Reading campaigns

On the surface of things it would seem like a very good idea to mobilise public support and interest in helping young children's literacy development, and in fact the Volunteer Reading Help scheme has a good track record in doing just that. But somehow the Evening Standard's campaign GetLondonReading pushes all the wrong buttons. Politically it plays on the Big Society agenda and regularly features donators who are models, celebrities or former politicians - in other words public or media figures who want to do something worthy. But celebrity support is no substitute for public education and the high expectations placed on the volunteers themselves may not be the best way forward. You might predict that if the campaign makes a massive impact, there will be political capital to be made. If it doesn't it will sink from view. No surprises there, because that's just the same story that we associate with governmental interference in matters of curriculum. What worries me more is when the transport networks of London are flooded with travellers waving the banner headlines 'One in five parents cannot read aloud'. Although that's based on evidence produced by the National Literacy Trust (another reputable body) it's a scare story. Firstly, literacy is more than reading and certainly can't be reduced to 'reading aloud', but secondly, and more importantly it neatly ducks some key characteristics of the fluid multilingual demographic of our cosmopolitan capital. On the 9th June Free Standard the grinning picture of blonde (?) white model Laura Bailey - who donated £1000 - appears to be the solution to a hyped-up problem. And in the text, reading is clearly connected with empowerment, which is ironic when the most evident power lies elsewhere.

The future of the past

In our discussions on Monday for the It's the learning future project some of our teachers talked about children living in the technological present and then stepping into the past when they come to school. According to this view school becomes a sort of working museum in which children are in role as learners of the past - enacting how we used to live. At the same time we can only imagine the future on the basis of the present, or at least in our experience of recency (which is in effect the past). Although it may sound like word-play there is a very real sense in which these timescales reveal complexity and seem, in fact, to overlap. I thank Chris Thomson, someone who is also trying to imagine the future with pupos[ed], for introducing me to the design concept of the Skeuomorph which is another example of how the past is useful. So, not all history is bunk!

Mapping the mind

I'm in Belgium at the moment, but I'm reading Robert MacFarlane's evocative and excellently written book 'The Wild Places' which is a first-rate exploration of wild-ness and one which is tied to the British landscape. In a section on mapping, he tells us that over a million road atlases are sold in England and Ireland each year and that there are thought to be about 20 million in circulation at any one time. That's a lot of geographical literacy that's going on - and that's before you start thinking about AA maps, Google maps and various sat nav systems. Wow! But, as he observes, "The fells, the caves, the tors, the woods, the moors, the river valleys and the marshes have all but disappeared. If they are shown at all, it is as background shading or generic symbols. More usually, they have faded out altogether like old ink, become the suppressed memories of a more ancient archipelago....The priorities of the modern road atlas are clear. Drawn by computers from satellite photos, it is a map that speaks of transit and displacement. It encourages us to imagine the land itself as a context for motorised travel." In other words (my words) maps help to produce a kind of social identity - a mobile identity - in which we are constantly on the move between urban spaces, and the rest is something that is blank or something we go through.

Post-modern literacies

I'm reading a pre-publication version of Colin and Michele's New Literacies (3E) at the moment. The opening sections provide a really useful map to 'where we are' and 'how we got there' in literacy studies. They've just about got it right with a definition of literacies as 'socially recognized ways in which people generate, communicate and negotiate meanings, as members of Discourses through the medium of encoded texts'. I know it doesn't exactly trip off the tongue and I suppose that nearly every phrase needs translating (which is, as you'd expect, what haoppens in the book). I still have a problem with the social spread of new literacies and wonder to what extent the exciting practices which appear to be the popular everyday practices of children and young people are actually niche interests. On a more abstract level I enjoyed reading about Andreas Reckwitz's work on practice theories and made a note to follow this up. The football analogy reminded me of Bourdieu which sent me scurrying back to The Logic of Practice. Bourdieu, at least in the translations that I read, can be hard going, but one of his clearest pieces (Chapter 4 ibid) actually uses the football metaphor to good effect. But here he is on 'practice', the principle of which is found 'in the relationship between external constraints which leave a very variable margin for choice, and dispositions which are the product of economic and social processes that are more or less completely reducible to these constraints, as defined at a particular moment.' (p.50). That makes me think twice about agency in cultural (re)production and is something to pit against remix and participatory culture.

Radio silence

I've had one of those times when life takes over, and blogging falls by the wayside, spending most of my time looking after baby Dylan (in the picture) and my daughter, Hannah. It's interesting watching the play/work of a 9-month old and the ways in which new media is woven into the environment. Firm favourites are the V-tech products (particularly the dance tower), but Skype calls on the laptop, grasping for the mobile phone and nursery rhymes on the i-touch are all part and parcel of daily life. At the moment my attempts at keeping a record have been squeezed - maybe I need a firmer plan. Whilst immersed in all this life goes on with several projects under way and an opportunity to re-engage with the Barnsborough virtual world. More on that later on.

Are we still nodes?

The network metaphor is everywhere. Yesterday I travelled down to Oxford on the rail network; most of the time I could use my mobile (I'm on the Orange network). In the book I was reading Gilbert told me that in my brain 'millions upon millions of new connections are formed....in increasingly complex networks.' It seems that networks are both inside and outside me. That's a distinctively 20th century metaphor suggesting as it does desktop computers tethered together and interconnected. So a network is a connection between points or places, a channel of communication. But what happens when the metaphor is applied to the social? Actors are reduced to points - not even points of view, but nodes connected to other nodes. In the fluidity of everyday life we make and break ties, the signal breaks up, the network goes down - do we cease to exist? When we flicker in and out of communication, when we become more mobile are we still nodes? And how does the network metaphor consitute us as human subjects? Perhaps there's a better way of imagining communication and connectivity...

Guitar hero?

Well, maybe not. But this is me in full swing with my new midi controller. What you can't see is the way I'm hooked into Garageband, playing digital instruments and samples (my favourite percussion is taken from an audio-file of the porridge-spoon rocking in the bowl!). To the extent that I'm researching my own learning I'm finding that my own, rather limited, skill with the old technology of strings and frets has an interesting iterative relationship with my midi play. Because the midi has different affordances, I can do a whole range of new things - and I'm still discovering them. I also have to learn new skills of preparation (eg: clipping samples, importing them, stitching together a rhythm track) as well as new skills of performance. Yet at the same time all this brings a new understanding of what I can and can't do in a more traditional environment. It's almost as if the learning and reflection happens because of this back and forth movement. This all gets framed up in my favourite arena, which is live improvisation with my partner-in-crime!

Misspent youth

Collecting the football cards that came with Anglo Bubblegum stood me in good stead later in life. Redolent of that sugary fruity flavouring (a sort of guilty pleasure) each packet contained a card with basic details about a player, his club, his position and so on. I could never work out whether I prefered the information or the gum. They took it in turns. Maybe it was a rather dry strip of gum that ran out in less than a minute; maybe it was Danny Blanchflower or Jimmy Greaves; maybe it was just the taste you needed. But all that Anglo Bubblegum pedagogy served me well when the sixties came blowing in to the Midlands where I grew up. Not only did I bask in the popular music that seemed so new and fresh, I scoured the album covers for information. Who wrote those songs? Who recorded them? Who played bass and who did the cover art? I geeked out on all the information, always keen to identify the key players and to trace the influences that had helped shape what I liked. Nothing much has changed. What might seem like a misspent youth was actually a substantial investment. A shift in the field to the world of theory and research is actually quite a small shift. I'm still listening out for 'new tunes' and trying to understand how they came about (who they were listening to when they wrote them and all that). Surely that's the starting point of a good literature review - creating your own map of the territory. And to think it all began with bubblegum!

Advantageous practice

In an article co-written with my colleague Cathy Burnett we've been problematising the notion of critical literacy - particularly in the context of social media. We've drawn on Greenhow and Robelia's notion of 'advantageous practice' which raises all sorts of interesting issues. One thing we're keen to avoid is the idea of teachers telling students what they think is best - a pitfall, as we see it, of some critical approaches. They end up by being uncritical to the extent that they try to force particular ways of reading texts, and particular ways of seeing the world. So advantageous practice is perhaps best seen as a dialectical process, based in an enquiry into how one is positioned in and positioned by social context, with a view to seeking ways in which these positions can be influenced in a positive and worthwhile way - one that is likely to benefit the communities and social networks of affiliation. Advantageous practices are then likely to be situated and often localised in character, although they may well relate to larger national and transnational concerns.

Books smell

I borrowed this wonderful advert for 'The Smell of Books' from Angela Thomas as an illustration for my keynote at the recent BAAL seminar on language and disadvantage. My point was to illustrate important changes in the communication economy (ie: the rise of self-sponsored writing; of new conventions, new relationships and ideas of appropriacy as well as the usual suspects: multimodal, multilingual and multiscriptual texts) that prompt us to reconceptualize disadvantage and to recontextualize public discourse about 'bad language', and to point out how all this takes place against a backcloth of persistant nostalgia for the book and other fixed forms of print literacy. For me it was a return to some key debates in sociolinguistics and with a title like 'The Trashmaster: popular culture, bad language and writing online', a return to form in grabbing attention. The nub of the question settles on old language prejudices - those that so readily associate with class, although as the seminar discussion uncovered, class is far more fragmented than it was when these debates last headlined in the late 1960s. Same same; different different.

Nostalgia for the future

Most visions of the future just flesh out the present - or even re-imagine the past. John Banville describes this effect extremely well when his narrator explores the 'outmoded atmosphere that pervaded ...[his]...dream of what was to come.' So here goes: ' So what I foresaw for the future was in fact, if fact comes into it, a picture of what could only be an imagined past. I was, one might say, not much anticipating the future as nostalgic for it, since what in my imaginings was to come was in reality already gone.' (The Sea: 71)

Looking back

window, a photo by on-the-run on Flickr.

September 1994 should be regarded as a landmark in the recent history of literacy studies. Or maybe it should be spring 1996. Either will do, because the autumn of 1994 was when the New London Group first met, and 1996 the date when their jointly authored paper ‘A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies’ was first published in the Harvard Education Review. To explain: New London is the name of the place in the US where the group met, where Courtney Cazden, Bill Cope, Norman Fairclough, Jim Gee and Mary Kalantzis, joined forces with Gunther Kress, Allan Luke, Carmen Luke, Sarah Michaels, Martin Nakata and Joseph Lo Bianco to discuss how literacy pedagogy might adapt to suit the changing context of the late twentieth century. Despite the impressive range of expertise it was an ambitious undertaking, but one that was nothing if not generative and, with the benefit of hindsight, highly influential. By the time the book Multiliteracies was published, the project had gathered momentum, had attracted new voices and was beginning to influence debate amongst literacy educators in much of the English-speaking world, and elsewhere too. At this year's AERA conference the group re-formed -well not all of them - but it was an impressive line-up. There was a fair dose of nostalgia, some great photos of New London in which they all (surprise, surprise) looked much younger and plenty of evidence that they all have more to contribute. Maybe the multiliteracies banner is a little jaded, but it's influence is still felt.

Migrations

Street Piano 2, a photo by on-the-run on Flickr.

Constance Steinkuehler talks about her work as migratory ethnography, and this description conjures two possible descriptions of research in digital worlds. One is practice- (or text-) focused and would turn the lens on how particular literacies and textual formations migrate across sites and between communities, whereas a second interpretation would look at how people migrate across sites over a period of time. They both have some relevance to what I've been thinking about Flickr lately - sparked by the fact that my subscription is up for renewal. Basically I started thinking about whether my subscription is justified by my usage and my level of participation in the Flickr community. Funnily enough just after my renewal reminder when I was wondering whether Flickr had had its day, I got Flickr mail from someone who was interested in the Street Piano photographs - wanted to initiate something similar at an arts festival and was asking for permission to use my pictures. This fascinated me - I'd already written about how the Street Piano became a 'slippery narrative' weaving its way between the real and the digital - and here it was again entering a new phase of migration! And this just at the point when I was considering leaving Flickr. I've now reconsidered; but it does make me think how Web 2.0 does produce rather transitory audiences/producers. Bloggers come and go, I deserted Last.FM in favour of Blip.FM and I find I've lost interest in Twitter. It would be interesting to trace people's migrations, to understand why they move and which practices they take with them into new environments. At least people continue to tickle the ivories!

Identity blues

Dorothy Holland and William Lachicotte have a great chapter in the 2007 Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky. They identify two tracks in identity theory, one is organised around the idea of a coherent sense of self and can be traced back to Erikson - with obvious connections to notions of psychological well-being. The other runs back to Mead, the formations that take place through social interaction and symbolic communication and suggests the possibility of plural identities. This allows the crafting of identities that may be a sort of bricolage of different social roles, a more creative way of inhabiting the various postions and roles afforded us by society. I don't know how far that confers us with agency, but it makes me quite happy to be a 50-something academic who attends conferences and loves live music. The video of Little Freddie King was taken at the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans on my Blackberry as I went (?) from one meeting to the next.

New Orleans!

French Quarter Fest 2011

I haven't been posting for a few days - that is since I became a temporary resident at the Sheraton Hotel in New Orleans, the location for this year's AERA conference. It's been a great event, with some very good keynotes and papers. I really enjoyed being discussant at Sarah's symposium on digital literacies in higher education, and the event I shared with Rebecca Black, Julia Gillen and Jackie Marsh went really well. Constance Steinkhueller was an excellent discussant. I've met lots of good people - too many to list - and enjoyed everything I attended. This morning I was wowed by the digital dome and the possibilities it presents (here's one). Jeffrey Jacobson's paper was thought-provoking and I found myself much in agreement with his comments about 'augmented' and virtual reality. The conference reality was helpfully augmented by the French Quarter Festival which was a musical extravaganza, with excellent Zydeco music (Donna Angello for one) and the full-on exuberance that seems to be the soul of New Orleans. Would you believe it, but I forgot to pack my camera!

Crowdsourced music

Imogen Heap's latest composition has a creative take on music in the digital age. Making extensive use of social media she has encouraged audience involvement in her latest work 'Lifeline' by incorporating the sounds and words sent to her. Now you could be picky and say that this is just a sophisticated marketing ploy, an easy way of gathering material and highly dependent on free contribution rather than open participation - but that would be unfair. The whole process springs from a different way of looking at the world, and one that reminds me of Colin and Michele's idea of mindset 2.0. In essence there's a distinctively new relationship between producer and consumer here, and a radically different take on where ideas come from and who owns them. Crowdsourcing is an interesting way of describing this because it leads us to ask for more precision in determining who the crowd is in the first place. The crowd here isn't 'the public' but it is 'a public'. It's not everyone, but it could be anyone. Similarly the crowd is not the audience but it may be part of the audience. No, the crowd is composed of a fluid coming and going of people who are part of a transient and distributed network - inhabitants of what Gee calls an 'affinity space'. There are clearly some resonances with other emerging social and political groupings, but I suppose the distinctiveness is around leadership and authorship (or ownership). Heap's achievement is, after all, still hers albeit with a little help from her friends, but it's framed by new ways of thinking about things, new practices and shifting networks of connection. Sell our sounds back to us, Imogen, or set them free: that's the question.

Getting mobile

In his careful exploration of the role of the mobile phone in contemporary life, Gergen (2003) uses the metaphor of the ‘floating world’. Historically-speaking the floating world refers to the urban lifestyle associated with the Japanese Edo period – an unregulated social world devoted to everyday pleasures and pastimes. The similarities between this informal social world and the floating world of mobile phone users is carefully sketched out, but the contrast lies in the conceptions of space and place that are involved. Geography is clearly less significant for networked communities and as Gergen poetically suggests these communities are ‘elevated from the physical terrain’ and each mobile ‘is a sign of a significant nucleus, stretching in all directions, amorphous and protean.’ It’s a vivid image of a pealing apart of place and space, and it also suggests that those who really count aren’t there. They are the ones that you left behind, because in the final analysis a mobile device presumes a mobile user. And in this way we are positioned as people on the move dependent on our phones for navigation, for orientation and most of all for connection. That seems strange when only ten years ago we thought that technology would allow us to travel anywhere without even leaving our terminal.

Augmented reality

The way Layar can deliver additional location-based information is a real bonus if you're in the right place with the right kind of phone, but all the same some of the more extravagant claims made about augmented reality warrant careful examination. Surely an augmentation would involve a heightened sense of reality whereas most AR apps are just clever annotations. In a way reality is diminished if you stare at it through the window of your phone. That's not to claim its of no use; it's just a matter of definition. Of a different order, of course, is the headset or the reality goggles. The BMW video shows AR goggles in operation. Surely, the ultimate toy for boys! I watched this with interest knowing full well that if I was working on an engine bolts would fly off, tools would malfunction, things would go wrong that no amount of augmentation could fix.

First Skype call

In affluent and highly-digitized societies childhood is infused with technology. Digital technology has to be factored in from the prenatal stage when the first images of a baby are scans on screens, circulated by mobile phone and posted on social networking sites. And for the newborn, not only are the toys digital but the everyday practices that they participate in with adults are similarly mediated. I'm slowly building up an archive of images - here's Dylan at six months doing his first international Skype call. And that's just the beginning!

The hammer and the keyboard

In the everyday use of tools, their operation becomes routine and normalized. Interfaces work in the same way. When we switch devices there is often a certain amount of disruption and we are thrown back on the stubborn materiality of our instruments of control, those tools that we normally experience as being straightforward - become almost invisible. 'Heidegger's hammer' is a way of explaining how the tool recedes from view in daily use. Its visibility is heightened when 'the tool turns out to be damaged or the material unsuitable.' (1962:102). That was my experience operating the above keyboard. Nothing went well. I had to look a bit closer to see that the familiar looking object was subtley different. The letter arrangement is not the usual QWERTY layout, but the Belgian equivalent. It disrupted my operations, I became hesitant and dependent on an expert to guide me.

Yardie shoes

For me Clarke's shoes are forever associated with the sensible and conventional footwear of the late '50s. Now they are the shoe of choice for the discerning Yardie - at least if we believe the video. There is that strange loop in which naff things suddenly become cool and cool things become naff. The same happened to Burberry (which I believe is back where it started) and high-waist wide-leg trousers which are making a come back. Who knows, maybe Vybz Kartel have got it wrong about the shoes - maybe Yardies prefer sandals - or maybe it's subtle viral advertising. But if I'm sitting on the Tube and catch sight of some Clarkes, I think I'll play safe and avoid eye contact. You never know.

Whose generation?

Young children lit up yesterday's dissemination conference of the 'Children's playground games and songs in the new media age' project at the British Library. The documentary film Ip-dipi-dation: My Generation was a triumph. I hope it gets a more public airing or at least gets posted somewhere where more people can get access to it and talk about it. Adult intervention has been minimised, the kids just talk and show what they do, and that's what makes it so powerful. Having said that it is, of course an adult view, with the images carefully framed, edited, and sequenced. We hardly notice the meta-text which is about adults talking to adults about children. And I was left with that overall feeling about this area which is such a tricky one to study. The project team have been meticulous in avoiding over-interpretation and unnecessary theorising, but as adults we certainly have a thirst for that. The British Library now have an impressive digitised archive which you can see here and the researchers have plenty to write and talk about. Part of that, I suspect, will be about the methodological problem of making sense of children's worlds in the first place. I was struck by how much we want to make some of this ephemeral stuff meaningful. For the children themselves, particularly the younger ones, I suspect that meaning is always in process. They do it because they do it, without being clear about why, and so the meanings are both opaque and fluid, and always multiple.

Robots can dance

Will robots ever become part of everyday life in the way that computers have? Well, I suppose it depends on what counts as a robot. I'm looking for something robotic for our futures event in July and came across these little ISO-bots. They don't look great, but they can be controlled with a nunchuc which is pretty impressive. If your associations with basic robotics are anything like mine then they're about turtles and roamers and they become a sort of conceptual exercise in programming. Skip the alpha-numeric stuff and go straight to movement sensors and gestures and you have a whole new kind of robotic control; something akin to an out-of body experience! I looked for a good clip and found the one above. I'm not sure how these ISO-bots are controlled (I think its the standard controller), but the choreography is interesting. The guys' reactions are at least as good as the dancing robots! If you want more go here.

Obsessing about fonts

Studies of the textual landscape seem to be grabbing our attention at the moment, and some of the work seems to reach a bit further than the original geo-semiotic work. But today I was made aware of the strength of popular feeling about the presentational features of alphabetic representation in the environment. Before the advent of word-processing, choice of font (and the very word itself) was the preserve of the publishing industry. Now it's everyone's business. Name your font, search for it in YouTube and you'll quickly see the level of interest and the strength of feeling about different fonts. I enjoyed this particular offering, which happened to lead me to bancomicsans.com. But what lies behind all this isn't just a simple question of design, it is also very much about socially agreed matters of taste. And the videos themselves are part of the process, producing and performing our ideas about what writing looks like.

What colour is the future?

The way in which colour associates with ideas and rituals is certainly a cultural construction. Note the way in which people in different societies use different colours at weddings and funerals. The same goes for an idea like the future. For a long time I was so impressed by the advertising campaign that I thought that the future was Orange. But recently I've succumbed to the idea that the future is in fact blue. Cars are employing blue technology (which is apparently green) and all sorts of new gadgets are blue-chipped or have bluetooth fitted, and videos, of course now have blu-ray equivalents. But the future is a moving target and my future colour scheme underwent yet another change on Friday. I was, in fact, reminded of Proust and I quote from the last book of his monumental work: 'As in a snowy landscape,the degree of whiteness attained by a person's hair seemed in general to be an indication of the depth of time through which he or she had lived, just as in a range of mountains the higher peaks, even though they appear to the eye to be on the same level as the rest, nevertheless reveal their great altitude by the intensity of their snowy whiteness.' I was at yet another retirement do; and that's where I formed the distinct impression that the future is now white. In fact, at least for me, white is the new black.

Images

I love Michael Constanza’s video of Hope Sandoval on this YouTube clip. The dreamy quality goes so well with the track. It’s interesting how readily music and image combine in new media. I'd love to write a bit more about music; I had so much fun doing that chapter in the Web 2.0 book. And image has been very much on my mind of late. So for my latest project I’m looking for a reliable way of streaming live video. I’ve been experimenting with U-Stream which does the job quite well. I also learnt today about Screencast-o-matic which seems to do everything I used to do with Jing, but not what I want to do on the project, but I’m looking into that one, too.

Firewall frustration

Talking with one of the teachers we hope to involve in the learning futures project, the old topic of firewalls came up. She described the imposition of a blanket firewall as an action worthy of a police state. Even quite reputable educational sites are blocked, along with YouTube etc. Googling, as you do, I wondered who else had recently been writing about school firewalls, but what appeared in my rather crude initial search was pages and pages of firewall hacks and dodges such as this one. In other words there seems to be more interest in subverting systems than challenging those who operate them! I suppose in the long run widespread adoption of such practices would undermine the justification for having firewalls in the first place. Perhaps this is an instance of a new digital politics in which sneaking round firewalls, dodging copyright restrictions, freeing-up information and networked action are coming to the fore.

Coming soon!

I always think a good breakfast sets me up for a day of writing, and having just signed a couple of contracts I'll be needing all the help I can get. Last year's ESRC seminar series is coming to fruition with an edited book for Routledge called 'Virtual Literacies' and I'm involved in a couple of joint ventures producing handbook chapters one on digital texts in the classroom and the other on early digital literacy. Apart from that we have some exciting collaborations between the two Sheffield universities which may well result in some publication. Some colleagues have also been successful in setting up a BAAL seminar series on language and deficit; I'll be doing a keynote at that with the snazzy title 'The Trashmaster: Popular Culture, Bad Language and Writing Online.' So although the policy context is looking rather grim there seems to be plenty to be getting on with. I'll need a good breakfast, but maybe I'll skip the Krave.

Bolton boys blog

Well, good: blogging is catching on! But I was left rather bemused by this article that showed how introducing children to blogging had revolutionised writing practices in Bolton (taught them to write properly). In the current climate of increasingly myopic curricular vision when something like this becomes national news you just have to celebrate it. Maybe my eyes have been dimmed by too many digital innovations, but the whole idea that blogging solves the so-called gender and writing conundrum is a bit underwhelming. Oh I'm glad enough they're blogging (by the way, is that a 21st century skill?) but 5,000 word stories for their blogs? I ask you! I'm still working on that one myself. Scores are going up too. That must be good? Call me a cynic, you can do that, but I was genuinely pleased to read that 'they exchange blogs with places as far apart as Canada and Australia'. Yes they're really far apart, that's global. I know there are other countries, too, but it's good to hear that Bolton is connected. So that's little me in the picture above on the left, before I got glasses. OK so I might be squinting but at least I was legally blonde. And now I'm resolved to improve my writing with more blogging; I'll have to work hard!

Stories from things

I've just finished reading de Waal's book (see interests) and I must admit that I'm still unconvinced that it deserves so much critical acclaim. But, the quote on the dustjacket does capture its originality: 'You take an object from your pocket and put it down in front of you and you start. You begin to tell a story.' And that's a theme that certainly resonates with me - the ways in which objects shape the stories we tell. Anyone familiar with the poetry of Seamus Heaney will know how so often it's the object that's the way in; but narrative research often uses objects in a similar way. The shoebox fad is one example, but I'm also thinking of the way in which Margaret Mackey's excellent auto-bibliography does a similar thing. Putting the object in a particular place, or a series of places as de Waal does, starts to unlock the stories. In a way our memories exist in the present, and with objects we can make the link between present sensibilities and past events, thereby opening a space for reflexivity.

Twitter-lect

You wouldn't really be that surprised to find social identity encoded in microblogging, but then to find regional dialect and particularly from a corpus of US tweets is impressive. That's the work of Jacob Eisenstein and colleagues at Carnegie Melon which is carefully reported by Rupert Cornwell here. And the fact that they could accurately predict the regional origin of tweets to within 300 miles adds to the wow factor. I suppose that all underscores the fact that from a sociolinguistic perspective there's nothing radically new about digital literacies except for the very fact that old themes persist in what seem like radically new media.

Virtual culture

Do we have a cultural obsession with the virtual, with concerns about the boundaries between fantasy and reality, who guards them, and to what extent they are permeable? Watching Shutter Island and more recently Inception I have been tempted to think so. (Either that or else the obsession is some strange emanation of the mind of Leonardo Dicaprio who (coincidentally?) stars in both.) No. We are intrigued and sometimes repelled by the virtual worlds of gaming, uncertain whether to villify them, hold them up as educational worthwhile or admire them as works of art. This is a thoughtful exploration of some of these debates about videogaming. As gaming moves on, media rolls on with the creation of the first full-length machinima (The Trashmaster - trailler above), new advances in made-for-mobile movies and, I suppose, we shouldn't forget to add 3-D to this list. Maybe we shouldn't be surpised, given all this development in new media, that we wonder where it's all going. Perhaps our fantasies, our narratives, and our imagined worlds are becoming more real. Maybe we should be preoccupied with the virtual; after all it's all around us.

Mapping the territory

I was brought up in the era of the corner shop. It was predominantly a one-man operation (and I use the gendered form consciously, because male ownership was the norm back then). That was the main commercial model and so my known universe was bounded by the the names of the proprietors and their small businesses. Pegg's the butchers, Horobin's the grocers, Glandfield's for newspapers and confectionary (sweets and particularly Anglo bubblegum) and a little further afield, Applebee's with what I thought at the time was a winning combination of electrical goods and toys. They were the outposts, and my empire lay in the streets between them, through which I would wander on errands or simply for diversion. Now I was no cartographer, and in fact I always thought that geography was rather feeble, consisting as it did then of endless rote-learning punctuated with intense bouts of colouring in. But I suppose one thing I learnt though the study of geography was about the use and misuse of maps. Even now, I enjoy reading a good map, mining the information it holds, cursing what it does not tell me. Maps are put to good use by the powerful and map-makers choose what to emphasise as well as what to erase. That might all sound like a thing of the past in our post-colonial digital world. Google Earth and Street View (like all sophisticated technologies) appear to simply tell us the truth. But those applications are the long arm of the corporate digital empire that is Google. Now I quite like Google, but I think it's important to remember that it always has a point of view. I can't quite re-trace my schoolboy peregrinations on Street View. The views are limited and timebound. In the end I'm quite relieved, because the space between those now non-existant corner shops is still my dominion. Reading Jason Farman's piece 'Mapping the digital empire' was a great comfort in this respect.

The cult of the book

Defacing books still fills some people with horror. It's amazing how often people get quite hysterical about marking one's place by turning the corner of a page or scribbling in marginalia. One of the key articles of faith in the cult of the book is to create rituals to secure its power. Carefully place it on a polished shelf and make sure it keeps good company; wash your hands before beginning your reading; hold it carefully so you don't damage its spine etc etc. Many of these rituals humanise and sanctify the book. But as we know, books have a chequered history. Marginalia go back a long way and the pointing finger doodle or manicule has attracted plenty of academic interest. More recently creative types have been glueing, sawing and cutting books up to make interesting works of art (there are some examples here). In comparison Jonathan Safran Froer's 'Tree of Codes' consists of kinder cuts. If, however, you prefer wordplay that is even gentler you need stop-motion wordplay with dingbat.

Plato's invention

The story of Socrates and the slave boy in which the latter learns some basic geometry has an almost iconic status amongst educators. It is a key illustration of the Socratic method in which the questions that the philosopher asks illuminate the boy's understandings as he draws abstract shapes on the sand with a stick. Attention is usually fixed on the way in which Socrates coaxes understanding out of the learner but what if we broadened our focus? If we did I think we would have an early glimpse of educational technology in which the surface of the sand prefigures the slate, the page, the board or the screen and the stick the stylus, pencil or keyboard.

Dealing with ghosts

After several years of teaching in synchronous environments in which participants are geographically dispersed you get accustomed to the problems of bandwidth and connectivity that cause fade-out, freeze-up and sequencing problems. These like other digital phenomena are wonderful ways of reflecting on taken-for-granted encounters in face-to-face interaction. I don't think I'm the only one who actually experiences bandwidth and connectivity issues in offline communication! In last night's teaching session there were a couple of ghosts in the room. I heard their whispers, but were they really there? Or were they actually more there than I was (after all I wasn't there at all)? I wonder how much our years of familarity with so-called RL settings help us to smooth over all the false-starts, non-sequitors and random noise to present an illusory experience of a seamless and fairly predictable world?

Networks of the world

As a way of describing social interaction, the metaphor of a network is appealing in a number of ways - after all, it suggests connection between points, as well as a sense of fluidity; but it also invites a sort of abstraction of the social which is perhaps best captured in the diagrams that are a common characteristic of network analysis. It is also a peculiarly 20^th century metaphor, one that readily associates with the network, itself synonymous with the online world of digital connection. The concept of a social network reduces the human social actor to a point, not even a point of view, but a point that connects in various ways to other points and in this way it speaks to the patterning and flow of communication and interaction by drawing attention to relationships, social groupings, friendship, intra- and inter-group behaviour as they are enacted in and across different geographical locations and over time. It has become quite common to use the term 'social network' to describe online social networking, and to assume that they are the same thing. Of course, they co-exist and overlap but I think its important to make a distinction, and that's what I've been writing about recently. In this post I commented on the mistaken idea that Facebook was connecting the world, but Vincenzo Cosenza's world map of SNSs quickly illustrates its broad appeal as well as its limitations in the global market.