Google is rubbish

I've been keeping a Blogger blog for nearly 9 years now, and it suits me down to the ground. When Google bought out Blogger it didn't really make much difference to me. Gradually they've developed features and changed things around a bit, but all to the good. Then a few weeks back they just completely changed the posting and editing layout. And I must say it was much worse. Yes it was perhaps simpler, but it was certainly more of a straight jacket. I thought long and hard about migrating to Wordpress, but decided to wait awhile. And now, at the weekend I think, they send a stupid email about terminating 'legacy accounts', without really specifying what a legacy account is. I dutifully followed a link in the email, that then required me to log on. I tried this using my standard Blogger log in, but that was no good. A helpful link directed me to a forum - God, I hate them - where a very unhelpful Google statement tried to explain what a 'legacy account' is. A 9 year-old could have done it better. By the time I'd wasted 20 minutes I decided the easiest thing was to email back, asking for clarification. Guess what? You can't do that, you get a gmail error message. I suppose that happens when the big guys move in. The web changes; it loses its appeal. I think I'll move on.

Digital Bloomsday

I'm drawn to looking at the cross-cutting layers of our literacy practices and what these look like in an era of digital communication. Thursday provided some rich material for this, so I'll give a chronological account. First, though, I must explain that I'm working with Julia Gillen from Lancaster on a number of joint projects including a paper on Twitter, an edited book on virtual literacies and a development project funded by JISC. So, back to Thursday. Soon after getting up, I checked my email to see if I'd received an invoice from Julia. I couldn't find anything, but I did note a couple of other messages from her on other matters. About an hour later she was scheduled to take part in a meeting via Skype. In the few minutes before the meeting started, I was able to check up on some details with her in an informal way. The meeting began. Julia was passed round the room in tablet form, on my iPad. Five of us were sat round the table, Julia was a couple of hundred miles away in her office. We looked at the same project wiki. In the room the wiki was projected onto the whiteboard; Julia watched it on her office PC. Throughout the meeting those in the room talked in fuller, more explicit utterances than normal, and at a slightly higher volume, conscious perhaps of performing to the absent presence of Julia. When she spoke we all leaned in and nodded attentively. Anyway, later in the afternoon, I was back on email, and began to attend to other business. This included checking some documents that Julia had left on Dropbox. When I was eventually done, I emailed her with comments, and then wrote a cheque for her (associated with a completely different matter). I put the cheque in an envelope with her work address on it, ready to take to the postbox. Before doing this, I emailed her, listing all these varied strands of communication as a bit of a joke.......end of story. So what interests me here is the way in which all these strands overlap, whilst at the same time each having quite distinct trajectories defined by processes and projects that take place in different communicative spaces along quite varied timescales. Perhaps there is nothing new here, apart from an amplification of complexity, a density, and a pace that would have been impossible to achieve in a previous era.

Literacies and complexity

On my idiosyncratic pathway through informal meetings and programmed events at AERA 2012 I became interested in how becoming literate with technology is now being conceptualised and investigated. Researchers I have a close affinity with see digital practices as hard to pin down, difficult to describe and often associated with disrupting assumptions about literacy, pedagogy and curriculum. As the simple attractions of the iPad capture the attention of early years researchers, they raise similar issues to those of their colleagues working with older children and youth - both in school, and out-of-school contexts. Issues of varied experience, questions of what is age appropriate, and re-considerations of the processes and products of meaning-making recur. I seem to have come down firmly on the side of embracing complexity, and resisting simple frameworks and accounts, and search for this in the work of colleagues. At the moment I can see three reasons for upholding this acknowledgement of complexity. Firstly, it seems to me to be the stongest theme in my own empirical work. Secondly, it is in sympathy with post-modernism's rejection of grand narratives. And thirdly, from the educational perpective, it defies the sort of reductions that make learning seem measurable and something to assess and therefore a subject for numerous attempts to monitor and control - to render it as a mechanism that holds those institutions and individuals responsible through the vice-like grip of accountability.

Back

I'm back in the UK, after the annual pilgrimage to AERA, which this year was in beautiful Vancouver. As always it was great to meet up with people and learn new things from the sessions - more on this later. This year I decided to travel in a technologically lite style - with just iPad and flash drive for presentations. Apart from a few teething problems this really does seem to be the way forward. AERA's phonebook of a programme is usually problematic on at least 2 counts. Finding stuff in it can be a challenge, and unless you rip the page out, finding it again is difficult. Then you've got to lug it around multiple venues. Well after some experimentation with the online version, this year we had the conference app. An excellent innovation. You could search the programme, favourite specific schedules and then they would appear on your calendar. Furthermore you could also make notes attached to that particular session and then email them on. If that appears tp privilege the techie, it's not at all like that, because you still have the print version if you prefer it.

The shock of the new?

Sifting through some old books I came across an almost pristine copy of the 'Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers' released by the Board of Education (HMSO), 1938. It contains some fascinating material, including this on new technology: 'The films and wireless have already begun to play an important part in education and there is every prospect of their becoming even more important. It must be remembered that they do not so much introduce us to a new kind of education as provide additional opportunities for making existing forms of teaching more concrete and more interesting and for linking up the work of the school with what is going on in the outside world. Certainly, the teacher who is able to employ films or wireless as an aid to instruction may find in one or the other of them an instrument for infusing fresh life and purpose into his syllabuses.' Fairly transferable statements, if you think about it.

Talking about a digital revolution

I have a lot of respect for academic and Guardian columnist John Naughton, who regularly contributes measured responses to debates about technology. However, I think he is misguided in jumping on the coding bandwagon and turning it into a big deal in last Sunday's Observer. So the editorial leader of that paper has some fiery talk about a digital revolution (in the classroom). Here's a quote: ‘For more than a decade, the teaching of information technology in schools has focused on using software rather than understanding systems; and on treating computers more like magical boxes than tools to be programmed and critiqued. With the government's recent decision to throw away this old syllabus and replace it with something better fit for 21st-century purpose, we have an opportunity to rectify a dangerous imbalance and set a new standard.’ It's true that ICT is dead in the water, but across the sectors there have been some highly creative uses of software in just about every subject area. Don't knock it! There have also been some very important moves in critique, but I'd be the first to argue for more in this area. But Naughton's manifesto hangs far too much on coding. He says 'every child should learn some computer science from an early age because they live in a world in which computation is ubiquitous' - well that's not really a justification, and anyway a lot hangs on what he actually means by 'computer science'. The devil is in the detail. He argues against the economic rationale (I'm not convinced that government ministers would go along with this) and suggests that the real issues are moral. He fears that children will 'grow up as passive consumers of closed devices and services, leading lives that are increasingly circumscribed by technologies created by elites working for huge corporations such as Google, Facebook and the like.' Well, there are probably worse things, but actually I think he is dead right. It's just that computer science and coding are unlikely to deliver anything more than the sort of divisions that already exist in classrooms. I'd put my money on the sort of critical media literacy that colleagues have been writing about for some time now. That comes from the best work on digital literacy and the best of media literacy. Yes ICT in schools is 'a toxic brand', but computer science and coding could go the same way. There are parallels in language education and English teaching. Despite the hours spent on grammar teaching, and reviving grammar teaching for the 21st century, its impact on students' language and literacy is very hard to demonstrate, and it mostly ends up showing that some kids are better at grammar than others. Attempts to show how we can be manipulated by grammar (see Hodge & Kress, 1988) were impressive, but despite the best efforts of the LINC project, they had little purchase in schools. Structure may not always be the best way to critique meaning. I happen to believe that meanings are negotiated and critique comes when meanings are contested - and that should be at the heart of the enterprise of public education. If new media are about the meanings we make, then I think that this is a more productive place to begin than coding.

The fashioning of the new consumer

OK - I really like the New iPad, and I'm glad I indulged myself. Like my last purchase, the Kindle, it demonstrates how slick digital technology is becoming. That's the enthusiast talking, of course. But the Kindle is nothing without a few books, a newspaper or two....and then maybe some more books. So, it is just a platform for selling digital content. And the iPad? Well you're going to need some apps, after all, and they're not all free. More digital content. Then, of course, the iPad works very well with iCloud and that's the big sales push. Can that work with my laptop? No. I need to upgrade the OS....to Leopard, and that comes at a cost, too. Ah well, there's a cold snap on the way, and it may even snow again, but no need to worry, there's no need to leave the house, I can do all this from home. Who needs shops? They seem curiously old-fangled, now. I'll get a couple of books on the Kindle - click, that's twenty quid out of my bank account, and when I get bored, then what? Well I'll go to the app store and buy a bit more....maybe, I'll do the nostalgia thing and buy some music from the early 70s (iTunes springs to mind), or watch a movie (downloaded from LoveFilm). OK, I made the point. You click, you get - they've already got your card details. No need to leave the sofa. I have become the new consumer.

In Second Life

There were some pretty strange goings-on in Dasein (that's my place in SL) last Thursday night. The course participants had some very basic virtual orientation in the previous session, and then they had been given some Lindens and asked to work in pairs to furnish Dasein as a social space for us. So they brought furniture, decor and gadgets -some attached to their avatars and some in a more conventional (?) way. That must mean they all had some kind of collaborative shopping experience. I put up the big-screen TV and we watched a short film and then ended up listening to music and dancing for a while. We had rum and cocktails, but I wasn't aware of anyone actually drinking. I find it very interesting when we make the transition from the VC environment into SL and back again. Dasein certainly feels like a place and the 3D representation accentuates this. The interaction between avatars is definitely more social, and also quite a bit more random. Back in VC mode we're like talking heads, like TV, but still quite definitely mediated. It's very tempting to think that VC is more real; but then SL feels like a reality. It feels much more like going somewhere and meeting people. From a pedagogical point of view it seems, at the moment at least, as if we have some routines in the VC environment - routines that appear to be recognisable as learning and teaching. In SL, a bit like in a non-formal setting in real life, learning happens but it's completely interwoven with the experience of being there and doing stuff.

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

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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.