts in policy. In the meantime it's always worth following #govemustgo on Twitter - often entertaining and up-to-date, complete with comments on creationist teaching in new free schools. And for my next blunder...

I was drafted in at the last moment to the Writers Panel at this year's UKLA International Conference. The star attractions were the writers Patrick Ness and Meg Rosoff, and I was there to give my views from the perspective of academic writing and blogging. As it turned out I didn't talk much about blogging, which is probably just as well because it's been a bit infrequent of late! Apart from that, though, it was fun looking at the similarities and differences between narrative and academic writing - particularly with respect to process. There probably aren't as many differences as I imagined, particularly around the composing part, although there do seem to be some different attitudes to editing and revising. Sometimes I find it difficult to cut the pieces I like but don't fit (other academics seem to share this), whereas the authors are more ruthless, less attached to stuff that doesn't fit what they're trying to do. With two more offerings about to go live - a piece on mobiles for BJET and the Virtual Literacies book - it was useful to reflect on all of this. The Writers Panel was nearly the end of a whirl of activity (hence the poor posting record) which also included a very enjoyable joint presentation with Cathy Burnett at the CSL conference on our virtual worlds work. We hope to be writing this up soon! These things often seem to clash with the Old Whittington festival and wells dressing. Now I'm not a traditionalist, but I am quite interested in the flower art that's a local folk-art. So the picture shows an example of this (I'm not a monarchist either, I hasten to add) which picked up the jubilee theme.

Nodal events

In trying to analyse the latest tranche of virtual world data, the challenge of capturing and documenting complexity without reducing it is a constant theme. On Saturday at the Sheffield CSL boutique conference, Cathy and I tried working around what I'm provisionally calling an event node. We chose 'the missing castle' as one node. That enables us to trace the fractal literacies that seem to us to diverge from that node in multiple ways - resulting in individuals (both children and adults) constructing different meanings and communicating them in various ways, through speech, note-taking, blogging or within the world itself. Of course, this is just work in process but it's interesting to test out the idea in other contexts. So, in the pic, you can see the proofs of the Virtual Literacies book that arrived by snail mail on Saturday morning. It's in a sort of self-opening envelope. An envelope which at least reduces some of the reader's labour (it is, I hasten to add, undamaged). The node might be the emailing of the MS, but that event has provoked a whole chain of conversations, jottings, postings and so on. A moving thread of activity that pauses briefly in this reflexive moment. Work in progress....I know.