Slightly potty

The BBC has quite a knack of digging out enthusiastic and slightly potty boffins to drive their distinctive brand of middlebrow edutainment. These characters seem to race around various glamorous locations in the UK, and elsewhere, talking nineteen to the dozen about their favourite idea. (Why hasn't anybody ever discovered me I wonder?) Returning home, I just had to catch up with the latest, Adam Nicholson - a historian with impeccable qualifications - who dazzled viewers with his take on literacy in  seventeenth century England. It was, or so the title goes, the century that wrote itself and he had lots of quirky examples to illustrate this idea. Although very entertaining, the major shortcoming was its rather narrow determinist view. That's the way we became modern: through literacy, through individual expression, from discovering the power of writing and so on and so forth. Major social, political and religious changes were relegated to the sidelines in these programmes- as if they were simply caused by literacy rather than intimately bound up with it. Power, and that century's particular shifts in economic and civic life were always hovering in the background: class, gender and race reared up as another version of how we became modern. Nonetheless this is better than a lot of TV, and if you're in the UK you might still catch the series on demand on iPlayer.

Mediated publics

I like Thompson's idea of mediated publics. He argues that public was once defined in terms of people, places and events that share a common locale. Print media disturbed this convergence by creating a 'reading public which was not localised in space and time.' (Thompson, 1995:126). Other media have helped to accelerate fractured or reconfigured publics. In the UK, the 1952 Coronation is often cited as a landmark event, in which the spectating public was dispersed as television ownership grew exponentially. A public event was witnessed in private surroundings by many people, often with neighbours crowding into houses to share the spectacle. Perhaps it could be argued that the first moon landing was another key moment in that the immediate audience was particularly small, but the mediated event reached out to a large and very diverse public. Interestingly though, for the upcoming funeral of Thatcher, the public is divided in other ways, but there's bound to be a heavy media presence.

Photo-sharing

Yes, I finally let go of my Flickr account last year, realizing that it no longer served any real purpose for me or, in fact, held my interest. There's a sort of archive of memory there, but a lot of it was rather ephemeral - or so it seems now, at least. Interestingly though, I'm using Instagram more intensively, and almost exclusively to share more intimate family-related images. In some ways it's a more traditional network. Barton & Lee pick up on a passage from Wellman that fits in very well with this: 'CMC supplements, arranges and amplifies in-person and telephone communications rather than replacing them ' (2001:18). This relates to our family use of Instagram which for me hybridizes the phone-call, the blog and the family photo album without replacing any of them. It all seems far more old-school than the sort of transformational social networking associated with Web 2.0 that I, and others, have written about extensively. Appadurai (2003) suggests that 'where natural social collectivities build commonality out of memory, virtual communities build memory out of connectivity.' - well he might just have produced a killer quote, but certainly the first half matches what we do on Instagram. We must be a natural social collectivity, then. For me this points to a very interesting research area which would look at how new media gets adopted and absorbed into family interactions. Next project?

Ungoogleable?

Sometimes you just can't find what you're looking for even when you're using really sophisticated search engines. To put it another way somethings are just...well, ungoogleable. Sorry Google if I just invented a word that contains your corporate name, but I think it has a certain ring to it. But of course when it comes to getting my new word in the dictionary our corporate searching outfit may object. That's exactly what the Language Council of Sweden found with the word 'ogooglebar' which means the same. You can read all about how Google stepped in, and how the Swedes reacted over here. Welcome to the weird world of technology. Maybe I'll get out the vacuum-cleaner instead - do a bit of hoovering (sorry Hoover) if they'll let me!

Paperless?

Le papier ne sera jamais mort / Paper is not dead on influencia.net ! from INfluencia on Vimeo.

I always thought that the idea of the paperless office was somehow flawed, and this video really brings home the point! Last week I was involved in so many discussions that helped to cement the view that the relationship between literacy and digital technology is additive rather than transformative. By that I mean, that it's not really a question of either pen and paper or keyboard and screen more 'both...and'. Literacies just got more complex, that's all! So rather than being digital, I'm enjoying a really good book at the moment (and I'm reading it on my Kindle and my iPad in turn, depending on which device is closer to hand - oops digital, sorry). It's by one of my favourite writers Michael Chabon. I thought that 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' was a wonderful exploration of the world of early comic book artists and that got me hooked. Chabon has this wonderful ability to weave narrative around strong themes of popular culture in contemporary American life. Telegraph Avenue follows a similar pattern, based in and around a record shop - a purveyor of second-hand vinyl with a community-oriented feel to it, that's Brokeland Records. Collectors, fans, and the sort of loose (and tight) affinities that emerge are lovingly explored. I always like to quote and there's a bit set in trading card fair that I thought was brilliant (and also very funny) - but this, spoken by one of the characters sticks out: 'Trading cards? Little rectangles of cardboard? Stained with bubblegum? Pop one in the spokes of your bicycle, make it sound like a Harley-Davidson'. Why? Because, I think it captures multiple meanings so well. The cards, part of children's culture, can just as easily be taken seriously as they can be re-purposed in creative play; but at the same time, when they are re-contextualized at a card fair, there's an economy of circulation that takes place in a hallowed atmosphere of reverential seriousness liberally mixed with nostalgia. The same dynamic seems to lie at the heart of the vinylist culture as well. Let's hear it for Chabon - nice website, too. Paper, too could one day become a collectors' item. Imagine that.

The surface of the news

By some accounts, one of the problems with digital literacy is that our reading has become shallow - we stay on the surface, reading widely but rarely in any depth. Of course this doesn't need to be constituted as a problem, it all depends which side you sit on in the big debate. That's if you believe there really is a debate, and one with two opposing camps. This article seems to suggest that a) there is a debate and b) there are two dominant positions. Pushed for time, and faithful to the 'shallowness' principle, I decided to remain on the surface and just read the headlines this Sunday. In sympathy with readers who like a bit of depth, I've included the links. In my reading I learnt that some novelists are excited by the possibilities of digital fiction; that Collen Rooney tweeted: "Can't believe @WayneRooney isn't starting" at the beginning of Manchester United's big match on Thursday; that 'geek aesthetics' come into play as fashion meets Google Glass; that Samsung is taking the mobile market by storm; that Apple may have run out of juice, and that smart technology can help police detect crime before it happens!And I probably missed a lot more simply because I read on the surface. But isn't there a subtle irony, here? The same newspaper that berates our obsession with technology is the one that regularly feeds that obsession. It simplifies the issues about new technologies and then tells us off for simplifying the issues. It's a no-brainer: so stick to surfing and broaden your views!

Material signs

In the introduction to this book, Kallinikos, Leonardi and Nardi comment that: 'materiality is indicative of both the embodied and embedded nature of human experience, the multiple entanglements of humans with materials objects and artifacts, and the various supports these provide to human pursuits' (17)- and I find that very well put. As the edited collection progresses, ideas about materiality get more and more hazy - and the book is none the worse for that, by the way. We seem to land on terra firma with Borgman who re-iterates that matter matters and reminds us how we used to think that it must be 'tangible, have weight, and occupy a definite place and time.' But the rise of 'immaterial obects' he argues (and most of these are digital or textual) throws all this into disarray, and with a pleasing turn of phrase he suggests that the 'material solidity of the world seems to be slipping over the horizon' (335). Perhaps all we've got left is signs.

Movement of signs

In the geosemiotics of traffic signs, this warning slips between being 'situated' and 'transgressive' (Scollon & Scollon, 2003: 22). In some ways it only works in the upright position. I've often wondered then, at what stage in its history a sign of this sort can be said to loose its authority? When it is fallen, rusted or removed, or simply out of date, what it is intended to signify begins to wear away, as it comes to represent something else - something for which it was not originally intended. Around where I live, signs often disappear. I am reliably informed that they have good scrap value, and in times and places of economic hardship this counts for something. Their meaning value is exchanged for economic value. Ironically, the one in the picture is just outside a scrap yard - it's probably been displaced by a reversing heavy goods vehicle, but at this point in time nobody has cashed in. Perhaps this sequence of events contributes to a sense of the ambiguities surrounding text and context, and how these shift over time: is this, perhaps, another version of the traffic of texts?

Signs of movement

Cathy and I did a seminar at Lancaster the other week based, at least in part, on the virtual worlds work we've been involved in. The journey was an epic of delayed trains, missed connections and travel adjustments, all of which worked out quite happily in the end. In the process we seemed to collect a rainforest of tickets (see pic). It all made me think of tickets as signs of movement. There's all sorts that can happen - wrong tickets, lost tickets, no tickets - whole stories can turn on the ticket. The ticket becomes the bookmark - even the souvenir. And sometimes the ticket is the proof - it tells the journey taken, the time, the cost and even (I noticed this on close inspection) the name of the purchaser. All very handy for those acts of surveillance connected with claiming expenses! I loved tickets as a child. The top-deck journey around the suburbs, the foot of Nottingham Castle and into the Old Market Square signified glorious independence. Often the journey was the best bit. I held on to my ticket as if my life depended on it (if an inspector got on and you couldn't find it, you'd be turfed off). After the excitement of the journey all you had left was the ticket. It was symbolic of something. I tried to collect them....and failed. I've never been the collecting type. But still so much connects to the ticket. It's all woven into the totality of the journeying experience - a bit like one of the nodal points Cathy and I were talking about. Yesterday I read something that seemed to capture this. In a review of the latest novel by Javier Marias, Alberto Manguel wrote 'every event, however minuscule, might develop into a sprawling web of roots and branches.' Despite a slight technical uneasiness with the word 'event' I found inspiring. In fact inspiring enough to re-mix as 'every ticket could explode into a sprawling web of roots and branches'. Apologies Alberto if that's plagiarism; I'm sure you understand.

Generating data

I've been looking closely at video footage of toddlers on iPads using a coding frame of my own design to try to understand what's going on. This is fascinating work, but as I'm doing it I've become aware of how the limitations of the video have already reduced and transformed the 'real' world into something else. The real has been transformed into data. Then in attempting to make sense of this data, my so-called analysis is actually creating a new kind of data - data which may well be the raw material that I end up writing about. From some points of view even that writing process itself is generating further layers of data - successive accretions or reductions, depending on one's preference. In the thick of all this there's a trajectory, a telos, an attempt to make sense of something. And only time will tell how that works out!

Putting things first

Joining the interdisciplinary group on space and place last Friday felt like taking time out. It was really fascinating to learn about the ways in which other academics are approaching different aspects of space/place in different ways. I learnt about ruin porn and object-oriented ontology (OOO), and some of the processes of artists - and somehow, in all that, it struck me that artists are often researchers and researchers are often artists. There's some really interesting blurring going on. In putting things first, humans often get erased - or at least all you see are their traces. Some of us wanted to re-insert people into their accounts, but presumably in ways that don't foreground or privilege them. All that was very stimulating, and the group project that we seemed to agree hovered somewhere between methodology and praxis. It's hard to say at the moment whether this signals a new direction for me, or whether it just sheds a different light on existing concerns. I'm content just to sit back and see what takes shape. So yesterday I took time out from taking time out, and spent the morning looking at ducks. Today there's only the duck sign left.

The Trashmaster: literacy and new media

Language and Education have just published my paper 'The Trashmaster: literacy and new media' which is an attempt to turn the tables on the whole disadvantage debate. I argue that schools are failing students by not providing them with the skills to negotiate the new media environment. I use an analysis of the Trashmaster machinima to explore the literacy practices that are associated with new media and then bemoan the fact that children and young people are not provided with tools that might help them to produce and consume in these textual environments effectively or critically. I'm sure friends and colleagues will point out its shortcomings, but from my perspective, I wish I'd had enough space to put this analysis alongside some extracts from curriculum documents. That would sharpen the argument - I don't know, maybe there's a chapter to be written from that. Going forward from that there is a complexities paper with my colleague Cathy Burnett (that's very exciting) and then I'm sketching out a first piece on very young children and their interactions with iPads. Somewhere, also, swishing around in virtual space is a book chapter written with Julia Davies which looks at digital literacy and teacher education, drawing on the work of the Deft project. Plenty of writing....and then there's the day job!

Going Dutch

Last week it was officially announced that the EBacc was dead. At the wake, Gove re-iterated his homespun philosophy of education. We already know he's living in the past but he seems to really believe in the battle between 'traditionalists' and 'progressives' - the signature binary of educational debates in the late 70s and early 80s. I thought we'd all moved on. Anyway, in trying to rally his troops, he's been re-asserting the importance of a content-based curriculum stuffed full of facts. Education has always been far more than that, and learning far richer. Jean Lave pointed out the habit that reformers have of trying to improve learning by focusing on teaching, powerfully asserting that whilst the two may overlap, they are by no means the same thing. Asking ourselves what is important to learn, is always a good starting point. But even before we get to that point we need some handle on learning itself. Gove seems to equate it with memorising. Remembering the capital cities of the world may depend more on memory than learning. What, for example, if they change - as they have the annoying habit of doing. Does that mean we've remembered wrongly or just remembered redundant information? Did we learn anything at all in memorising them? Would it help me in a pub quizz? It's not a simple matter. This is not to argue that we shouldn't commit anything to memory, merely to suggest that we should disentangle this from learning....and from education. I can remember the names of the original Clash line-up, the album names and most track titles: I didn't learn them; but I can't seem to forget them, either. It doesn't really help me in daily life, but then neither does knowing about the ins and outs of the English monarchy in history. Could I honestly say that I'm a better citizen, or a more cultured individual because I learnt these things in school and then forgot them as a young adult? My interest in the Glorious Revolution and what the Dutch monarch brought to England has been fired by living close to Revolution House and reading this book. We never did William of Orange at school; I thought it was humorous to have a king who was also a fruit, it appealed to my schoolboy humour. It was only relatively recently that I learnt about how oranges were actually used iconographically in portraits. That seems to be something called learning, and how it's bound up with relevance, interest and tactics. Can the same be said for non-human agents - I'm also interested in how we might say that the Tesco Clubcard (or Amazon) 'learns' about my consumerist peccadilloes - should we be sending technology to school. What might it learn?

Coding and all that

The English curriculum has repeatedly been the site of ideological conflict. Opinions on how we should teach students to talk about language have often divided educators. Traditionalists have tended to extoll the virtues of grammar teaching as a way of maintaining or improving standards of English, whereas radical voices have argued for teaching different kinds of meta-language, often aimed at exposing the operation of power and manipulation in various kinds of texts. The original formulation of the genre approach, and the wranglings over Knowledge about Language reveal the highly contested nature of developing a critical or emancipatory perspective. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to demonstrate the relative merits of inculcating a critical perspective through different approaches. But now the whole debate seems to be shifting from English to the technology curriculum. Coding and programming are being touted as the magic bullet to giving students a better understanding of how technology works 'under the hood', as opposed to 'in the 'hood'. John Naughton is an academic and journalist who is usually worth listening to, however, his celebration of the inclusion of programming in Gove's flawed EBacc is misguided. The idea that understanding coding might somehow inoculate us and our children against the ravages of corporate manipulation (ie: Facebook, Google etc), has already been elaborated by Lanier in his book 'You are not a Gadget', but if we look at the parallels - ie grammar in the English/literacy curriculum, we may have serious misgivings. In fact, given that digital communication is the cutting edge of new and emerging social practices we might be better to focus on promoting productive and ethical consumption and production. In an article written in 2007 'Writing the future in the digital age', I called this approach critical digital literacy. The term has been rehashed and developed by others since, and last year I revisited the idea, with my colleague Cathy Burnett. The result is here - I'm not claiming that it goes the whole way, but I think it introduces a perspective that the hastily reconstructed ICT brigade are in danger of missing.

Language, signs and so on

According to Adam Kendon, the sort of gesture you make when you're going through the mental lexicon looking for that illusive word is called a Butterworth - itself a lexical item of some merit. I usually make rather disparaging comments when I hear people say they find language 'fascinating': after all it is a rather trite comment, but nonetheless there are some interesting and obscure terms around, like the aforesaid Butterworth. I'll now be trying to weave it into my everyday conversation. Just watch! But aside from the interesting and obscure, I must confess to being rather impressed with prose that has a good flow to it. Although Kendon's book on gesture is well-written it doesn't really flow. On the other hand in Calasso's book 'La Folie Baudelaire' it seems as if every single word is measured. I could see how it might be irritating, but I just love things like: 'On March 13, 1856, a Thursday, Baudelaire was woken at five by Jeanne, who was making a noise shifting a piece of furniture in her room. His awakening interrupted a complex dream.' (129). This gentleman-from-Porlock moment introduces the surreal Dream of the Brothel Museum, which Calasso then explores in an oblique way. For me he writes very well - even though he tackles the life of Baudelaire at a tangent. What he does with language is accomplished, and if that is fascinating, then I've just contradicted myself!

Bacc off

Curriculum design and implementation once the site of intense debate between educators and the public has, over the last 35 years, become the plaything of politicians. It has not fared well as a result. And in England and Wales a rash of reforms and draconian accountability measures have sapped the profession of the very energy it needs in order to provide high quality and inspiring learning experiences. Politicians with very little  knowledge of learning and teaching, and a very thin knowledge about what constitutes evidence have attempted to make their mark and advance their careers by introducing measures that alienate teachers and pupils, running the danger of turning schools into irrelevant institutions that simply reproduce inequality. One wonders whether the current Education Secretary is about to get his comeuppance after all his recent meddling in the compulsory sector. The English Baccalaureate is one of his most reductive and divisive ideas - and the opposition is gathering strength. When it's compared with something more imaginative, like the International Baccalaureate, you see how we are hobbled by limited vision, a curriculum devoid of values, and an Education Secretary who is ideologically driven. Unfortunately we are currently in a position in which professional voices are ignored and political opposition fragmented. Is it too much to hope that the Labour Party can seize this opportunity to begin a movement that hands education back to educators?

Different signs

Travelling quite often propels you into a very different semiotic context in which, at least in the first few days, you are unusually sensitive to what it is that you don't understand and those things which in theory, at least, should be completely obvious. You realise that it's far more than just language, or even one's ability to navigate the immediate environment. It is as if your whole communicative system has been derailed. My recent forays into the vocabulary of hands, gestures and pointing, and their place in everyday communicative encounters, has made me increasingly sensitive to the differences here in KL. There are, for instance, some very different ways of pointing and attracting attention. It's easy to be misinterpreted before one has even attempted verbal communication. Hands, arms and the rest also have deep historical, cultural and religious significance, as this Nataraj statue in the Batu caves illustrates.

Multimodal themes

Do we all have undeveloped areas of interest? I suspect we do, and sometimes I think it's the case that the interest is latent - we might take some time to connect the dots, to realise the interest is there in the first place! That's what it feels like reading the literature on gesture and pointing. With a long-standing hobbyish fascination with the role that hands play in literacy events, the iPads work brings this into the daylight at last. Margaret Mackey introduced me to Frank Wilson's book The Hand (watch him here), and later I read Raymond Tallis's book with the same title. An interest I never followed up. Now I'm reading Herbert Clark's chapter 'Pointing and Placing' which is in this collection which is a carefully-constructed scholarly exploration of the ways in which communicative attention incorporates gesture in 'directing to' and 'placing for'. At first it seemed to be very culturally specific, but as the chapter progresses Clark acknowledges that these are cultural conventions - his data being North American (presumably Caucasian). His use of the idea of vectors in nodding,  sweeping hand movements, general and specific pointing to objects and sites is fascinating. One dimension that needs more exploration is how this articulates with social relationships. Is it an accident that the majority of Clark's examples are of men pointing things out to women? To extend this to toddlers on iPads it raises the question of adults' attempts to direct to and place for young children - and, of course, because toddlers are so delightfully agentive, the reverse. How do they manipulate adult attention through gesture? So all this folds into the ways in which the hands are also controlling, opening apps, turning pages and the rest. More to follow!

Pointing out a myth

Watching toddlers on iPads quickly shows that the claim that the interface is 'intuitive' is quite clearly a complete myth. Not only do you have to understand the logic of haptic control, you also have to get it just right. To know that you tap or swipe is a start, but when it comes down to it, it's a matter of just how you tap or swipe. The margin of error is quite wide. Still, our data shows children engrossed in playful learning, experimenting with pointing. touching, holding and carrying tablets. I'm particularly interested in how the gestures cross from one experience to another. We have video of toddlers mixing pretend cake with a circling motion, swiping as if turning a page on a print book, and even applying some iPad gestures in other contexts, too. I'll definitely be following up on the literature on gesture. Apparently, Adam Kendon's 'Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance' (2004) is a good start. You could also get quite absorbed in the deictic gesture and the segue between pointing and pressing with the first finger. In our video data you can see plenty of fingers poised in mid-air, children guiding adult fingers and vice versa....and then apparently, I'm not the only one who somehow imagines data stuck to my finger when I'm cutting and pasting! It's all fascinating stuff which will be written up in due course, but for moment the idea that iPads are tailor-made for young children has to join the list of myths.

Imagining the virtual

The idea that the virtual is constituted by the work of the imagination on tangible material phenomena only really started to take shape for me on the recent Las Vegas (!) trip. In the paper I gave with Julia Gillen, I think we brought the role of the imagination in virtual world gameplay to the fore. This came back to me on listening to the mathematician Robert Kaplan on this excellent radio discussion about virtuality. He talks about the thin line between the virtual and the actual and the constant acts of negotiation between the two. Kaplan also quotes from Midsummer Night's Dream - I only wish I'd remembered that in writing for the virtual literacies book. The passage, spoken by Theseus goes like this:

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.