For your pleasure in this present state

Reading for pleasure and self-improvement has an enduring and emotive appeal, and through its close association with typographic print, with the book, and with immersion in literary fiction the idea has significant currency in recent debates in literacy education. This is indeed welcome when understood as a re-statement of the importance of the liberal arts curriculum in an educational landscape dominated by accountability and assessment regimes that carve up learning into measurable parcels. In England the backwash of testing in spelling and grammar is emblematic of how progress in literacy can result in learning that is parcelled up and quantified. As a counter-narrative then, reading for pleasure evokes everything that is good from individual choice and independence to interest-led autonomous learning - qualities that by their very nature elude measurement. Yet even though the challenge to an atomised and autonomous model of literacy is desperately needed, this should not place the idea of reading for pleasure beyond scrutiny. Reading for pleasure sits at the centre of a nexus of ideas about literacy that constitute an ideology that requires careful examination. Reading for pleasure derives its justification from a number of different traditions. What the Cox Report called 'cultural heritage' is a justification that draws on (well-deserved) pride in the tradition of English literature. How empathy and vicarious experience may develop moral virtue is a second justification, and one popularly articulated in Pinker's recent work. And since no educational debate now seems complete without a contribution from neuroscience, the influence of what we presume is immersive reading on our neural pathways surfaces here. But what might the challenges be to reading for pleasure in our densely mediated, highly mobile and increasingly digital world? This is the project I'm now embarking upon! Watch this space.....

The pleasure principle

Good quality research data on reading for pleasure is always a useful complement to the rhetoric on the topic. So it's great to see the clear message that 'children who read for pleasure are likely to do significantly better at school than their peers' (who presumably don't). This comes from the Centre for Longitudinal Studies report here. If you delve into the report you see that the key influence is defined in rather broader terms - 'home reading culture' and 'leisure reading' are described in some detail and these are to my mind rather more sophisticated concepts. However, put the headlines alongside this and you might quickly get the picture that print culture is doomed and with it the written word. I don't actually think is the case - there's probably more reading and writing going on with everyday uses of technology than ever before in history, and there are also more possibilities for narrative pleasure. But digital media are an 'and' not an 'or'. Children and young people simply have far more textual choices than ever before. We know about the claims made about bedtime stories - but rather than simply accepting this as a privileged ritual (or a ritual of the privileged), we need to understand more about what's going on. I'd put my money on the shared endeavour of skilled and apprentice meaning-makers making sense of text together. If this is accurate then the benefits could extend to any media, unlocking a wider palette of pleasures.

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!

Technology and learning

You might guess that a publication addressing the state of the art in pedagogical uses of technology would include MOOCs, learning analytics and badges - and that's exactly what you get in the OU review Innovating Pedagogy 2013. But you also get more varied material on geo-learning and 'maker culture' alongside useful critiques of familiar topics like learning from gaming and digital scholarship. I thought the idea of rating the impact and timescale for adoption was an interesting and original approach - much better than that tiresome trick of lifting a sentence from the text and putting it in a large font, as if it is more significant or somehow captures the essence of what's being said without subjecting you to the chore of reading the whole page. One of these inserts is 'technologies may change, but the innovations in  pedagogy bring lasting benefit' - it's a rather vacuous statement in my opinion. Meanwhile the idea of 'one tablet per child', recently adopted in Thailand shows the extent to which national governments are willing to invest in technology - the scheme, still in the pilot stage is apparently paying off already. It's the sort of investment that's needed before innovating pedagogy can take place.

What's on it?

It's getting quite common to hear about how technology can solve all our literacy issues in one fell swoop. But this story about using e-readers in Ghana as a way of raising literacy levels was inspiring, and an outcome of the work done by the Worldreader charity. So it begins to look like e-readers can be a relatively simple way of enhancing the reading experience of students of all ages. But yet it seems to me that there's two crucial things that are missing in this largely technocentric debate, and they are - perhaps inevitably - to do with the social dimension. Firstly, we know that something like a Kindle or an iPad is simply a platform for digital content. What counts then, once you've got over the love of technology, is the quality and values of that content. Is it a commercially-bundled curriculum? Is it worthwhile reading material, and does it really explore the multimodal (and other) affordances of digital content? Secondly, what happens when you insert this kind of device into everyday pedagogical situations? What sorts of new roles and routines develop (or could develop) for teachers and learners? There's a significant research agenda here, and we need some answers to avoid being blown away by technologists, or bundled into oblivion by commercial publishers.

Twitter paper

In retrospect I think Julia Gillen and I managed to capture something of the essence of microblogging in studying how Twitter was used in what you might now call 'the early days'. But it was still great to see that the paper 'Contact Calls: Twitter as dialogic social and linguistic practice' was the top downloaded article in Language Sciences, and as a special deal it's now available free till 31st October! The paper has a natural partner with one I wrote with Julia Davies on blogging. Both are insider accounts of how we as academics have taken up social media and used it for our own purposes. Trying to describe the approach we used is quite hard - insider account is probably the best, but we've also tried 'dual autoethnography' to try to capture the idea of a parallel and reflexive endeavour. Neither study really has the depth and nuance of autoethnography, but the idea of a two-handed approach in looking at adoption/ early adoption has its advantages. See what you think!

Your books are reading you

The flurry of concern over data harvesting has taken up quite a few column inches lately. It seemed that no-one was particularly concerned when Amazon first started recommending books to you, or when it was revealed that Tesco collected smart data on local shopping trends, but now a more general paranoia has set in. This is mass surveillance and where will it all lead, say some; what about personal freedom they ask. Now there's renewed concern that your books are reading you (see here, for example). Electronic devices know where you are, what you bought, what page you're on and so on. Do I care? Not really, to be honest. I don't think I've ever once bought what Amazon recommended - it's clever, but not that clever. After all smart databases are only as good as the people that design them, and I challenge anyone to design one that fits my fickle taste. And if they could design one, I myself would be the first to be interested. The police only seem threatening when you're involved in some wrong doing, and by the same token surveillance only becomes problematic if you've got something to hide. But the root problem lies in those definitions 'wrong doing' and 'something to hide'. If you live in a democratic and genuinely open society those things are relatively unproblematic, reflecting principles like freedom of speech, freedom of movement (and in a market-led economy - freedom to consume), but as soon as that changes, data harvesting turns into surveillance. That's the time to start getting worried.

Itinerant academic

The rather sudden decline in my posting frequency is probably largely the product of a very busy year that's included trips to the US, Malaysia, Hong Kong and now Australia. The funny thing is that you find yourself catching up on work tasks and conversations in the most unlikely places - a day out with Catherine Beavis and her partner at Purling Brook Falls (above), and now reviews, journal work, emails and some writing at Noosa. Although it may sound glamorous it gets very tiring, and I'm now looking forward to some down time. Moving about has highlighted some interesting, and perhaps unsurprising, themes in literacy education. The most dominant of these by a long way is the work that literacy educators have to do to legitimise what they already know, or think they know to be worthwhile in the light of  new centralised curriculum and accountability measures. In the realm of new/digital literacies this is particularly noticeable, and makes little sense when seen alongside political rhetoric about economic competitiveness and 21st Century skills. Another theme concerns raising the achievement of marginalised groups, and particularly the recognition of different languages, cultures and forms of representation. In sum, for all the newness of these policy initiatives and curriculum changes, the same old issues come to the fore. Given increased connectivity, it now seems timely to encourage transnational connections between educators - connections that may provide challenge and support for those committed to real change.

Body hacking

Any self-respecting cyborg has to be a fan of body hacking. Rather than some sort of grim ritual of zombie-like mutilation this sort of hacking is about collecting (and sharing) data on yourself, or as Gary Wolf founder of the self-quantifying movement puts it, turning windows into mirrors. It's not just about logging your life - that's been going on a while - but the whole idea is to collect your own physiological and psychological data. learn to read it (becoming data-literate in the process) and then use the wisdom of crowds (and experts) to improve your well-being, your physical and mental state. You could see it as digitally-enhanced self-improvement or extreme narcissism. The Quantified Self movement may not be your cup of tea, but when I heard Rodney Jones it made me think how it just is the logical extension of a more general trend in digital life. The supermarket knows what I eat, Amazon what I read, Insight knows when I meditate, and Mappiness knows how I'm doing. Put it altogether, invest in a FitBit and then you're truly post-human. It's the way to go...

Commodification

As a sort of postscript to yesterday's piece on the commodification of early learning and literacy, I wanted to underline that this isn't a new phenomenon at all. From Dinky toys and Meccano to Helix geometry sets, Chambers pencils and Beacon Readers, my own childhood learning was strongly patterned by commercially-produced artefacts that often enjoyed global circulation. What has changed, I think, is the extent to which the tools of edutainment are scripted, mediated and marketed to consumers - both parents and their children. In a sense some of the products are more specialised and they tap into curriculum discourses about what early learning should look like, and an increasingly high-profile set of messages about the home as a site for influential early learning. Most of us in the field would agree about the significance of early learning, but the backwash effect from narrow models of curriculum could end up with narrow models of early learning - a toddler's home curriculum which is characterised by endless and unimaginative routines based on the alpahabet, the cardinal numbers, and shape - all driven by digital toys. If I'm right then it's important that we champion those toys, media products and apps that are informed by a more diverse, expansive and flexible view of literacy and learning.

Multiple things

Research Story from Chris Thomson on Vimeo.
We all  have to juggle with competing demands and priorities, and it seems to get even worse when we start to research things! I was moved by this digital story produced by one of my Masters students - it illustrates the cost, the struggle and the emotional underlife in an elegant way, but also it highlights some of the benefits that accrue from doing this sort of work. It's well worth keeping all this in mind as we go on. In my own work, I've been wrestling with ideas about pleasure, everyday life and the commodification of early learning and literacy. In the light of this I returned to Helen Nixon's piece  'From bricks to clicks.' and the more recent piece, with Erica Hateley in Children's Literacy, Learning and Culture which ends with this: 'As children are inducted younger and younger into particular modes of literacy, and particular dispositions as 'consuming citizens', researchers committed to learning from and contributing to young people's agency and social opportunities need to pay attention to what is happening culturally when reading and playing and literacy and learning means tapping, touching, swiping, and scroling and combining online and offline activities.' (2013:39)

Perspective

In our paper, Points of View, Cathy and I use some virtual worlds data to problematise a whole range of issues in literacy studies. Starting from the use of virtual worlds in classrooms a number of common assumptions about the material and the virtual; space and place; and even temporality are called into question. But we also go further than that to offer some alternative perspectives on researching literacies. In looking at this data, the whole notion of segmenting our observations into discreet events was a fundamental challenge and so we experiment in the paper with providing alternative accounts, or stories, which we suggest can 'stack up' in different ways. The theoretical dimension of the paper is inspired by Kwa's reading of the baroque. Following this we suggest that a focus on baroque complexity helps us to ask the important question: what else is going on here? In doing this it provides a useful counter-narrative to over-simplified conceptualisations of literacy. Read all about it over here!

Movement

When you're travelling it sometimes seems that the whole of humanity is also involved in this restless journeying, burdened by luggage and the unpredictability of their arrangements, the regrets and sadness of departure, and the anticipation, or otherwise, of arrival. Dragging their stuff, rushing, waiting, trying to negotiate complex information, dealing with other languages, unknown currencies and the inadequate approximation of translation. This movement of people is a communication - in fact transport systems are often described in this way - and the exchanges that occur as a result of it involve sharing stuff, giving stuff, getting new things as well as loosing or forgetting what is dear to you. The communication of human travel is embodied and materialised. It also takes place across space and time, and this is so eloquently captured in Doreen Massey's essay 'Some Times of Space '. It is similarly comprised of convergence and divergence as well as by the inclusions and exclusions wrought by the distribution of power. And yet, when we return 'home' , what have we got to show for it? Well we may return with something substantial, something we purposefully went to get, but more often than not it is with a small souvenir, or perhaps just a jumble of recollections, the feeling that we've changed in some subtle and indefinable way. The communication was often an end in itself; the subtle change, the intangible was a little like learning, hard to define, difficult to articulate a shadowy form in the mists of memory.

Discourse

I'm really enjoying the Fifth International Roundtable on Discourse Analysis with its focus on Digital Practices. Presenters have brought a wide variety of perspectives to a wide range of topics. There have been different takes on discourse itself and work that's focused on mobile technologies, machinima, MOOCs, Flickr, 'netspeak', virtual worlds, self-quantifiers and the comment genre - to mention just a few. Today is the final day and there's the unknown dimension of what themes will arise and what new questions will emerge. I always find that an interesting process. At the moment all that I've heard re-inforces the view that thinking about the online/offline binary is unhelpful. In some way's David Barton's notion of 'writing spaces' works a little better for me. The whole debate also confirms my belief that studying practices without a close look at people and things leaves out the complex and messy nature of the work that gets done. So materiality, embodiment and affect seem to me to be important emergent themes. But, as ever, what I think may well be modified by what others say; if it isn't, perhaps that's not discourse.

Unconvergence

Five years ago, convergence technology was the real buzzword, and with early smartphones we began to see this on the high street - the phone was the camera, was the MP3 player. We're so used to that now that the powerful handheld device, aka smartphone, is often referred to in terms of its computing power and its internet capability. Early critics of iPhones often complained that it was good with media, but not wonderful as a phone. That's changed quite a bit over the years, but there is still a recognition that in order to get all that computing power into a small space some compromises have to be made. Commonly these compromises are about battery life and signal transmission/reception. Most people probably just live with this, but others have begun to invest in a simple phone too, so that they have at least one thing that works well. That's all very well, but as I pack for a trip to Hong Kong it's a logistical nightmare making sure I've got my phone, my camera, my iPad and my laptop and all the various leads and cables (each being completely different, of course). So, actually I'm a big fan of convergence technology, just because it makes life simpler, but it does seem that there's a way to go.

All fingers and thumbs

I've just been writing another paper about toddlers and touchscreens, and it returns to the same themes about gesture that I explored before. Essentially, looking at the video data we have, you see how hand gestures and pointing are woven into adult-child conversations and that they also appear to extend quite naturally into taps and swipes on the touchscreen. Often someone starts off pointing at something on the screen and then ends up tapping - it becomes part of the interactional flow. And the toddlers (see index finger in pic) often seem to have their trigger fingers at the ready, perhaps mimicking adult gestures or maybe in readiness for when they need to deploy them. I'd been using the word 'index finger' so often in the writing that I began to wonder about its origin. For one feverish moment I thought it was connected to print literacy, being the finger that turns the pages at the index. But in the end I was convinced by this account, which simply connects it with indicating or pointing. Well even that is enough to confer on it a very significant place in human communication. I reckon there's a book to be written about the role the first finger plays in human culture. Someone's probably already written it, though.........no, just got lost at Amazon only to discover that someone called Al Fingers has written a book on Clarks in Jamaica (bring on Vybz Kartel). How random!

Slightly potty

The BBC has quite a knack of digging out enthusiastic and slightly potty boffins to drive their distinctive brand of middlebrow edutainment. These characters seem to race around various glamorous locations in the UK, and elsewhere, talking nineteen to the dozen about their favourite idea. (Why hasn't anybody ever discovered me I wonder?) Returning home, I just had to catch up with the latest, Adam Nicholson - a historian with impeccable qualifications - who dazzled viewers with his take on literacy in  seventeenth century England. It was, or so the title goes, the century that wrote itself and he had lots of quirky examples to illustrate this idea. Although very entertaining, the major shortcoming was its rather narrow determinist view. That's the way we became modern: through literacy, through individual expression, from discovering the power of writing and so on and so forth. Major social, political and religious changes were relegated to the sidelines in these programmes- as if they were simply caused by literacy rather than intimately bound up with it. Power, and that century's particular shifts in economic and civic life were always hovering in the background: class, gender and race reared up as another version of how we became modern. Nonetheless this is better than a lot of TV, and if you're in the UK you might still catch the series on demand on iPlayer.

Mediated publics

I like Thompson's idea of mediated publics. He argues that public was once defined in terms of people, places and events that share a common locale. Print media disturbed this convergence by creating a 'reading public which was not localised in space and time.' (Thompson, 1995:126). Other media have helped to accelerate fractured or reconfigured publics. In the UK, the 1952 Coronation is often cited as a landmark event, in which the spectating public was dispersed as television ownership grew exponentially. A public event was witnessed in private surroundings by many people, often with neighbours crowding into houses to share the spectacle. Perhaps it could be argued that the first moon landing was another key moment in that the immediate audience was particularly small, but the mediated event reached out to a large and very diverse public. Interestingly though, for the upcoming funeral of Thatcher, the public is divided in other ways, but there's bound to be a heavy media presence.

Photo-sharing

Yes, I finally let go of my Flickr account last year, realizing that it no longer served any real purpose for me or, in fact, held my interest. There's a sort of archive of memory there, but a lot of it was rather ephemeral - or so it seems now, at least. Interestingly though, I'm using Instagram more intensively, and almost exclusively to share more intimate family-related images. In some ways it's a more traditional network. Barton & Lee pick up on a passage from Wellman that fits in very well with this: 'CMC supplements, arranges and amplifies in-person and telephone communications rather than replacing them ' (2001:18). This relates to our family use of Instagram which for me hybridizes the phone-call, the blog and the family photo album without replacing any of them. It all seems far more old-school than the sort of transformational social networking associated with Web 2.0 that I, and others, have written about extensively. Appadurai (2003) suggests that 'where natural social collectivities build commonality out of memory, virtual communities build memory out of connectivity.' - well he might just have produced a killer quote, but certainly the first half matches what we do on Instagram. We must be a natural social collectivity, then. For me this points to a very interesting research area which would look at how new media gets adopted and absorbed into family interactions. Next project?

Ungoogleable?

Sometimes you just can't find what you're looking for even when you're using really sophisticated search engines. To put it another way somethings are just...well, ungoogleable. Sorry Google if I just invented a word that contains your corporate name, but I think it has a certain ring to it. But of course when it comes to getting my new word in the dictionary our corporate searching outfit may object. That's exactly what the Language Council of Sweden found with the word 'ogooglebar' which means the same. You can read all about how Google stepped in, and how the Swedes reacted over here. Welcome to the weird world of technology. Maybe I'll get out the vacuum-cleaner instead - do a bit of hoovering (sorry Hoover) if they'll let me!