Where's Hill at?

Children's literature isn't normally something that gets a look in on this blog. You could probably guess why. But in the process of looking around for Web2.0 material that is related in some way to formal education, I found this little gem. It's Eric Hill's contagious ebullience that really bowls me over. That, and the fact that he is decidedly unteacherly about the whole thing as he describes how he experimented with interactivity and modality in those famous Spot books. But where is Spot in the digital age, or has he gone virtual - that's what I want to know.

Flash mob futures

Rush hour Phnom Penh 1
Back in November I wrote a critique of Rheingold’s flash mobs and the whole idea of direct action mediated by new technology. I argued that it is hard to see how impromptu i-pod parties at Paddington Station or smart mob swarms in sofa shops fit into this vision. I suggested that they might constitute performance art or collective play, and certainly heralded a new kind of social participation, but weren’t so likely to transform society in any radical way. The French activist movement L’Appel et Le Pioche has just proved me wrong. You can read about spontaneous picnic parties in supermarkets here (their French blog) and the English press commentary here. Sounds great, but are things about change?

KTV as new literacy

Mr Leang
Just for distraction, on those long bumpy coach journeys in Cambodia, you get plenty of Karaoke TV. This is mostly Khmer or SE Asian pop with subtitled words. The words, in true KTV style, are highlighted more or less in synch with the vocals, so you can sing along if you want to. But nobody does; at least, not on a public bus. But it just struck me that this is a powerful new technologically-mediated literacy practice, and not just a distraction.

Kawaii!

Kawai
Hey, I'm the proud owner of 284 of these personalised Snoopy stickers! This all started when I expressed interest in a sort of Kawaii thing that was going on with the Taiwanese students I was teaching a few years back.... and then I just received this delightful seasonal message along with the stickers. Lungshing is the company that does them (along with all sorts of Sanrio stuff). Maybe someone should look at the use of stickers and stationery in literacy practices, after all there's identity performance, multimodality, popular culture and stuff, what more could you want?

New Literacies

Many thanks to Martin for pointing me to this video on YouTube which puts across familiar messages but makes more specific reference to younger children. These videos really pick up the heartbeat of new literacies. From another point of view here's Colin and Michele writing in a really interesting way about the writing of New Literacies. It's like a hall of mirrors, sometimes!

Back to work

Feather duster man
So it's back to the old routines again, and things are rolling along as usual. The Web 2.0 book is one stage nearer to publication and my piece Literacy in Virtual Worlds is now available here. Things are looking good for an exciting Special Edition co-edited by me and Vic Carrington (in this journal) and there are a couple of other exciting ventures in the pipeline. Watch this space!

Phnom Penh

After a long boat journey from Chau Doc we made it back to Phnom Penh, where it's hot and muggy. Spent the afternoon hanging out with the monkeys at Phnom Wat - that's about the quietest place out of the continual noise of the motorbikes! Tomorrow we'll be on the road again, heading down to the sea at Sihanoukville by air-conditioned coach. This is a four hour journey, although judging by how things run here it could be anything up to six hours. You always have to be on time at the start of the journey but it never quite works out to plan by the time you reach your destination. Still I'm not complaining, at least it beats the day job. May post from Sihanoukville, hope to have some original pics by then!

Sorry I forgot!

In the rush to get away just after Christmas, I forgot to announce a short break in my posting activity! So this is stolen picture of where I am at the moment, a shot over the rooftops of Chau Doc in Vietnam. It's great to be able to have a break and get a taste of what it is like on the Mekong delta, and I have to say it's rather different to Sheffield. For a start it's pretty warm; there's more motorbikes and bicycles than cars; and the standard of living is pretty low. Having said that you can still buy flat screen TVs and mobile phones! Yesterday I saw European tourists photographing Vitenamese kids on their digital cameras. The kids were fascinated to see their own images, pulling faces, making v signs and so on. This morning, outside the hotel in Chau Doc the situation was reversed as a Vietnamese teenager came up to a young German family and took pics on their mobile phones! Tomorrow we'll get the boat up to Phnom Penh and from their down to Sihanoukville. No promises about regular postings, but a normal service will be resumed mid January!

Virtual bowling

We've been having a bowling competition on Robbie's Wii. Spending a little time making our Mii avatars makes all the difference as the screen gets populated by our alter-egos. It actually begins to create a bit of a virtual space and certainly increases the level of identification with what's happening out there/ in the screen or wherever. I also discovered that you can download software to enhance your Mii design or (less adventurously, really) you can practice your design-craft. Interesting how working through options on multiple templates can begin to create an impression of personalisation. It's the sort of effect that must be explained by a mathematical formula.

Multiples

Lower Level 2

If you've ever had anything to do with literacies, you can't fail to be struck by the dense textual environment of Hong Kong. It's a sort of junction of so many linguistic crossings. When I hear the term multiliteracies it always brings to mind that order of richness of different practices, in different media and in different places. A kind of multidimensional diversity. This diversity seems to me to be shape of the future (or is it the present?). So it's very good to see Martin Waller launching his Multiliteracies Learning Initiative with a well designed space here. I hope this work continues to thrive!

Take five

Don't think just work

Well, it's time for a nostalgic sort of post. Time because this old blog is now five years old. And in that time it's become a part of my life as I construct this fluid and rhizomic text that weaves in and out of other spaces. Sometimes I surprise myself; sometimes I'm embarrassed. And when there's time I blog about the process over here. More than anything though it provides me with a space to give voice to some of the things that interest me, and some of those things become themes that I pick up in my published work. Other things are more transient. Dead ends leading nowhere. As bloggers come and go, vary in their posting habits, become intermittent or give up all together, I seem to carry on regardless. I must be a born blogger!

Lost in translation

So, after yesterday’s post and in the interest of balance, here’s the Hong Kong duo Fama. Now is that indie, or canto-indie? I’m no longer certain, but I suppose the danger of reporting on cultural hybridity is the danger that in translation you create the exotic. Now to me Fama seem more MOR, but maybe their message is more authentic, or is it just matters of taste that give Alice bad dreams? The more I wonder, the less I know.

Hong Kong rap

One of the most fascinating papers at Hong Kong Pop was Angel Lin’s sociolinguistic study of local hip-hop artist MC Yan. Fascinating because of the ways in which local artists work with (or appropriate) global trends and genres to fashion new cultural forms. MC Yan uses chou hau the unofficial language of the street to make strong statements, remixing familiar rhythms in his conscious rap. Watch the video!

Participation (again)

weight

I finally made it to Hong Kong after getting stranded in Paris with bad weather. If I get a good night's sleep then I should be OK tomorrow for the paper (with Julia) on Web 2.0 and social participation. At the moment I'm holed up on the 13th floor of a modern hotel with a slow internet connection. And this is the conference!

Internet safety

Yale (turquoise band)

There's a great little story here in the Guardian about how easy it is to cut keys from images on your Flickr photostream. This adds a new dimension to debates about internet safety. Local authorities and other administrative bodies may now have to change their policies. I'm taking a different view and hoping that someone can cut a key to unlock the padlocks that keep us out.

Bad games

Skysigns

We often hear stories about the evils of gaming. Earlier in the week I reported about the Italian boy who was diagnosed with PlaySation addiction. Apparently it all ended well when he told his father to throw it away. But the really bad games are played out in the Nevada desert, where miltary operatives dispatch unmanned drones to wipe out settlements of Islamic extremists in Northern Pakistan (news story here). Now what kind of terror is that? I'm still having a personal moral panic attack about this one.

Pirate Macros

This video is interesting in a number of ways. It plays on the amateur feel of a lot of language instruction material to feed that obsession with talking like a pirate. The American attempt at that 50s English voiceover is also a nice touch. But why talk like a pirate in the first place? Who knows? Interesting, at a time when real pirates are very much in the news. Then to entertain us all, along comes the latest mash-up as the lolcats phenomenon meets pirate-talk head on with Pirate Macros – argh Jim Lad, that be photoshopped!

Overclocking

Jim Gee’s sustained examination of videogames does two things. Firstly it helps to show their learning potential in the face of ongoing moral panic; and secondly it generates principles of situated and distributed learning. In the second sense the videogame acts like an extended metaphor. But the videogame (or maybe the MMPOG) could also work as a metaphor for the education system as a whole. In which case, so-called education reform begins to look a bit like overclocking. And as every good gamer knows, overclocking can lead to component burn-out, system crashes and serious overheating, and that’s why there’s a market for heavy duty cooling fans. What’s more, the game that runs restricts interaction, limits user-generated content and rewards a narrow range of behaviours. Avatar roles have reduced functionality and their behaviour is under tight surveillance. Call in the game designers, we want something more rewarding to play in!

Fascination

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Here’s a link to a New York Times video which shows the faces of fascination when youngsters are emerged in video gameplay. I think it’s a good illustration of interest-based engagement with new media. danah boyd makes the distinction between interest-based and friendship-based participation in her commentary on 'Living and Learning with New Media: Findings from a 3-year Ethnographic Study of Digital Youth', the MacArthur-funded study she’s just finished working on. I note from the executive summary that despite the emphasis on peer learning there’s a validation of the role of adults who act as role models and experienced practitioners. But alongside that, the sense of engaged youth comes across, the willful participation, the fascination: there’s a lot for education to compete with.

A question of compliance

I’m beginning to work my way through a modest pile of assignments written by student teachers. What really strikes me is the way in which they negotiate the official literacy practices of higher education, grappling with new concepts and trying to match them up to their own experience of life in and out of school settings. This process reminds me of how Anne Haas Dyson describes the interplay between official and unofficial literacies in her study of young children’s writing; the only difference is that these older students mostly play the game and the unofficial is only subtly signaled or perhaps half-silenced. But also they have to take a stance on another official discourse, that of the school curriculum. And then they have to make some guesses about what level of compliance or critique is expected by their higher education tutors who, after all, hold the power by grading their work. These students grapple with a potentially perplexing set of multiples. The words multimedia, multimodal and multiliteracies (which they easily confuse) often appear in their work, and sometimes these terms interweave with multi-sensory approaches and even multiple intelligences in interesting unorthodox or non-standard ways. Broadly they stick to the idea of 'doing what the documentation says', conferring the power of an imagined common sense on curriculum documents; but occasionally it appears as if they are persuaded to try something different as a result of what they’ve read; but then you can never really be sure that they haven’t just got very good at playing their own official literacy game. I guess to have come this far they are in some sense or another expert at compliance.