NMC Conference

In yesterday's opening keynote at the NMC Conference, Mimi Ito was as thought-provoking as ever. The 'hook' for the audience was the webcam lipsync meme on YouTube as an instance of new media practice. Apparently having its genesis in Gary Brolsma's Numa Numa with its 37 million views, she used the example and its subsequent development to make points about production and learning. Posing the question of how, as educators, we can leverage informal learning and develop critical media literacy.

Mimi's 3 themes were the movement from originality to appropriation; stocks of knowledge to flows of knowledge; and assessment to reputation, the last of which was illustrated by the AMV work and these were set against the backdrop of blurring boundaries between school/out-of-school, popular/mainstream culture, formal/informal learning and so on. We wondered whether her 3 themes really did capture something new or whether they are better conceived of as a continuum for mapping specific kinds of activity and engagement.

Integrating technology

Let's Go Water Quality trial from CeLeKT on Vimeo.

This is an interesting short video that includes mobile phones and QR codes in some school science work on water quality. The traditional teaching looks a bit scary, but the students seem to be engaged in some good quality learning in which technological tools serve a useful purpose. This is part of a suite of projects hosted by the Centre for Learning and Technologies at Linnaeus. Full details are available here.

Social media spaces

I've been reading Matt Locke's blog recently. Matt is Channel 4's Education and New Media Commissioner. Being an enthusiast for typologies and lists I'm rather taken with his six spaces of social media. It's an idea he first came up with three years ago, but it still works. The six spaces are secret spaces (SMS, MMS, IM), group spaces (Facebook, Myspace, Bebo), publishing spaces (Blogger, Flickr, YouTube), performing spaces (Second Life, World of Warcraft), participation spaces (Meetup, Twitter) and watching spaces (mobile tv). Here's the original post. And in the pic you'll see the poster for the amazing ESRC Seminar Series dissemination conference. This, in true style, will happen in a number of spaces - face-to-face in Sheffield, on Twitter, and in the afternoon in Second Life (here).

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.

Vocab

I had such a busy week last week that I've spent most of this one catching up! Last week I extended my vocabulary to include 'ganking', 'twinking', as well as learning the subtleties of the use of 'dry' (see here) and 'bait'. I also learnt what 'fubared' (or furbied) means ... although it doesn't happen to me very much these days and won't appear on my status. And of course I spent Saturday morning in SL at the VWBPE conference which was a gas. What's wrong with a short post anyway?

Friending on Facebook

Listening to insiders talking about Facebook I was struck by all the etiquette around friending behaviours in SNSs. For example, ending a relationship is a complex matter. If the simplest solution is just to delete someone, then what about mutual friends? In life-without-SNSs this is always a tricky matter, but Facebook seems to speed the process up and add another layer of complexity. Similarly you may just delete someone you no longer trust. But then what if you bump into them by accident in RL? So I heard the other day how 'I couldn't look his friend in the face because I'd deleted him'! And then, of course there's the whole process of adding which is equally complex. Leaving aside, for the moment, the idea of adding everybody and anybody to gank up your popularity, the more discerning user wouldn't 'Add a random'. So who is a friend? A friend of a friend, for instance? Or an old friend who has since become an acquaintance? I get the impression that the whole notion of friendship (already a rather fuzzy concept) is being redefined. It's also interesting to hear about who's popular in different social networks. I have 2 examples. Firstly the DJ who's 'on all the time' and throws out questions as bait. 'Most TV adverts are really dry. What's your favourite TV ad?' And in a short space of time everyone has something to say! Another crowd-pleaser is the road-rage driver who regularly reports on his driving exploits around London. The language is rich: the other motorists always in the wrong. It's a performance that has an audience in mind, and attracts both sympathisers and counsellors. Antway, that's all for now must 'go' to VWBPE to give my talk!

Seminar 4 already!

I can't believe we're on to Seminar 4 in the ESRC series already! Here's the programme!

March of the Penguins

Anna Peachey, Open University

This presentation focuses on the Disney-owned virtual world Club Penguin. Club Penguin is an international exemplar for internet safety in massively multiplayer environments targeted at children (6-14), making it a popular choice for parents wanting to support their children's participation in online game play and early social networking. However ‘safety' in this instance is based on constructs of credentials, and critics suggest that parents should be more concerned about the subliminal learning that is mediated by and within this highly sophisticated environment. The presentation will explore how playing in Club Penguin helps to develop digital literacy skills in young people, and consider some of the advantages and disadvantages of being a Penguin.

Learning practice in social worlds

Diane Carr, Andrew Burn

http://learningfromsocialworlds.wordpress.com/

London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, University of London

This paper is about how and what people learn in two different online worlds. Initially we report on learning practices in the massively multiplayer online role playing game, World of Warcraft. WoW is a game. It has goals, rewards, missions and conditional progression. It might be said to offer a curriculum of sorts. It does not follow that expertise is attained or assessed in predictable ways by its players. Attention then turns to Second Life, an online social world. We focus on a particular community (machinima makers) in order to explore competence, expertise and literacy in this context.

Online discussion

Catherine Beavis, Deakin University, Australia.

Being him rather than the puppet master: boys, being, gaming and literacies

Alex Kendall, University of Wolverhampton

Drawing on evidence from a qualitative study, Just Gaming , of young men's ‘talk' about the categories of gaming, reading and viewing this paper explores the ways boundaries are constructed, insulated and transgressed by participants for different performance contexts and audiences. Attention is paid to the opportunities for the frivolous, in the serious Maclurian sense, kinds of playing at being that on-line and off-line gaming seems to offer young men particularly in contrast to their own accounts of a wider range of literacy practices, most especially those contextualised by institutionalised practices of school or college. Towards a conclusion Maclure's notion of the ‘baroque' is evoked to consider what new kinds of pedagogical narratives might be called for if education is to successfully enable young people to (re)read the “textualized stories of their lives” (Kehler and Grieg 2005:367).

Wow!

What's on your mind?

I think SNSs are under-theorised. So as I turn my attention to some of the data collected last year on teens' social networking, here's some first thoughts on the big F.....I'm suggesting that Facebook provides contexts for the social construction of relational meaning. An individual personalised profile page resources and constrains this social construction in the way in which it presents multiple invitations and a limited set of opportunities. If we take the view that identity is always dialogic and performed in relation to the other, then there is a sense in which you are called into being by your profile page. Here the process of interpellation, used by Butler (1997:5)and drawn from Althusser (1971) is helpful. Interpellation is mobilised by Butler to illustrate how people accept and internalise social relations and norms. On Facebook the busy screen that updates you on activity in your social network already positions you, but the site's prompting question 'What's on your mind?' hails you into being as a particular kind of subject, to use Butler's expression. In this process of interpellation you enter into a universe of textualized selves in which your own self-narrative is developed, modified and repeatedly performed in relation to others. Social relations and friendships are rehearsed and more or less publically enacted in a heavily mediated environment. But of course this environment intersects in complex ways with life outside Facebook - life in what we sometimes call the 'everyday world', in which freindships are also enacted, but also in life in other mediated environments and life as experienced in relation to other popular narratives.

One thousand posts

I missed the exact day of my blog's sixth anniversary but this is officially the THOUSANDTH POST! So that's an occasion for some reflection on the what and why of blogging. Thinking back to the start, I was intrigued by publishing on the web. I'd done a few courses on web design, but it all seemed far too complicated, so when I came across the blog concept in late 2003 I was keen to give it a go. Pretty soon after I'd published my first posts Colin and Michele found my blog and I was dragged rather unceremoniously into what people were beginning to call the blogosphere. That spurred me on a bit, and realising that my blog might actually be read by others made me try a little harder to do something sensible for a change. So most of the time in the early days I'd use the blog to collect links to all sorts of quirky websites that I discovered in my surfing life. Colin and Michele wrote about it once and described it as wunderkammer. At the time I didn't know what that was but it sounded all right; now I do and it sounds even better. That was a fun time. Later on colleagues like Dr Joolz caught the blogging bug and soon there were several groups of academics connected to new/digital literacies who were posting stuff. That was an era of much commenting and encouragement! Some carried on, some fell by the wayside amd some became intermittent bloggers. As time went on my blog became more focused around the issues now on the header - education, new media and literacy - but I always allowed for the possibility of adding anything random that appealed. Over time its become an important way of processing what I do in my academic life, in my writing and in my research. I'm recording what's on top for me each day. Sometimes these shards of writing get absorbed into stuff that gets published; on other occasions I'll include off-cuts and often there will just be random thoughts or half-digested bits from what I'm reading. It's a way of working that suits me. At the same time I try and keep what I'm reading, listening to and watching up on the sidebar and from time to time I update the links (but that's now overdue). I don't think I really believe in blogging as a genre. I get the point, but there's so much variation in blogs it's hard to pin down. I'm not that keen on the concept of the blogosphere now either. I work across more static websites, Twitter, Flickr and a number of VLE blogs and wikis. That's the sort of circulation around my posts. I suppose I must have an 'ideal' or 'imagined' reader, but most of the time I'm motivated by doing it for me. I'm always surprised, maybe flattered when someone says 'I read your blog', but quite early on I removed the site counter because it annoyed me. Mostly my blog is work/interest related. I know family members and non-work friends sometimes read it, but I get the sense that they're not particularly drawn to it. Performance? Why, of course, there's a performance of the academic self. I'm happy with that. And, yes, there's so much to write about this topic - and lots that I haven't written about..... but one of my conventions is to keep it fairly brief, and I feel like I've already exceeded my average length. Maybe some linguistically orientated student of blogging could do a mean length of utterance!

Self accounting

A couple of quotes from Butler that have set me thinking: 'I come into being as a reflexive subject in the context of establishing a narrative account of myself when I am spoken to by someone and prompted to address myself to the one who addresses me.' (2005:15) and 'An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing....the very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our 'singular' stories are told.' (2005:21). So our individual identity is the product of social interaction, is confirmed through recognition and framed through similarity and difference. I guess that's what I mean when I say identity is relational. Work in progress....

This week last week

Last week was one of those characterised by a flurry of activity. The DIY media book was published, my piece on online social networking came in final proof form, and Scholastic published the re-vamped curriculum materials on Sci-Fi writing 7-9 (see pic). That was a demanding little project, but it kept me distracted during a difficult personal time. I also had an interesting chat last Thursday with Lyndsay from Future Lab about what participation, and in particular digital participation, might mean or might look like. There’s certainly more thinking to be done in that area. As well as all that, I expanded my technical vocabulary which now includes the wonderful term exertion interface which pretty much sums up Wii activity.

DIY danger

I've written about photosharing on a couple of occasions now, but I've never really addressed the issue of ethics. I suppose that's mostly because of an interest in the sharing process itself and how it fits with the more general Web 2.0 ethos, but also because it raises some thorny issues about ownership and even e-safety which aren't exactly top of my list, even though they are worthy areas of concern. But I adhere to my own ethical principles with respect to images of human subjects. I'll ask permission to use/share photographs of individuals and I've only once had an issue with that. On that occasion it was photographing a graffiti jam in Sheffield. I was taking pictures of the materials and the emerging wall art. I put these images up on Flickr, but in one of them I had inadvertantly captured the face of one of the artists. She mailed me through Flickr and politely asked me to remove the photograph because of the rather touchy legal issues. I obliged immediately and sent an apology. So, anyway, my unwritten ethical code doesn't cover inanimate objects, like the Victorian ford sign above. I've never asked a sign for permission! It never crossed my mind. But with this pic I encountered an onslaught of verbal abuse - not I hasten to add from the sign itself (roll over Saussure) but from the owner of the property whose outside wall the sign is on. 'What are you doing? What right have you got? What are you going to do with...? Let me see!' etc etc. I explained that I wasn't a spy, I meant no harm - and this is the embarrassing bit - I had to explain that I like taking photographs of signs! As often happens in such situations the social interaction surrounding the event slowly changed its tone as I learnt that the farm was continually harrassed by the local authority for allowing water and slurry on to the road and that that my photographing had been construed as an act of surveillence! And, as the day wore one, I learnt all about the farm, the ford, local history and so on. But in the end - damn it - I forgot to ask permission. Do visual researchers do sackcloth and ashes, or has the moment passed?

DIY media

Well I suppose this is DIY media - me introducing this paper on participation for students - and for that matter everyone else. It's another instance of the consumer becoming the producer on the read-write web. And in an attempt to blur boundaries just a bit more, here's Ruth's DIY media of last October/November in Paris!

Literacy in print

Here's Colin and Michele's 'DIY Media' from Peter Lang - out now! I have a chapter called 'Visual Networks' in it which explores Flickr (again!). The book looks like a great addition to the series, and to emerging work on new literacies - and I can't wait, as usual, until I get my own copy. Also just out is Debra Myhill and Ros Fisher's Special Issue of JRR 'Writing development: cognitive, sociocultural, linguistic perspectives.' It's good to have a feature on writing, but thumbing through I note a distinct absence of the digital - which is a shame, because that's where a lot of writing seems to be happening. A while back the latest RRQ dropped through my letter box. I was really impressed with 'A Review of Discourse Analysis in Literacy Research: Equitable Access', which has so many authors I'm not going to list them (sorry folks!). But it's an excellent review and I'm going to repeat myself, here, but these essay reviews are an extremely strong feature of RRQ. Long may they thrive!

Scrappage

Old cars taken away from my brother’s house are material objects now emptied of their previous significance/use value and are about to become scrap. I wonder if anyone working in the field of material culture is looking at this trajectory of objects and the changing meanings that are involved as stuff becomes trash? Something about the topic reminded me of how the great Russian intellectual Bakhtin used his notes for 'The Novel of Education' as cigarette papers. The tragedy of the story is that this substantial work was lost when the publishing house was bombed. Unknowingly Bakhtin, who was heavy smoker, used his remaining notes in this way. Because of the wartime paper shortage he literally smoked his own greatest work! He began at the back, so that all that remains is the opening section on Goethe.

From down under?

It was great to listen to Barbara Comber at the University of Sheffield yesterday. Although developments in Australia with the NAPLAN testing regime and public scrutiny via myschool are not exactly what you'd calll good news, the careful and critical study of these sorts of innovations from their inception could be very productive in understanding how policy gets enacted and interpretted (and subverted and resisted). It might also open a useful space for comparison and critique. All through her talk walked the ghost of Foucault. But also the impact of a testing regime on conceptions of literacy was hauntingly familiar. Will it end up with this?

Identities

Well I finally got recognition of some of my multiple identities. How postmodern is that! So the doorplate saga rolls on, but it brought to mind all that stuff about anchored and transient identities which seemed to go down quite well. I want to revisit the ideas, particularly with respect to the data I have on teens’ online social networking. The original idea was really motivated by a need to underline the fact that whilst many were arguing for the levelling effect of the internet and suggesting that you could be who you wanted to be in an online community, the weight of one’s historical and social past is actually still present, and that performances of gender, class, and so on are still very much in evidence. Of course I was not arguing for an essentialist self, but merely suggesting that strong, structuring forces continue to exert an influence. These could be seen as discourses to which we are strongly anchored. On the other hand the kaleidoscopic identifications (often media-related) and more temporary I saw as transient identities, easier to remake and by definition easier to discard. Perhaps the division was too strongly made, because it has since become clear to me that the sort of things I referred to as transient could actually be closely related to or even expressions of anchored identities, the TV shows we like, the toys children choose, the sport we feel passionate about and so on. So I’ve shifted my ground in the direction of a particular kind of relational performativity. I particularly like Butler’s idea of interpellation but I am also still working with what the ideas of transience and anchorage might add. In the interim I’ll just mess around with doorplates.

Hall of mirrors

My target for today is to write about targets. If this is successfully achieved then I can be safe in the knowledge that I have met my targets! This is the sort of hall of mirrors effect that the current fad of reducing learning to specific and achievable targets breeds. The setting and achieving of targets is foregrounded and there is little questioning of the appropriateness or the relevance of the learning itself, nor for that matter an openness to the unpredicted, incidental or otherwise unmeasurable learning that might occur. In schools children's learning (in all its vastness) is reduced to a target - a target which contributes to a sub-level - which in turn contributes to levelled progress, which somehow represents an education. I just marked a student assignment that identified a personal target of setting more targets! So a mindset is produced which is replicated with seven year olds in the school system. This has an insidious effect on literacy education when the targets themselves focus on things like knowing the difference between fiction and non-fiction, using a range of connectives in writing, and choosing more inteteresting words. Not that there is anything wrong with knowing these things of course, but the complete atomisation of lannguage, learning and literacy that can occur is a real cause for concern. I'm targetting this reductive view of learning. But I'm also interested in the provenance of 'target culture' and what the target metaphor itself invokes.

Critical media literacy

I promised a snippet from my writing on critical media literacy, so maybe this gives a sense of where I'm at .... As we move towards a reconceptualisation of literacy education there remain some important and unresolved dilemmas. The first of these concerns the various interpretations of the notion of criticality. In some ways this debate mirrors some of the complexities in critical theory and in literary criticism. We need to ask whether we want children and young people to re-discover the ideologies and biases that some adults have previously identified, whether we want them to be informed media critics, or whether we want them to be discerning consumers and producers of media. The second issue is whether or not we believe that the formal education system can be expected to bear the full responsibility of developing media literacy. Given that the major part of young people’s engagement with media is likely to take place outside of school contexts, there are good reasons to suggest that media literacy develops across a range of contexts and that parents, after-school clubs, community groups as well as producers and independent agencies have an important role to play. Thirdly, there are some contentious issues at stake in identifying what constitutes development in critical media literacy. For instance, in discussing literacy the MacArthur Report suggests that ‘Before students engage with the new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write.’ (Jenkins et al 2006b: 19). But given that young children are already immersed in media culture well before the start of their compulsory schooling there are powerful arguments to suggest that critical media literacy should be taught alongside traditional literacy. Finally, there is the question of how this kind of critical literacy can most profitably engage with some of the popular discourses about the harmful effects of media. These discourses often focus on the vulnerability of the young and the supposed dangers posed by early exposure to sex and violence; to manipulation through advertising; and to the possibility that they may become addicted to media. Although media education has contributed a degree of challenge to such views, they have re-surfaced in recent concerns about chatrooms, videogames and online social networking. An open-minded and critical approach to media regulation and safety issues will need to have a central place in critical media literacy as it responds to changing contexts. I think that's what I think.

Knowledge procured through doubt

In Galileo's last speech in Brecht's great play, he talks about the pursuit of science demanding a kind of courage: 'It deals in knowledge procured through doubt'. Well there's a distinct absence of doubt around as Krotoski strides around in her blue coat occasionally stopping to caress her Macbook. In episode two of the Digital Revolution we're treated to more of the 'triumph of freedom over control, thanks to the internet' rhetoric. Geeks show us how it's possible to get round state firewalls and we get a lot of swivelling eyeballs - for instance from an over-enthusiastic Clay Shirky (too much coffee?). But when Jeff Bezos from Amazon talks about freeing-up information, surely we must have one or two incklings of doubt. Don't get me wrong I love Amazon. I even like the way it tries to read my mind and tell me what I want to read - that's clever shopping. So Bezos runs an intelligent and very reliable bookshop that scares the hell out of traditional booksellers. If freedom is about being able to buy more or less what you want when you want it, that's OK; but I thought it was a bit more than that. For once I found myself in agreement with Andrew Kean, blogging here. The clips on Twitter in Iran and networked Climate Change camps were OK, but I want more searching analysis for my licence fee. A freedom to doubt.

Visual understanding

I was sent this YouTube link by a Twitter friend. A Ukrainian sand-artist, Kseniya Simonova. How’s that for unusual? Apart from the fact that it’s just a little bit too long, it’s pretty impressive. For me it played into that recurring debate about what the visual can and can’t do. Well for a start it’s pretty hard to work out the Ukrainian sand-artist thing without words; but then it is quite striking that as the images evolve and take shape they make a sort of narrative that holds our attention and engages us (maybe emotionally?). I suppose the meanings are quite open. The images invite us to reflect, but then they don’t direct our reflection in any way. Music and sound effects serve to thicken our interpretation of the visual. And since I’m now writing about media literacy, I started wondering about what sort of media knowledge you need to produce or consume something like this and then, to go further, what sort of reading a critical media literacy might yield. Well, I only wondered, but when I get just a little bit further on with this particular piece of writing I hope to share some of it before it reaches the full light of day.

Hypermediated selves

Upload your photo. I did. Again. And thought about how many images of me are splashed around the internet, on Flickr, my blog, my home page, allconsuming, wikispaces and so on. There's a sort of chronology, too. One of the oldest is my icon on allconsuming, taken in the Gaudi park in Barcelona on my fiftieth birthday, whereas one of the most recent was taken last year in Sheffield just below the bar in this blog. (And yes, if you're reading this through a Safari or Firefox browser you don't get my forehead; wheras if you're using Explorer you get some extra space. I blame Blogger.) I'm confronted with representations of myself on a regular basis. The headshot has become a very popular identifier. Here it is a hypermediated self located, as Bolter and Grusin would have it, in a shifting network of affiliations. Each self is differently defined, both constructing and constructed by those networked contexts in a different way. Maybe they are only tied together by a likeness. Which brings me back to the photo of my surrogate self on a skiing holiday that heads this post. Perhaps you didn't recognise me. I changed my mouth shape a bit (cosmetic surgery). I added hair (a wig). And although you can't see I went for an earpiercing (just because you could). It's one of those quirky little things you can do online. But it's interesting because it hybridises the icon-headshot and the start-from-scratch avatar - the sort of thing you develop in Second Life. I wonder if I'm any different as a hypermediated self, but I guess one of me already knows I am.

Virtual (R)evolution

Aleks Krotoski's BBC2 documentary was everything you'd expect of old media on a Saturday night - plenty of clever eye-candy. We had talking heads, the usual suspects, glamourous locations, our presenter in slowmo silhouetted against sunsets and always with a Macbook and i-phone (was this subliminal advertising?). There was gushing enthusiasm about the 'levelling' effect of the web, promising a utopia of person-centred libertarianism, and much furrowing of brows over corporate interest and authoritarian hierarchies. But the basic and optimistic premise that new technology puts the power of self-expression, communication and information in our hands is flawed. To live that particular dream we have to be born in the right place, to have the social, cultural and economic resources not only to get a Macbook and an i-phone, but also to know what we're supposed to do with them. In other words we need to be one of the lucky (?) 20% of the world population. There was a small parallell in the way the BBC flashed a hashtag onto the bottom right of the TV screen just after the opening credits - fine if you're one of the Twitterati; meaningless if you're not. To be fair though, it wasn't all sweetness and light. There is, apparently shopping (in Cardiff), and dating (in Manchester), and pornography (in Harrogate - shock/horror) and it's all virtual, whatever that means. And then there's also the emergence of A-lists and editors - filters and blocking; but no mention of the Great Firewall of China. Apparently it's all down to a conflict between freedom and control, and you get the feeling that Aleks wants us to join in this global Last Battle - on the side of freedom and in the spirit of a particular imagining of sixties counterculture. This just goes to show that even BBC2 can fall into the trap of making the complex simple and presenting us with an either/or debate rather than a set of unresolved or unresolvable issues. Anyway, I stayed the course, I'm linking to the website and I've learnt that the blogosphere is in crisis. What blogosphere? Which crisis? And I'll probably watch Part 2 next week. Will you?

Micro co-ordination

On Friday I found myself syphoning colleagues from 3 different trains into 2 different minibuses in order to make a decent start for Seminar 3. It was really easy to do this as well as to reassure Tetra back at the university that everything was in hand! Easy because of the way in which mobile phones facilitate micro-coordination. That, and the fact that we had a presntation on phones, led me think how taken-for-granted the mobile has become. It's a potent symbol of connection (often laid on the table in face-to-face interaction as if to represent wider networks) and it's also a talisman of security (when you're alone, in the dark, or about to break down, or all three). Writing about mobile connectivity, Gergen notes how phones 'emphasise and underscore the importance of connection as opposed to autonomy, looking outward rather than inward; toward network as opposed to self-sufficiency ... With the mobile phone the relational net is always at hand ... As a material object, the mobile phone functions as an icon of relationship, of techno-umbilical connection. The Enlightenment paen to individualism, "I think therefore I am" is replaced with "I'm linked therefore I am". (Gergen 2002:109)

Layered cuts

Seminar 3 of the ESRC Seminar Series raised lots of interesting issues about overlapping 'worlds', 'spaces', or 'realities' associated with technoliteracy practices. Speakers included Christine Greenhow, Paul Coulton, and Keri Facer. Although we'd billed the session as addressing the topic of mixed reality, that term soon got pluralised, augmented and generally pulled about. I was left thinking about ways in which reality is layered with varying amounts of textual mediation, with the textual including all modalities. Now I'd normally feel more comfortable talking about multiple realities in the plural, but in this instance I am unconvinced that virtual or technosocial spaces actually constitute separate realities. So, provisionally I'll stick with the singular layered and textually mediated description. Virtually (!) at the same time we engaged in the familiar identity debates - another easily pluralised concept. Here I find myself moving away from any conception of fixity (the core difficulty with the performance metaphor) drifting ever closer towards what Gergen describes as 'relational being'. To quote: 'The bounded and centred self is undone.' (Gergen, 2002:6)

I'm losing you

This amateur linguist has developed an interest in collecting the expressions we use when technology interrupts the anticipated smooth flow of events. Take phone conversations as an example. Mobile reception is notoriously patchy on trains as they weave their way through tunnels into cuttings and alongside tall buildings, so you’ll regularly overhear high-powered business conversations or the more informal everyday domestic exchange interrupted with 'I’m losing you' or 'You’re breaking up'. These are interjections which in another context might seem rude, incongruous or even incomprehensible. Another example is when colleagues are giving a presentation at a conference or seminar and their slideshow suddenly goes pear-shaped and delivers the wrong image. Some complex and abstract theorizing will be abruptly juxtaposed with 'That shouldn’t have happened' or 'Oops! I’ll just go back'. These disruptions have a humorous dimension, but the mere fact that we don’t usually laugh or take umbrage when they occur reveals something important. That is, they are so common place that they have become quite unremarkable. No-one I know has misinterpreted 'I’m losing you' (it's not a life or death matter or a signal that a relationship is about to terminate) or I’m sorry I’ll have to go back' (back where - step backwards, go home, go back to basics?). There is in fact a shared understanding that these things happen. Things go wrong. And these represent the moments when the transparency of technology shifts and, perhaps only for a moment, the medium itself comes into focus. Talk shifts from the mediated topic to the topic of mediation. I’ll be cutting out in a minute...I just missed the nail and hammered my thumb... Am I losing you?

A virtual perspective

Connotations of 'nearly', 'as if', or 'almost' readily associate with term virtual. Although the word has some more specific dictionary definitions as well as some more recent technical ones I think these everyday uses are a good starting point for theorising the virtual. Reflecting on the Avatar experience, I’ve been thinking how the whole way in which flat representations take on the semblance of 3D is an important aspect of the virtual. So the mathematical calculation of perspective, the idea of the vanishing point - in fact the whole history of representational art from the Renaissance onwards is conjured up. Culturally we have adapted to representing and reading space in a particular way. It seems perfectly natural to perceive depth of field - but is it really culturally acquired? We readily assume the first person point of view of the artist, the photographer or the camera. And at that point is what we see virtual? Does the medium become transparent? Bolter and Grusin (2000:25) when talking about this suggest that: 'If executed properly, the surface of the painting dissolved and presented to the viewer the scene beyond.' The project could be seen as one of becoming immersed in an alternate reality by forgetting that it is mediated in the first place. That's my experience of good theatre - I begin to forget the audience around me, that actors are just doing their job and so on - I'm temporarily 'in' the world that is unfolding.

Social media

What do we actually mean by social media? It suggests, I suppose, a certain level of participation - but then aren’t all media social? I realised this week that it’s another ill-defined term, used interchangeably with Web 2.0. At least that’s the way I’ve used it in a chapter called 'Social Media in the Primary Classroom' for Cary Bazalgette’s forthcoming book 'Teaching Media in the Primary School'. I argue that there is plenty of evidence of educators experimenting with sites like Cooliris, Voicethread, Bubbleshare and Glogster - and I suggest some issues that teachers may wish to consider when planning to use social media in the classroom. These are framed in terms of six key questions (a list is always good).

1. What kinds of learning are intended?
2. What sort of understandings does the social media site assume?
3. What will need to be taught or explained before children get involved?
4. How easy is it to access the site?
5. How easy is it to register/set up accounts?
6. How can safety issues be addressed?

For more, you’ll have to wait for the book!

Avatar

The Avatar film will no doubt bring the contemporary avatar concept more squarely into the popular imagination. Certainly in 3D, the film gives a heightened sense of motility and presence, but one is also struck by differences in control in comparing this to a 'real' avatar experience in SL. In SL your intentionality is expressed through keyboard and mouse and in this sense you are more active; in the 3D movie it all happens to you. That said there is of course more action. More things happen to the avatar in the movie. Apart from the occasional push script in SL, you navigate your way around a comparatively static world. I’ve yet to try Avatar the game, but I am tempted. I left the cinema with a little disappointment with the plot (I didn’t expect a lot) but also the idea that we now should be able to have a similar visual experience with our own avatar. That would be nice.