Completely booked up

We've been evaluating the Booked Up programme (to a rather tight timescale), and that's rather distracted me from blogging of late. The programme is a book-gifting scheme aimed at 11-12 year olds on school transfer, and it's organised nationally by the Booktrust. It's not exactly digital practice, then, but the Booktrust are open to the idea of reading in other media. Part of our design was investigating students' reading habits, using both the perceptions of adults in school, and the students themselves. As you might expect we tried to work from a broad conception of reading. As it happens I was intrigued by the fact that there was little reference to digital practices in the data. Students seemed to prefer reading print. This could be accounted for by a number of contextual factors: the study was about Booked Up, interviews took place in the school setting, and the Booked Up selection was used as an elicitation prompt. It may also be the case that digital literacies are so embedded in students' everyday life that they are not actually seen as a kind of reading. We clearly need to look at this in more detail.

Pleasure or inclusion?

Frank Cottrell Boyce has a good piece in today's Observer in which he is critical of our national obsession with testing and educational competitiveness. His argument is a valorisation of the imagination and of the pleasures of literature. But although he aligns himself with Plan B (above) - the articulate voice of the underclass, Boyce has a mainstream message. Literature is so easily absorbed into education and into the curriculum, continually generating and regenerating cultural capital. But what of Plan B, this is a harder message - to pun on his name, we don't have one, do we?

Synthetic phonics

It could be said that the biggest irony in our current obsession with phonics teaching is in the naming of the brand - 'synthetic phonics'. For most people, unless they happen to be Hegelian philosophers, the word synthetic connotes with an artificial imitation of the real thing. In fact the Oxford Online Dictionary has 'not genuine', 'insincere' as well as 'imitation' in its definition. Of course, when that's paired with the word 'phonics', now synonymous with the direct teaching of sound-letter correspondence, we might end up with teaching routines that lack a genuine sense of what reading is all about. The current interpretations of synthetic phonics are an interesting illustration of how a particular interpretation of evidence-based practice impacts on policy and how this policy gets translated into training and eventually plays out in the classroom. Knowing the creativity of teachers, I suspect that some are making the best out of this - and all credit to them. But I've also been hearing some of the concerns. Here are just two. Firstly, there is the notion that in order to make progress in sound-letter correspondence children have to learn to speak 'like Southerners' - ie: imitate the accentual features of RP. This, of course, simply recycles the old North-South divide, replays the old asymetrical power relationship, and subtely undermines the way many people speak English. Let's hope the regional features that give distinctivenes to the voices of Jarvis Cocker, Tony Harrison or Arthur Scargill (to name but a few), and their future successors, are not compromised! Secondly, and this a much more fundamental classroom concern - it seems that success in synthetic phonics, as it is currently conceived, may not necessarily transfer into authentic reading and writing contexts in the classroom - and if this is the case the whole synthetic phonics bandwagon might come off the track. The whole initiative could well end up being a costly error in policy implementation. Only time will tell. My contention is that skill-teaching routines will always look as though they are synthetic (not genuine) unless they are fully integrated into an informed model of reading and learning to read.

Struck

I've been re-reading Donna Haraway's 'Manifesto for Cyborgs' as background for a chapter I'm writing. I was struck by what she had to say about minituarization, and how in some ways it prefigures the widespread diffusioon of mobile technology. I quote: 'The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but minituarization has changed our experience of mechanism. Minituarization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as preeminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wristbands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised.' (30)....mobile phones, ipods, tablets...AR. Drones....?

Stuck!

Having been confined to quarters with a wretched stomach bug, things have ground to a halt. All I've been able to do is sleep and read (and all the other things, too). So I finished Murakami's 1Q84 (volumes 1 and 2). When you're immobile and lying flat, a 620 page hardback can really sap your strength so this morning I decided that I'd get Volume 3 on the Kindle. I've no idea how heavy it is in print, but I knew right away I'd made the right choice. Amazon talk about the Kindle as a platform for selling content - and yes, I paid about the same as I would have done for the print copy, so more profit to them - but for me delivery is faster, the thing is easy to hold (I only need one hand) and it won't take up any of the space in the house that is no longer available for books. What's more 1Q84 is printed in a really small font which I can't adjust on the print version. That's no problem at all on the Kindle. So that's how I followed up World Book Day, and everybody's happy as long as they believe that a book is a book even when it's not a book!

Writing Symposium

Last Friday's UKLA research symposium gave us multiple perspectives on children's writing. Debbie Wells-Rowe opened with a critical multimodal analysis of young children framing and annotating photographs of themselves. That was followed by Cathy Burnett's look at digital texts in the classroom, and the sorts of negoataitions that surround textual production. In the afternoon Debra Myhill took us into some of the methodological issues around her project on Grammar and Writing with older children. Although the over-arching issues weren't immediately apparent, each speaker brought a different methodological lens, and each in her own way troubled the definition of writing itself. But for me there was something very interesting about formal and informal adult pedagogies and how children and young people respond to these in their text-making practices. In most cases there were multiple adults, as well - the adult in the writing process, and then the adult as researcher (sometimes they were the same person), and then of course the adult audience at the symposium itself!

Writing about trash

I'm currently writing a piece based around The Trashmaster. The Trashmaster is of interest from several points of view: it is an example of ‘machinima’, a movie made with videogame engine, and it is also the first of its kind to cross-over into mainstream cinema. Like anime music video (AMV), in which anime cartoons are edited and dubbed with rock music, machinima has its roots in DIY fan video production. It is is an 88 minute movie made from the popular, and in some contexts notorious, Grand Theft Auto IV videogame, and features a ‘vigilante sanitation worker’ involved in a battle against corruption and crime.

Virtually psychic

With a bit of help some of the problems associated with Barnsborough seem to have been circumvented. Yesterday, Chris, one of the teachers we're working with found his way in. What was strange was that when Chris materialised in the world I was on one of my periodic visits. I'm so used to being on my own in the world it was really good to have company! As if that wasn't enough of a coincidence, when I logged in this morning to check the enrolment tool, there was Chris, again, doing the same thing. I must be virtually psychic. With his help a further difficulty was resolved. Next it's firewalls. And the screenshot shows the scene of devastation at the petrol station!

Literacy as digital practice: the extra-textual

When I find myself constantly gnawing at an idea, it usually means its got something to offer me. This is the case with Cathy's notion of how, in literacy as a digital practice the textual, the material and the connected inter-relate. Her articulation of this is the best starting point, but I wanted to just try out my thinking around these ideas, which I'd like to suggest constitute something of an 'extra-textual' dimension. I'm saying extra-textual to make a distinction between, on the one hand those factors that are traditionally rendered as contextual (following, for example Halliday & Hasan), and, on the other, those that constitute the text itself (grammar, multimodal design and so on). Straight off, then, there's a bit of a problem, because one the dimensions is actually called 'textual' - so for me that might work better as the point of appearance of the text, the interface, place of inscription or surface. But essentially I think this is a sort of 'where' question. Where is the text? The next dimension is the material dimension. This the 'what' - the thingness or physicality of the text, the mobile window, the sheet of paper, the hinged screen and so on - and, of course, all those things that surround it. Finally, the connected dimension is about how the text connects to other people and other spaces. Now, I have a feeling that you could apply these extra-textual dimensions to non-digital texts, but that would be a further elaboration of the basic idea. At this point in time I just want to get my head round the basic notion.

On evidence

Research, like photography, is a selective record of things that have already happened. The writing of research is inevitably retrospective, and in this sense is always a partial history - a flawed recollection of the past, albeit one that is consumed in the present. And this is what makes research design such an interesting process. It is the point at which we are planning the future selection of evidence from which we will attempt to construct the story of something that hasn't happened yet. It details how we will select, collect and analyse the materials that we haven't yet collected. No wonder, then, that when we read research - even good quality research - it so often feels as if some realities have been hollowed out, or that there is an airbrushed image of truth. As with history with a capital 'h' it is usually the lived experience of the human subjects that is hidden, perhaps simply because this is always so complex and fluid. It is only really the most patient of ethnographers who can capture the fleeting shadows of human intentions, emotions and their various attempts to forge meanings. In the Julian Barnes novel: 'The Sense of an Ending', there's a great quote about history which is attributed to a Patrick Lagrange. It goes like this: 'History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation' (p17). Since the source isn't formally acknowledged, are we to assume that it is a work of fiction? Whatever the conclusion, could it be re-worded as : research is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of interpretation meet the inadequacies of data?

Siamese twinning

3 years ago my mother was taken ill, she was hospitalised, and never returned home again. She had 2 Siamese cats and I brought them up here to Chesterfield for safe-keeping. Within days the female cat did a runner, escaping through the bathroom quarterlight and all attempts to locate her failed. I never told my mother. And then just before Christmas, some three years on, I had a call from the RSPCA in Chesterfield - I was in Australia at the time - they'd found the cat! So now, after all this time, we're a 2 cat family again. Siri (we've no idea where she's been hiding out) is the one to the left. She's very shy and still getting used to us and the surroundings, but they say that Siamese are happier in pairs. I don't know whether that's related to the idea of Siamese twins or not.

Bare-knuckle fights and WoW

I caught an interesting segment on the radio today which was about bare-knuckle boxing in the early C19th. Given that I'm reading Bonnie Nardi's ethnography of WoW, I was tempted to draw some parallells - not, I hasten to add, about violence, but about popular entertainment and gaming. Big fights might attract an audience of thousands, and were a hugely popular affair mostly publicised by word of mouth, but what struck me about the history was the way in which the entertainment itself was embedded in a nexus of social practices. Firstly involvement in the fights was a fashion, but it also included many layers of betting and even the specific jargon of flash. Mainstream media eventually got interested, and there we can trace the beginnings of sport journalism. In an interesting parallel you can see how most of the broadsheet and weekend newspapers now have sections on gaming and digital culture

Everyday

I just wrote a paper called 'Mobile practices in everyday life' - and now, stepping back from that work I find myself wondering about that hook the 'everyday'. It's been useful for a number of us working in new literacies to use the idea of the 'everyday', the quotidian, in making a distinction between what people do informally in spaces that are not structured by the institutional regimes of education or work and what they do in schools, worklife and all the rest. Colin and Michele use it as a subtitle to New Literacies - it's even the title of their blog...and I know they will often make reference to deCerteau 'The Practices of Everday Life'. Apart from reminding me of the Buddy Holly song (above), I'm now wondering about the shortcomings of the 'everyday' as a concept. Firstly, although it's useful in identifying an often neglecting aspect of literacy (neglected, at least, by educators) it does set up a dichotomy. What we increasingly witness is practices that cross the divide, that blur those boundaries, The everyday leaks into institutional life. Secondly, there's a danger that we over-generalise. maybe a lot of everyday practices are actually those of the affluent, or to put it another way, the everyday is itself segmented and diverse. Anyway that's just completely undermined my own hard work...but virtual literacies will not be so easily undermined. In fact there's every indication that it may be slowly making its way from the virtual realm into the...into the.... everyday!

Where have I been?

My blog is like an old friend - I like to keep company with it on a regular basis - even if it's just to give narrative fragments of my (mostly) working life it seems important. Tamboukou (2010: 79) has this idea of 'nomadic subjectivities' which seems to me to capture that movement in and away from the activity of posting. So I've been at full stretch completing my part of the 'Virtual Literacies' edited book (watch this space for further details). It should be published by Routledge later this year. So, I had it mind a critique of this re-telling and privileging of book fiction, but I missed the boat; I also wanted to comment on the mixed messages of Gove's opinions on technology in education. But the moment has passed. But I was delighted to get urbanroller's permission to use his photograph. There's a genre - but this such a good version! Permission was given 4 years after my initial request. Ah, the age of instant communication.

Canada's digital literacy

In everyday uses of the word, literacy associates with being able to read and write. But making meaning, by locating, organizing, and understanding information are also implied, along with critical engagement. So literacy involves both the production and consumption of meaning. Reading Canada’s Information and CommunicationsTechnology Council’s white paper on digital literacy is interesting in this light. Just add the words digital and technology and you come to their definition Digital Literacy which is 'taken to mean the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology for a knowledge-based society. It involves a working knowledge of current high-technology, and an understanding of how it can be used. Digitally literate people can communicate and work more efficiently, especially with those who possess the same knowledge and skills.'

What's cooking?

I'm not sure where the media obsession with food came from - it seems to fill the newspapers and swamp the TV schedules. Perhaps I shouldn't be that surprised. Food is, after all, the original consumer product. We consume it, we digest it....and we want more. That's as close as you'll get to a seasonal message on this blog! But I do think this particular mash-up is excellent. That's good entertainment value, and I consumed that!

Searching limits

At the CSU technology symposium, we were once again alerted to the ways in which our casual searching behaviours may be shaped by search engines such as the mighty Google. This time it was Judy O'Connell issuing the warnings. So we learn to be sceptical of the JFGI approach. But since then I've got interested in something else about searching - and that's related to modality. I've been using the image above a bit lately, and have got quite interested in its provenance. A contact tells me that it shows the warehouse inventory process - possibly at a shipping line. Well that's OK, so far. But what I really want to do is search for the image and find out more about it. Of course Google (can I still mention it?),will allow me to search for an image related to a word, but it won't allow me to search with an image. Hence the modality issue. So I'm wondering if anyone's come up with a way of searching with an image? Maybe they have. Since some photo apps can now recognise your friends, image matching should be possible - and of course images are tagged and labeled. I wonder.

Beyond binaries

This is actor Jack Thompson, ending with a Riverina rhyme. Many thanks to Barney Dalgarno for this link. At the risk of undermining the entertainment with some analysis, it does seem to be a good example of something that's simultaneously recognisable but different. Same/not same. So the overall form and structure make sense; the liberal use of the adjective insert (we'd recognise it as the expletive-as-infix) are familiar. But unless you've been to Tumbarumba, or tuned into the patterns of Aussie conversation, they constitute the unfamiliar. Interestingly our patterns of thought (or socio-cultural dispositions) work in these sort of binaries. But isn't there really just a continuum of familiarity? In fact could this be a wider problem? At our symposium yesterday some familiar binaries popped up at regular intervals (global/local; online/offline; actual/virtual; me/not me; material/immaterial; mobile/static). We encounter these and we rather clumsily start talking about blurring the boundaries, but even this language tends to get in the way of the fluidity we want to talk about. We need to replace the light switch with a dimmer switch. But maybe we really need a new language, or a new philosophy for doing this. Perhaps, at the end of the day, this is part of the problem with affordances. It's a sort of on/off concept, and it doesn't allow enough space for fluidity, the evolution of new practices and conventions, human agency and so on.

Affordances symposium

I had a great day at the symposium organised by the Technology and Teaching Practice Group at CSU. The presentations were great and in fact the whole day was very stimulating. I realise that one thing I really like about technology-focused discussions is that you don't have to deal with the book fetish. Of course, there are other things to get hung-up about - but today, which was about affordances (not my topic of choice, I must admit), included some quality discussion. The fact that the symposium was held at the National Wine and Grape Industry Centre, could be misleading. But there wasn't a bottle in sight. The only nod in the direction of wine was the barrel-shaped podium. Oh, that and the vineyard outside!

Schools - the future?

I went for a cycle ride at the weekend. Riding round Lake Albert I thought of three possible future for education. They are:

Deletion schools as institutions are increasingly irrelevant. As social structures strongly formed by modernist thought, they perpetuate a factory model of education, which attempts to prepare the young for a world that has long since disappeared.

Re-construction schools as they are currently conceived are incapable of delivering the kinds of understandings and skills or cultivating the habits of mind that will produce 21^st Century citizens or a 21^st Century workforce. A new vision of schooling is required that incorporates the new literacies and is responsive to emerging patterns of social organisation.

Reform schools are out of step with society and need to capitalise on the new literacies that children and young people engage with on a daily basis. Extensive professional and curriculum development is required to align our education systems with the lives of young people.

Strange places

OK, so when you have a bit of down time, what do you do? Well, I'm always drawn to the places with the most interesting names. I remember watching the film 'The Last Journey of a Genius' in which the famous physicist Richard Feynman went all the way to Ulan Bator in Mongolia - just because he liked the sound of it! Now I don't pretend to be a genius - far from it - but I get the idea. So I had to go to Tumbarumba, up in the Snowy Mountains, only to discover that it isn't much of a place. But it does at least have the 4 Bears cafe, with its absolutely amazing collection of bears. I suppose that, in itself makes it worth the visit!

More Ziggy?

Reading Bauman is a bit like listening to Leonard Cohen. He's either gloomy and predictable, or sad and beautiful, depending on your frame of mind, or mood. So when Christina passed me Education in Liquid Modernity, I wondered what listening to the honey-tongued purveyor of post-modern angst would tell me about my own state of mind. Well, I like his six features of contemporary life: the rapid changes of short shelf-life; the way power, politics and the state begin to peel apart; the noticeable decline of collectivity; short-termism and disposable planning; an anxiety about the future; and the shape-shifting individualism - always adaptable but always in fear of irrelevance or exclusion. But although I liked them, each one may not be quite as certain as it sounds against the strum of his intellectual chord shapes. Perhaps: 'it is better to think of knowledge consumption and production after the pattern of fast food' 316 (on-demand and just-in-time). Still Bauman's conclusions are slight. Of course, we know all about the student as consumer in a marketised system - but what else is there? Bring on Johnny Rotten for a bit more energy!

Unlearning literacies

What might the study of literacies look like if it was set free from its histories of theory, its well-rehearsed models and research routines? That was the question we generated yesterday, with our talented colleagues at CSU - and, of course, that is a challenging tack to take. Moving away from familiar text-centric approaches became a key theme for me as we thought through how complex histories and diverse meanings are negotiated in social contexts. Not only do learners - and in a sense we are all learners - bring their own learning histories, social and cultural capital, and resources for meaning-making into new situations, but also these play out against the backdrop of powerful global and local flows that position them and carry the stories of how they became who they are in a social, cultural and historical sense. At the same time, the material resources for meaning-making play their part in constructing, communicating - mediating our relationships with others. Here, the available technologies, the modalities of representation and the codes (languages and scripts) can be seen as the tools or resources. This remains a sketchy outline of a detailed conversation - but it leaves me with a sense of how textual approaches might be displaced in order to allow us to develop a model of literacy that (re)places social interaction and meaning making at its centre. To be continued.

Wagga Wagga

Wagga Wagga is a great little place. There's a picture of the Lagoon I took yesterday evening. I'm so fortunate to be so well looked after. Today I've been up to the university and in between meeting people I've been reflecting on Stephen Turner's ideas about emulation. They've got rather mixed up in my mind with something from Philip Roth, which I think is so neatly expressed. He's introducing the central and charismatic character, Mr Cantor. Here goes: 'His athletic, pigeon-toed trot was already being imitated by the playground kids, as was his purposeful way of lightly lifting himself as he moved on the balls of his feet, and the slight sway, when he walked, of his substantial shoulders. For some of the boys his entire bearing had become theirs both on and off the playing field.' (Nemesis:13) There goes my role model!

History of use

I looked in the mirror this morning, saw my face, and thought well there's the history of use. That's after more than 20 hours of flying; so it's not surprising. But the phrase a 'history of use' comes from a paper on distributed cognition that I've been revisiting. It's by Hollan, Hutchins & Kirsh (2000) and it occurs to me that I may use it while I'm down here in Australia, not because of the history of use, but because it connects with Ihde's idea of human and technology as an active-realtional pair, as well as elements of practice theory, and even parts of actor network theory. In particular I like the idea that '...just like a blind person's cane...so well-designed work materials become integrated into the way people think, see and control activities (178)'. The blind person's cane is, I think an allusion to Heidegger. But as well as this, I like the observation that 'the environment people are embedded in is a reservoir of resources for learning, problem-solving, and reasoning.' (178). It's a thought-provoking article, a good example of psychologists moving away from their fixation with individuals - and that's all before you get to the history of use bit!

Mobile literacy

I've been reading David Parry's call for what he calls ‘mobile literacy’ (here). He identifies three areas of focus. These are understanding information access, understanding hyperconnectivity and understanding the new sense of space. The first is about encouraging students to use mobile devices to search for (and presumably evaluate) information, and to appreciate the differences and similarities between this and desktop searches. Hyperconnectivity is about using and understanding how social media can connect learners with those outside the immediate classroom context in advantageous ways (selective use of Twitter is offered as an example). And finally, the new sense of space is about developing an appreciation of how mobiles can be used to mediate one’s experience of the material/physical world through so-called augmented reality applications and the whole gamut of data-enriched geo-location.

Who owns me?

This is me at Monday's conference. I didn't notice anybody take a picture (not that I mind), and then I found it later on in the week on the Cloudworks site. So I've re-appropriated it - but in so doing I was aware of the complexity. Does someone else own that image? Is it the person who took it ... or does it belong to Cloudworks? And then in an instant, by clicking it, I reclaimed it, and now decide to upload it to my blog. Mmm...now Google owns Blogger, and so is it the case that Google owns my image, as well as my thoughts, and my searches? In the end it's not very important to me, but in a week in which the Leveson Inquiry into phone-hacking and media intrusion has heard some frightening testimonies from those who have been pursued, you can't help reflecting on the underlying issues - the ease at which images can be captured and distributed is only one of these. Intent and affect must come into this though. John (yes, I think he was the clicker in question) meant no harm, and I certainly didn't feel any. So everything is OK; but when does this cross the border into become not OK? I hasten to add that I'd already given my permission to being video-recorded, and I have no problem with anyone's conduct at the event - I'm just reflecting on the issues! Cut and paste these words at your peril!

Mobiles

Mobile practices in everyday life

View more presentations from edsghm

I really enjoyed speaking at the SoMobNet roundtable - it was great to be part of the conversation. You can tune into some of the debate on cloudworks, but I think you have to join to comment. I learnt about some interesting work across European and in one instance beyond Europe. Joining together perspectives from learning, Web 2.0, media and technology made it a rich fare. My slides probably make little sense without the narrative, but that's how it should be!

Shaping narratives

There are some quite persuasive arguments about how narratives shape our view of the world, and recently I've been thinking about how researchers' narratives help to create the field. In digital literacies our narratives are often future-focused, in that they attempt to imagine the next generation of technology, or the skills that will be needed in the twenty-first century workplace. These narratives are shaped by other imaginaries, in which we are always being drawn into the future, rather than propelled by the past. I caught part of Lucy Powell's History of the New on the radio, in which she locates the Industrial Revolution as the point at which a 'cult of newness' began to challenge the authority of tradition. Gazing at the future is the hallmark of modernism, and it seems that the pull of the future still disciplines our thinking. There's an interesting synergy between this fascination with newness and the ethos of consumerism. In an era when the past was best, and when things were made to last one would have little interest in new fads and products; now we are always on the lookout for the next generation, the next version and so on. Why darn it if you can buy a new pair? Why make do with the existing pair when the new ones are so much better? We're sold newness in the guise of improvement. The concept of advantageousness, which I've been playing around with quite a lot lately, is a slippery beast - but I think it helps to ask the question - it gives a much-needed critical take. At least if we ask what are the advantages of a Kindle, for example, we can justify our purchase! And then we can take that further, and ask under what conditions it is advantageous, who is it advantageous to and so on.

Mobiles on the train

Mobile technologies suggest mobile subjects, and it may be that we best see these devices springing into life, as it were, when we too are mobile. Take railway journeys, for example, they are punctuated by the beeps, pings and buzzes of mobile message alerts - the ringtones that are familiar, more or less the same, or perhaps unusual - but still recognizable as such.

Mobile social networks

The October issue of Orange’s Explore magazine is out! Pictured above, you'll see that the background image is a dense mesh of intersecting fibres. Their fiery yellows, oranges and reds criss-cross to form an image that calls to mind familiar diagrammatic representations of social networks. The device itself - the Blackberry Curve - appears to glow, as a live hub, in the centre of these interconnections. It promises that you will be ‘always connected to your social networks’, and you can be sure that the social networking icons of Facebook and Blackberry Messenger (BBM) are displayed on the screen. They are; and what's more, the icons are tagged with the white star on a red circle that indicates that new messages have arrived! You consume. They produce.

Smart/not smart?

I found John Naughton's article (from last July) useful in thinking about the ways of the mobile market. Are mobiles becoming the ultimate symbol of a consumer society - an overpriced toy with bags of gadget-appeal or are they not just an object of desire, but a really useful thing to have? Naughton warns us that 'we are on the slippery slope towards a much more controlled, less open, internet. If these trends continue, then it won't be all that long before a significant proportion of the world's internet users will access the network, not via freely programmable PCs connected via landline networks, but through tethered, non-programmable information appliances (smartphones) hooked up to tightly controlled and regulated mobile networks. And if that happens then the world will have kissed goodbye to the internet's revolutionary potential.' I think he identifies a trend - but it's one among many. In a sense, if you can connect to anything, you just experience the advantages of mobility, but then again you may be paying for it!

Uncanny valley

The Spielberg/Jackson Tintin certainly does 3D CGI animation well. But the movie hasn't gone down well with critics in the UK for two reasons: firstly, and this is an old debate, because it dumbs down Hergé (see Lezard here) and secondly, because of the CGI effect itself. I find the latter more interesting because I've been writing about visual realism, using Bolter & Grusin's (2000) notion of 'transparent immediacy'. They suggest that media-technology is advancing towards ever more life-like representations. So one critique of Tintin brings in Masahiro Mori's idea of the 'uncanny valley'. This idea suggests that the closer that representations resemble the real, the more that small inaccuaracies will derail us. Actually that didn't happen to me at all, but I'm glad to have learnt about the valley. You can read about that here.

Imagining the virtual

A number of commentators have drawn attention to the symbiotic relationship between popular narrative and technological innovation. The ways in which these stories are told relates strongly to the cultural legacies appropriated by the teller; it is possible to tell stories of the construction of virtuality that derive from Scandinavian fairy tales, from early Soviet science fiction, and from a variety cinematic genres. If narratives of hidden kingdoms, parallel universes and alternate realities capture our imagination - and the evidence is that they do, then it is entirely predictable that virtual worlds (or online gameworlds) might do the same. At least in part, radical innovations such as virtual worlds have been shaped by wider cultural narratives.

Digital Literacies 2.0

As we embark on an exciting new JISC-funded project 'Digital Futures in Teacher Education', the old challenge of defining what we mean by digital literacy has raised its head once again. In Writing the Future, published in Literacy in 2007 I argued the case for digital literacy as a kind of writing - one that was largely dependent upon alphabetic representation. Although the argument conceded that what counts as writing has expanded with new technology, it was, in hindsight, quite a tradional view. In that paper I also acknowledged that writing is now commonly found in the company of other forms of representation - in other words one couldn't avoid what the multimodalists were saying! My motivation was to save digital literacy from the technologists and to claim it for the literacy experts, who in my opinion have a far more sophisticated understanding of meaning-making. I also wanted professional literacy educators to wake up, and face up to the changes brought through the emergence of digital communication. But in four years, quite a lot has happened. For a start practice in educational institutions has changed quite a bit (although perhaps rather unevenly), but also the digital literacies movement has taken on a life of its own. A significant aspect of that is widespread discussion about digital literacy in the university sector. I'm not sure whether all the interpretations that have subsequently become attached to digital literacy are helpful, but nevertheless I feel obliged to revisit my own ideas. There's something about these versions of digital literacy that don't quite work for me. Well, let's say that firstly I'm not happy with skills, and secondly I'm not happy with the recursive argument that digital literacy is about preparing people to praticipate in a digital society. But, on the other hand it's easy to complain - I haven't got my new version completely thought through yet! I can see, though, that it will have the following ingredients: a new mindset (after Lankshear&Knobel, 2011); choice and creativity (Willett, Robinson &Marsh, 2008); meaning-making and social participation (Davies&Merchant, 2009); interlinked or networked spaces (Burnett, 2011) and maybe even something about new kinds of writing/reading (Merchant, 2007). That's not enough yet, but probably enough to suggest a different sort of emphasis.

Practice accounts

It was great to meet Stephen Kemmis yesterday, ahead of my visit to Charles Sturt University. In his seminar,Stephen gave a lucid account of his theory of practice: the architecture of practice, and ecologies of practice. The inter-related dimensions of 'saying', 'doing' and 'relating' work well as an account of literacy practices, particularly when studied in their 'natural habitat'. I was particularly drawn to his idea that practices have a life of their own - one that weaves its way across time and place. I also felt that the 3 dimensions provide a useful lens for looking at the processes that constitute academic literacy practice. Like one or two others in the audience I wanted a stronger account of how power patterns practices. By doing away with the mediating influence of social institutions that you find in Bourdieu, Kemmis's theory needs a stronger account of how practices reproduce values, ideologies and unequal distributions of resources.

Technology and things

I'm back on Verbeek now, and quite appreciating the critique he makes of Latour. There's no doubt that he knows his way around the old actor network stuff, and there's a good survey of the ideas. I like the basic quote he pulls out from Latour: 'You could as well imagine a battle with the naked bodies of the soldiers on the one side and a heap of armors and weapons on the other' (1997:77). And he uses this to summarise why it is so problematic to separate humans from technology. This is the point on which Ihde builds when he says: 'Were technologies merely objects totally divorced from human praxis, they would be so much 'junk' lying about. Once taken into praxis one can speak not of technologies 'in themselves', but as the active realtional pair, human-technology.' (Ihde, 1993:34). This line of argument allows Verbeek to shift our attention to the ways in which humans and their devices shape each other. Good stuff.

Back in the world

There's been a bit of technical glitch which is now fixed, and so I'm back in Barnsborough once again! And that's quite strange - the same old 'place', familiar, even the bits I'd forgotten about. So I snapped myself outside the police station as a memento. I remember what it's like inside, but I didn't return. I know the cells. So is it a place? Well, that's the experience I report. Boellstorff would say that. He would argue that it's an act of homo faber: a created world 'for human sociality' (p. 237) in other words a distinct place. But what sort of relationship does it have to the 'actual' world? Is it an extension, a parallel world, an imaginal space, a mulimodal palimpsest, and does it matter? That's the debate I'm currently exploring in the book chapter. I think it's at this point that I may need help from my co-author!

Naming cyberspace

Marking Penguin's reissue of six of William Gibson's novels, yesterday's Guardian ran a good article on the godfather of cyberpunk. Most of it is drawn from the Paris Review (here), but what is so interesting is Gibson's account of how he coined the term 'cyberspace'. There's no reason to doubt him, is there? I was reminded of the way that Jaron Lanier claimed the term 'virtual reality'. Because these histories are recent, the people are still around to tell the story. Like 'virtual reality', the term 'cyberspace' has entered the vocabulary in a way that makes us think we know what we're talking about when often we don't. It's ten years now since I wrote a paper titled 'Teenagers in Cyberspace' (here), but I'll own up and say that at that time I hadn't read 'Neuromancer'. It was pure imitation, I'd heard the term cyberspace, liked it and used it. And so it goes on. The cyberspace/virtual reality meme really was nailed by Gibson as the Guardian article explains: 'Case, the hero of Neuromancer (1984), applies the dermatrodes of his cyberspace deck to his forehead, powers it up and jacks in to the matrix, his "inner eye" sees a "transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity", on which, or in which, is "a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system".' The idea was a stunning mash-up of drug sub-culture and what new technology was beginning to promise, and it generated a fascinating interplay between this imagined future and what computer labs were trying to develop.

Digital-analog circuits

'The analog is always a fold ahead' (Massumi, 2002:143). He really does have a way with words. And sometimes he gets quite cross. You can almost hear him fuming and saying 'twaddle' under his breath when he writes this: 'A commonplace rhetoric has it that the world has entered a "digital age" whose dramatic "dawning" has made the analog obsolete. This is nonsense. The challenge is to think [...] the co-operation of the digital and the analog, in self-varying continuity.' (2002:143). He may sound cross, but it's still a convincing argument. He develops this by illustrating how the digital always connects to the virtual through the analog. In other words to paraphrase his 3 examples word-processing involves analog operations: the digital is just what happens behind the scenes/screens, in between encoding and decoding; music, unless entirely synthesized, may be 'digital', but the digital is sandwiched between its disappearance into code and its reaappearance as C minor, or whatever; hypertext is open in its analog recepetion. And so as the man says 'the digital always circuits into the analog.' (138). So think on!

You don't say

What you don't say or write about can be as interesting as what you do. I mean this in a particular kind of way, though - not in the sense of self-censorship, or anything like that, but with reference to the ideas that seem to slide away in the act of expression. In writing about virtual reality and virtual worlds, I've been noticing this. A small tribe of ideas scurry away into the darkness each time I approach them. Partly this is because they don't really belong in the daylight of what I'm writing about. But I thought I'd sketch an approach here. Describe the hidden people, why not? The tribe belong to the fellowship of strong social constructionism. To begin with, I started thinking a year or so ago, that the socially constructed space of a virtual world (I think Gibson talked about a 'consensual hallucination') was a pretty good guide to how things actually work when we strip away the taken-for-grantedness of what we call reality. So reality forms from data as we experience or co-construct it. We inhabit a consensus reality which is established through some pretty sophisticated programming. The little that I know about consciousness studies seems to point in this direction. Work in that field suggests that the selectivity imposed upon us by the limited bandwidth of our perceptual faculties makes the world appear in a particular way to us. That takes you to a sort of psychological constructionist point of view. I don't know if that's an official term, but it has the right sort of feel to me. Philosophically, of course, that leads one to ask if there's anything really out there at all. The example of the virtual world can be helpful in addressing this. There is something there (of course), but we create it at the same time that it creates us. What's more its created out of stuff that we wouldn't recognise as a virtual world in the first place. So it gets metaphysical. I imagine the discussion on the holodeck 'There's something out there, but it's not what you think it is.' Thinking about the virtual can, in this respect, be quite powerful. I think. OK, maybe its best not to write it after all, but I'm glad I tried!

Returning to the virtual

I've been (re)turning to the virtual, once again. Yesterday I was interviewed in SL by a docotoral student. That was interesting because I hadn't been there for a while. Also, although I've conducted interviews in virtual worlds before (and have written and talked about this quite a bit) this was actuallythe first time I'd been the interviewee. That's interesting, because in this particular situation all I had was chat - in other words there was no sound and, as it played out, our avatars were stationary. So, apart from the experience of being in that particular part of cyberspace, the communicative interplay was just the writing. And although in some ways I was my avatar, my answers (and of course the questions that provoked them) were those of Guy Merchant. At the same time I continue to explore the virtual in my writing. I'm exploring how online environments have distinguishing characteristics that set them apart from other contexts, but suggesting that they should not be dismissed as not being real. In developing an alternative perspective, I take the view that virtuality bridges the material world and the world of information and data, or as Sakr (2008:8) argues ‘Virtuality is a negotiation between materiality and information.’ This negotiation regularly takes place through interactions between people and technology - perhaps that interview illustrates some of this.

More virtual

I've been looking back at writing on virtual reality and virtual worlds to help me in shaping my editorial contribution to the forthcoming publication 'Virtual Literacies'. First of all I tracked down a copy of an interview with Jaron Lanier (Journal of Communication 42:4), a rather wide-ranging piece from 1992, which will be useful background. It seems widely held that Jaron coined the phrase 'virtual reality', and this seems about right. Morningstar and Farmer's (1991) piece on Lucasfilm's Habitat uses cyberspace and virtual world throughout. The latter is a chapter from 'Cyberspace: First Steps', a collection edited by Benedikt - and this is a fascinating piece. I reckon that it would interest a broad readership because of the fascinating insights it gives into virtual citizenship, governance and of course design. These guys designed a commercially viable system which could support a population of thousands. I think that's a first, but need to check my facts. All of Second Life is prefigured here: 'users can communicate, play games, go onadventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start business, foundreligions, wage wars, protest against them, and experiment with self-government.' But if that's not your bag, it's still worth a read because they tell the story of creating and then populating a world so well. In the beginning it was an idea and then people started logging on, and that changed everything!

Virtual realities

Yes, why not go for the plural - we are so accustomed to thinking of VR as a singular thing which it most clearly is not. Heim, who I referred to here, has a list of seven kinds of virtual reality, or seven realities if you would rather. Some of them seem to overlap, but I'll try to be faithful to the source (Heim, 1993: 109 ff). Here we go: 1. Simulation. I think he means high definition graphic environments; audio/graphic realism; precision rendering; and all the other ingredients for producing lifelike dataworlds. 2. Interaction. Here he seems to want to include everything from desktop environments with their folders, files and wastebins to virtual classrooms. (Does he mean places you can navigate within as if they were actual spaces?) 3. Artificiality. Here he really goes off on one, exploring the philosophical position that reality, as-we-know-it, is a human construct and that as a result more or less everything could be seen as being virtual. This threatens the entire VR edifice, so Heim abandons it as being too broad to be of use. 4. Immersion. This is mostly about a total sensory experience - the sort of thing associated with HMDs. At this point, Heim isn't concerned with the psychological dimension of 'being there'. The sort of immersion that Schroeder has written about. 5. Telepresence. Here he's talking about robotic presence. Controlling materials at a distance. 6. Full-body immersion. No, this isn't about body suits or flotation tanks, it's about 'becoming' a represented body/thing in a virtual environment. For this I read Second Life avatar. 7. Networked communities. Here, users 'stipulate and shape objects and activities' and 'share imaginary things and events' (116). Dubbed 'post-symbolic communication' this may move beyond words and real world references. All told a rather complicated list, but there are some ideas that are definitely worth developing here. Watch this space!

Mobile divisions

Now that the Guardian is available on Kindle it seems as if some sort of order has been restored. I don't have to read the Independent any more, and I can save time on pointless debates with friends. We will have the same opinions, unless, of course, the Guardian suggests that there is some sort of discussion to be had. But seriously, a Kindle newspaper is a curious thing. It has all the advantages of portability. Thanks to 3G I avoided all the faff of finding an English language paper when I was on holiday in Spain. It was just delivered digitally, on time, at no extra expense. But there's the catch, you pay for the convenience - something you don't do with the Guardian online. What's more what you read on the Kindle is a slightly reduced print version. Reduced in the sense that it's rather like reading a 1950s edition with its low image, black and white visual content. All the online advantages - the add-ons, video footage, hyperlinks, comments and so on are absent. In some senses Kindle reading can have a rather retro feel to it. Of course you can still go to the Guardian online on the Kindle, but because of screen size and navigation that's a clumsy and frustrating experience. But so what? Well doesn't this all suggest that the mobile internet, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, is, despite its considerable promise and potential, a huge disappointment. Mobility costs, it's carefully packaged by the new media industry and end-users are endlessy locked in and locked out of different services. Maybe this is the beginning of the end of the free internet. OK it's never really been free, but in comparative terms it is essentially unbounded. It may be too early to say, but with all the convenience and capital that mobile devices give us, might they also divide us in much stronger ways than digital technologies have done to date?