Remembering things differently

Our self-narratives are stitched together from half-remembered fragments. I’m learning this through sharing memories of childhood with my brother. What has become a significant event for me has been forgotten by him, whereas his version of fact is often differently remembered by me. So when Siri Hustvedt writes: 'There is no clear border between remembering and imagination', it strikes a resonant chord. I love the way she talks about how we re-imagine ourselves in narration. 'Time is a property of language, of syntax, of tense' is another favourite. These are both in The Sorrows of an American. But I also recently read her essay on the same themes and this weaves in these threads with the topic of identity 'Identities, identifications anddesires cannot be untangled from one another. We become ourselves through others, and the selfis a porous thing, not a sealed container. If it begins as a genetic map, it is one that is expressed over time and only in relation to time...We do not author ourselves, which is not to say that we have no agency or responsibility, but rather that becoming doesn’t escape relation.' Granta 104. These sort of things occasionally get posted in Blogtrax which seems to have decided to ban me of late. Hustvedt is here and here, but if you want a more intimate and sustained view, this is from the Australian tour.

Literacies past

My father started working life as a teacher in a Nottinghamshire mining village at the time of the Depression. He used to talk a lot about the hungry children with no shoes on their feet. I’ve recently come across his teaching notes from that time, written in pen and ink in a flowing cursive hand. It’s a fascinating insight into the curriculum of the time, concerning what was thought to be important to pass on to the young. Geography and history are unsurprisingly anglocentric, undeniably nationalistic, and sometimes what would now be deemed racist. There’s a strong emphasis on nature study and lots of English. This is usually subdivided into prose, verse, reading, language study and composition. An extract from prose study runs like this: How a Little Boy Spent Two Shillings. The story itself is quite simple, but the following needs explanation :- disposed to talk confidentially; common complaint; lattice; Chippendale. The questions will be asked orally. The surviving students from that era will be about 85 years of age now, having lived through the Depression, World War Two, the Sixties, the Miners Strike, and so much more. I hope their education served them well and that they are disposed to talk confidently!

Reform?

I don’t know why but I seem to be writing curriculum materials again (Code MD is a theme). So I thought I’d look for some official support for using multimodal texts and video extracts in the primary classroom. Despite all the optimism about curriculum reform I was surprised how little there is out there. OK, so the National Strategies which have been the heavy handed steer on literacy teaching will be disbanded in September 2011 and the new curriculum area ‘English Communication and Languages’ sounds promising, but the draft subject descriptions don’t look that different. QCDA consultations on subjects claim that multimodality has been introduced, but it’s just tweaking, and apart from ‘searching using various sources’ what has been simply titled English is mostly about print and handwriting. Meanwhile, back in the present, the National Strategy has an uncredited and unbranded paper on Multimodal ICT Digital Texts. Not particularly inspiring. I found myself doing a cut and paste on the principle concerns. Here goes: 1.Digital technology and ICT texts will not replace traditional literacy. 2. Books will remain as central to the reading experience 3. Pen and paper will not disappear. 4. Keyboarding and touch typing will need to be balanced with the development of fluent handwriting. 5. There will also be occasions where more traditional forms of literacy are better suited to the job in hand.6. [children] need to be helped to make discriminating judgements about when and how to draw on digital or more traditional forms of texts for communication and understanding. It’s a document of concerns rather than ambitions. I hope the new primary curriculum can be more inventive. Early indications are less than inspiring.

Writing 1540

If you’re anything like me, you just think of Palatino as a font on a drop-down menu, but actually Palatino (Giovani Battista Palatino) was an early scholar of the technology of writing. He was fascinated by the different forms of writing systems and those used in other languages at various times in history. This is his rendering of Arabic. In 1540 he published a writing manual in Italian called The New Book of Learning to Write. Was this literacy sponsorship? Anyway I suppose that it was his version of new literacies!

DJ literacies as process

The practices of music production and consumption have always fascinated me. In writing about literacy, DJ-ing and remixing have become popular metaphors, as for example in the work of Dyson (2003) and Lanshear and Knobel (2006). They have also been used to describe the Web 2.0 user/developer (Boutelle, 2005). But I want to re-focus on the DJ and what might be called DJ-literacies. The short video segment shows a successful London-based DJ, preparing his material. Note how the tracks are downloaded from specialist sites, assembled on CD, catalogued on word-processed labels ready for remixing on digital decks in performance. There’s a whole string of literacy events that lie behind the live recontextualizing. To me this illustrates how a focus on digital literacy as text can be rather reductive, concealing the depth and complexity (or the absence of these!) of everyday practices. And that's a call for a richer description!

All a Twitter

Reading today’s Guardian you might be forgiven for thinking that the nation is obsessed with Twitter. The front page reports the Ofcom story of young people’s declining use of Facebook and Twitter, the Sports section has a piece on a footballer who’s using tweets to slag off his manager in a transfer deal, and the IT section has two pieces. The first of these is perhaps the most interesting because it looks at this guidance on governmental tweets. The second reports on Guardian journalists at play with the techies. The best of the latter is the Guardian Twat Race (their name not mine) which captures government feeds and uses them to animate a robot! When I was out with friends last week the T-word quickly became a topic of conversation. Somebody 'didn’t get' social networking...common enough...and then this was followed by '... and as for Twitter!' But you don’t need a very long memory to remember the same about blogging or about texting. The trajectory is interesting. At first these things bumble along quite nicely, then you get some high profile users, the application gets popular and it’s quickly followed by plenty of coverage which polarises public opinion. And after that? After that it all settles down, gets integrated in people’s everyday literacy practices, end of story.

Reviewing new literacies

Although I always look forward to the latest edition of Reading Research Quarterly, I rarely read all the articles. One thing the journal excels at however is the essay book review. I nearly always look at this. In 44:1 there was an excellent review of The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky, which was well argued, erudite and gave a balanced appraisal of the book. I learnt so much about how Vygotsky has been differently interpreted by different translators and theorists. In the current issue, Robert Tierney has an extended review of The Handbook of Research on New Literacies. It is a very close reading of an impressively sized tome. Ever the egotist, I quickly noticed that there was a decent paragraph on my chapter! There is also a perceptive conclusion; a summing up of the work which I suspect would have even stretched the illustrious editors. On another note, I’ve been asked to do an entry on Critical Media Studies for a new dictionary of applied linguistics, so if anyone has any suggestions please leave a comment. I’ll also try Twitter (often really useful for this sort of thing).

Heidegger's hammer

I’m back, but slowly, slowly. First Second Life, then the emails, next a bit of Twitter and now the blog! The video is from my daughter’s blessing in Marrakech and that’s where I was last month (there’s another video here). Whilst I was away the Special Issue of Literacy that I guest edited with Vic came out. It’s a great issue and explores some interesting themes on identity and literacy. Check it out! Although I’ve not been working I have been reading. One of the things that’s made the most impact has been Heidegger on technology, and particularly the idea that users become absorbed in their interactions with technology until the tool itself ‘withdraws’ from experience. This phenomenological approach offers an alternative way of looking at the experience of being in the zone as described by gamers. Vic also writes about this, using the example of the way the mobile phone only really comes into view as an object when you can’t get a signal (as with Heidegger’s hammer). And so, back to the blog as a fairly fluid way of expressing myself. Yes, I said fluid; not fluent!

Blog off

Just to explain that not posting for a week isn’t the result of Twitteration, but just the domination of life circumstances. I’m also off on leave this week, so don’t expect much more until August! First of all I’ll be here, and then I’ll be here. The highlight of recent events has to be listening to Anne Haas Dyson at the New Literacies event. She is impressive. I was particularly struck by the way in which she concluded that official literacy in school is marked by individual performance on a rather narrow range of literacy practices, which I noted here. She also spoke eloquently on writing (and children’s writing in particular) as a dialogic process. That, of course, and so much more. Well done, Anne!

Digital conclusion

Just finished the next draft of a paper on virtual worlds. It's strange how the writing process moves you to previously unarticulated positions. Does it make sense? I'm posting a bit of my final paragraph here, in the hope that I get some reaction. Here goes, warts and all... If the digital literacy practices of virtual worlds offer anything distinctive to formal education these attitudes and dispositions may hold the key. Enthusiasts claim that virtual worlds can promote learning that emerges from what Graham (2008)calls the ‘playfully social’ in which learners can benefit from network effects (Gauntlett & Jackson, 2008), developing interest-driven collective intelligence in which knowledge is distributed and collaboratively produced (Gee, 2004). If this is indeed the case then they pose a fundamental challenge to traditional schooling. The current emphasis on standards, derived from measures of individual performance on a rather narrow range of literacy practices coupled with pervasive and powerful discourses of what constitutes literacy instruction, limits our capacity for innovation. Changes in teacher preparation, continuing professional development as well as wider educational reform may be needed. The real transformation may rest on how we can re-imagine meaningful interactions in which pupils and teachers have the wider access to the ideational and relational resources that new technology can enable.

Digital literacy

I’ve been wanting to return to the matter of defining digital literacy for some time now, but never quite seem to get the opportunity to write a whole piece. After several encounters this week it seems like a good idea to put some markers down. Look out, this could be an uncharacteristically lengthy post! Here goes. My basic standpoint that digital literacy is best described as digitally mediated written communication (literacy qua literacy) remains unchanged. Unchanged for the reasons I’ve put forward elsewhere and synthesized in this piece. It seems to me that there are two substantive criticisms of this position. The first is that digital communication has become such a densely textured multimodal affair that it is unrealistic, reductive or somehow artificial to regard the different modes as separately functioning entities. They make meaning in and because of their interaction. The second criticism flows from this first one and suggests that that a literacy purist’s definition of the digital reduces literacy to letter-acy or basic alphabetic decoding and is therefore old-school. My counterargument is that literacy has always described the production and consumption of written language in a way that includes everything from the simple, perhaps unattractive but nonetheless essential, act of decoding letters, right up through comprehension into the critical reading of literature, media texts and so on in the various and diverse contexts in which it occurs. The fact that many texts are complex multimodal constructions does not undo the fact that we read different semiotic systems differently in order to build our various holistic meanings (that point follows on from Kress). In other words digital literacy has its origins in print literacy but reaches out and beyond the confines of bookspace. And this, I think, is the point at which digital literacy gets interesting; the very point at which the written word starts to take on new appearances, to perform new functions, to interact with new media, to connect different ideational and relational resources, to mutate, hybridize and so on. When we apply this sort of view of digital literacy to education it gets even more interesting! We are forced to re-evaluate the curriculum (what is literacy and literacy learning, how does it develop, where should it be placed in an education of communication etc etc) and our pedagogy (who learns what from whom and what, as well as how and when). I suspect that these are thoughts that will get developed in later posts!

Facebook tentacles

Wethink - the Facebook tentacles are everywhere. Already enormously popular, the social newtorking site is aggressive and ambitious. Last week I met 3 other academics who are researching Facebook - more or less by chance, and there are many more. But according to this piece, Zuckerberg hasn't just been very successful, he's aiming for world domination, or at least web domination. The idea is to make the social graph an integral and ubiquitous element of life fundamental to the way we use and search the web. The stats are staggering. 4 billion pieces of information uploaded each month means there's a lot of digital literacy going on. But the article also points out that the 850 million photos and 8 million videos uploaded are hidden from Google search engines. Anyone wanting to access them must go through Facebook because the social network treats it all as its own data. So is there competion for our interest? You bet there is. And there's plenty of scope for critical analysis, too. Time for educators to get active!

Worlds apart

I was in Lancaster today, doing this. I enjoyed returning to the Barnsborough material, and it’s interesting how a second reading of the data reveals new issues. Given the discussion that followed, I also thought how there’s scope for a methodological paper, too. Perhaps that could be a collaborative endeavour (maybe Tetra would be interested?). Tomorrow I’m meeting some of the Future Lab people. Dr Joolz will join us, too. Thursday we’ll be in Second Life for a planning meeting. Another day, another world!

Pessimism and new literacies

In the paper I'm currently writing I argue that the social control of pedagogic practice mitigates against significant innovation, and that new literacy practices tend to be pressed into the service of older ones. I'm reminded of Foucault’s (1997) description of schooling in which the use of space, disciplinary time and the regulation of activity institutionalise conventional approaches to literacy learning and teaching. The dominant discourses of schooled literacy that emphasise particular understandings of particular textual genres tend to inform the views of both teachers and students. Testing regimes, although very different from the examinations described by Foucault, still guarantee ‘the movement of knowledge from the teacher to the pupil’ (Foucault, 1997:187) and secure the identity of pupils in individual performances of ability, rather than in collaborative acts of problem-solving. In this sense learning through partcipation seems doomed to failure without a radical reshaping of the education system. A pessimistic view?

Virtually planning

Planning the future, again! This is a snap of our first virtual planning meeting for the ESRC Seminar Series "Children’s and Young People’s Digital Literacies in Virtual Online Spaces". The hardest thing was arranging the dates. And isn’t that always the hardest thing in RL, too? There’s no getting away from it. As Willis says "Surprisingly, though, the place where anything is possible bears a striking resemblance to the physical world where what is possible is determined by cultural, legal, temporal and physical constraints "(2007). Maybe I’m not so surprised, after all. Anyway it was good to make some progress. We now need to find a good tag for the series, so we can do the Twitter, Flick mash-up thing; and I need to get back to writing about virtual worlds.

Planning, again

All planning involves imagining the future. In education that often means imagining the setting, the texts and resources, as well as the teachers and learners. But our imaginings are always coloured by previous experiences and constrained by different discourses. Often these discourses are enshrined in official documentation, and are themselves a reification of a past order. And so the past gradually begins to infect the imagined future, right up until the point at which the present is produced. So perhaps innovation rests in the strength and originality of our imaginings of the future and our ability to resist the gravitational pull of the past.

Planning and designing

As educators I think we invest considerable time and energy in planning for the learning experiences of our students. And planning is enshrined as a key professional skill in training programmes for teachers working at every stage of compulsory education. Design, particularly in the sense of curriculum design, is often the work of official bodies, examination boards, government agencies and so on. In this use of the word, design is associated with the aims and ambitions of a curriculum within the overarching project of education. So, for example, design has been described as ‘...an active, willed, human process in which we make and remake the conditions of our existence...’ (Cope& Kalantzis, 2000:203). And yet we still talk about designing games, designing activities, and designing environments, perhaps because the concept captures the sense of creative possibility that has been drained out of the act of planning by the discourses of learning objectives, learning outcomes and lists of skills and competences. So let's all get back to design!

Pop tarts and book sluts

Should I be offended? A friend calls me a pop tart, perhaps because I’m always talking about popular culture, or maybe it's because my ready-made ideas just pop-up like a rather unsatisfying breakfast snack, all taste and no nutritional value. I don’t know. And then in an attempt to navigate the uncertainties of another language I come across the word "book slut" in Sweden (which actually means book end), but since I always want to impose my own meanings on words, the two terms seemed like a handy way to categorise my friends. They’re either pop tarts or book sluts. It all goes to show that too much Bakhtin is a dangerous thing, in the wrong hands. After all a word becomes one’s own when "the speaker populates it with his [sic] own semantic and expressive intention." (1981:293). So there I go again, like a real book slut!

Techno logic

I think I’m generally optimistic about the potential of Web 2.0. The book Web 2.0 for Schools : Learning and Social Participation, written with partner in crime Dr Joolz must communicate that optimism. It’s the sort of optimism I respond to in Leadbetter’s book We Think. But then his is a romantic view of Web 2.0, a view that seems to ignore issues of power, social division, and ownership. It’s all very communitarian, which is no bad thing of course, except for the fact that it’s a naive position to adopt. Bolter and Grusin (Remediation) is a more thought-provoking piece. They argue that "many cyberenthusiasts assert that the web and computer applications are creating a digital culture that will revolutionize commerce, education, and social relationships. Thus, broadcast television is associated with the older order of hierarchical control, while interactive media move the locus of control to the individual. That digital media can reform and even save society reminds us of the promise that has been made for technologies throughout much of the twentieth century..." (2000:60) and in so doing they provide a counterpoint to Leadbetter. I’m also rather taken with their description of networks of remediation and how new media must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media. It is interesting then to trace how texts cross between media. Tweeting Blip.fm DJ onthetop playing Daft Punk’s Technologic could illustrate this. The link from Twitter connects to a YouTube video, one of several recontextualisations of the orginal sound track. This sort of hypertextual recombination has the capacity to make new meanings whilst at the same time challenging the haeccity of the text.

More immediate

I’ve been thinking more about the immediacy effect after blogging about it here. In that post I was thinking about the illusion of the synchronous evoked by microblogging (Twitter) and that sense of the nearly now. But I’m now realizing that immediacy is a far more subtle concept than I first thought. For something to be immediate it has to be instantly available at this point in time and in this particular place. On demand and just in time are fashionable ways of saying the same thing. But looking at Bolter and Grusin’s book "Remediation" you also get the sense that the immediate is similar to the un-mediated, or at least the tendency towards it - a sort of invisible or immersive media or what you might call the nearly real. Virtual reality, live broadcasts, reality TV, and YouTube all move in this direction in their attempt to produce, or reproduce the authentic.