Virtual realities

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

Mobile divisions

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

Virtual reading

Michael Heim's 'The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality' makes for a curious read in that it was published in what seems like another era - 1993! He mixes a sort of cautiousness about technology with occasional bursts of enthusiasm. For all this I liked the description of what he calls cyberspace, which seems to me more like virtuality: 'We inhabit cberspace when we feel ourselves moving through the interface into a relatively independent world with its own dimensions and rules. The more we habituate ourselves to the interface, the more we live in cyberspace.' (1993:79). But what if that interface is print text? Heim has a view on this, too. '...the magic of the story comes from our ability to cross over from the words of the narration to an inner vision of the sequence of virtual events (which occurs to us when we walk through the wall of words on the page). (1993:133). So somehow our belief, or immersion, in a represented world defines this kind of virtuality. Carroll's looking glass, C.S. Lewis's wardrobe and Philip Pullman's subtle knife all act as metaphors for this in the sense that they are gateways to an imaginal world - a sort of parallell universe of the prosumer's fantasy sketched out for us by the author/designer. In this sense all that changes with technology is our ability to mediate or represent that parallell universe.

Government may try to disrupt social media

The idea that the government or the police should have the power to disrupt social media in the event of further civil unrest seems to me to be more like the action of a totalitarian state than a liberal democracy. I'd be particularly worried that a power such as this might be evoked to control legitimate protest or even the everyday communication of innocent citizens in times of unrest. Ironically, the advice to us at the university ran like this: 'For up to date information about the situation in Sheffield please monitor the South Yorkshire Police social media channels, which are regularly updated. Follow them on Twitter @syptweet or on Facebook For national Government guidance about the situation please visit http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Nl1/Newsroom/DG_198958'.

What did you get in London?

Whatever our opinion about the motivation of rioters, it needs to be acknowledged that mass unrest is a kind of spectacle and a political statement - even though it might not be a product of an articulated political doctrine. But as spectacle a riot is now densely mediated. It makes compulsive TV viewing, particularly when you are familiar with the location. Watching one sequence I was aware of watching 'from' the Sky News helicopter as 3 citizen 'journalists' photographed 1 rioter in a hand-to-hand scuffle with a policeman in Lewisham. Hidden from my view more images were probably collected from the nearby police helicopter and from behind their lines. After the event, if it is anything like the student unrest earlier this year, it will become a battle of images. But technology was to the fore in at least two other ways. Firstly, as has been widely reported, social networking sites and Blackberry Messenger (BBM) were used both to distract police attention and to co-ordinate activity and looting. Rheingold may have been ahead of his time with Smart Mobs, but this is mobile mahem writ large on the streets of London - so much so, that the police, roundly outflanked by youth are reportedly looking at (hacking?) BBM chatlogs. Secondly, the main targets appeared to be mobile phone shops and Curry's Digital. Gadgets have become objects of desire, significant cultural capital and a potent symbol for all. We do not need to speculate prematurely about whether this is a restless underclass seizing what has been denied to them, or a lawless mob stealing what can easily be sold (maybe both are true at the same time) in order to see the significance of the main retail targets.

Wanderings

Way back when I was doing my Masters, Bill Harpin upbraided me for taking the scenic route in my studies. He wanted me to read his book on writing; I was reading Derrida. I'm not sure it made any difference, but old habits die hard. Now somehow, a week or so ago, I ended up getting Brian Massumi's 'Parables for the Virtual'. Maybe I liked the title, or perhaps it was the cover. Anyway I got 2 copies. I thoroughly enjoyed the first copy and read it cover to cover. Just as this reading was coming to an end I realised that I'd hardly understood a word of it, and so I decided to go to the second copy and it is, indeed, exactly the same. Word for word, the same. But I'm going to it as a second reader, to try to find the point at which I got lost, and maybe to watch myself getting lost all over again. This much because I like Massumi's starting point. It goes a bit like this. He critiques cultural/social theory for its inadequate account of the 'body in movement'. He says: 'Earlier phenomenological investigations into the sensing body were largely left behind because they were difficult to reconcile with the new understandings of the structuring capacities of culture and their inseparability both from the exercise of power and the glimmers of counterpower incumbent in mediate living. It was all about the subject without subjectivisim: a subject "constructed" by external mechanisms. "The Subject".' (2) That creates a sort of stalemate because for example: 'Aren't the possibilities for the entire gamut of cultural emplacements, including the subversive ones, precoded into the ideological master structure?' (3). Instead Massumi focuses on the sensing body, seeing structuration as a back-formation - 'positionality is an emergent quality of movement' (8). As you can see, I'm doing OK so far, but that's just the introduction. When will I see myself getting lost? That's the mystery. No. The real mystery though is why Amazon sent me two copies. Maybe they knew I'd struggle with the first reading, who knows. They made me read it twice.

Baroque literacies?

The picture is supposed to evoke the idea of ponds within ponds (Leibniz) and the following are some of the ideas I'm working on, beginning with the idea that the human subject is embodied and all activity is situated (there is little choice in this, after all, at least from a phenomenological poit of view). And then, as a result there may be little gain in ‘looking up’ to more abstract theory, but a compelling richness in ‘looking down’ into the complexities and interconnections of embodiment and situated activity itself. Rather than moving in the direction of coherence and convergence this suggests a view of literacies informed by the notion of ‘baroque complexity’ (Kwa, 2002) - one that may provide a more nuanced account of how digital texts enter the communication economy of contemporary literacy practices. Drawing generously on the work of Deleuze (1993), Kwa outlines three characteristics of the baroque: 'First the historic baroque insists on a strong phenomenological realness, a 'sensuous materiality'. Second, this materiality is not confined to, or locked within a simple individual but flows out in many directions, blurring the distinction between individual and environment. And third, there is also the baroque inventiveness, the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements, for instance as in baroque music.’ (Kwa, 2002:26). So Kwa’s version of the baroque encourages us to ‘look down’ at the detail rather than to ‘look up’ for some broader picture (Law, 2002). In practice that may well mean seeing the ways in which the broader patterning of practices such as the global flows of information, shifting power relations and so on are inscribed or become manifest in specific situations. To be continued....

Learning to....

Gearing down for the summer offers more time for my exploration of music software. For the non-specialist, Logic Studio is a densely-wooded forest of terminology, toggles and plug-ins. You could easily get lost. It brings me face-to-face with digital learning. Step-by-step guides, help functions and tutorials are evidently a non-starter. First of all I want quick gains. You could call it impatience, but I need a certain feel for the possibilities before the questions and then the real learning start up. So my first step is to hitch up midi controllers and to begin to playfully explore what's available. And my way of doing this is to draw on repertoires I already have - just to get started, to gain interest and to experience some early success. And then I'm in! I want more, because I'm at that point that Jim Gee calls the 'pleasurably frustrating'. My curiosity kicks in: 'surely you must be able to...'; 'I wonder how...'; 'will it let me...'; 'what happens if...' And the perfect solution is the just-in-time advice that at-elbow support can give you. Ruth, whose already done a course, is great for this as she show me how to quantize, modify the velocity and fade out. But if I aspire to my own brand of contollerism (see the vid and here) I know I have a long way to go.

Of maps and brains

Sometimes when you're on a journey you glance at the map to see exactly where you are, and at that point become suddenly aware of how far you've travelled. Sometimes, too, you can see the exact point at which a particular choice - a fork in the road, for example - took you in a particular direction and into a distinctive kind of landscape. I had the impulse to check the map at this year's UKLA conference in Chester, when I was listening to Usha Goswami. Her explanations of neuropsychology and what it tells us about early reading were lucidly presented, but they seem to be located in another territory. It is a territory in which 'the brain' is a central feature and in which stories of how the brain works and how it develops are told. Checking my metaphorical map, I find I'm accustomed to a completely different set of landmarks, in a very different country. It's a far more densely populated place - one in which meanings are negotiated and exchanged, in which stuff is used in all sorts of ways, and one in which irregular and complex shapes form and re-form as practices evolve. I can't find the fork in the path, though. But I suppose my interest in language variation, in the stories we write and tell and in the impact of the digital on these things all presuppose a sociocultural orientation. I am in different territory and I'm glad I am, but I'm also pleased to know that some people are interested in brains. The map would be inadequate without their work.

Kids, kit, classrooms

It looks as though we've got nearly all of our students enroled on the learning futures wiki (pilot version), so I'm now really looking forward to looking at the work of these digital leaders over next couple of weeks. In the meantime I've been sitting on a list of views that emerged during our last planning meeting. They tend to cluster - in the ways I have them on the wall - around ideas about students and ideas about schools. Students are generally percieved of as having technological expertise, whereas schools are seen as an inhibiting force. Technology and innovation are described as 'kit', and basically you're lucky if you've got it! All our views are of course far more subtle than that, but the broad contours are still there. At this point in time I'm intrigued to see if the digital leaders themselves have a different view of these issues.

Shop fronts and shutters

The shops used to be closed a lot. Sundays completely, often Saturday after lunch, and mid-week. I think Thursday was 'early closing day' when I was young. So if you were incarcerated in an educational establishment (and most of the time I was), looking at what you could buy was time-limited. From quite an early age I compensated for this by window-shopping, pressing my nose up against the fronts of closed shops, peering in against the glare to see what you could get. I started with children's toys, but as my ambitions grew I began to focus on musical instruments and LP covers (big boys' toys), spanners and wrenches (serious boys' toys) and eventually clothes and electrical goods. I carried that on well into adult life and as a matter of fact I still enjoying looking at things I could buy, might buy, or might one day buy. It's everyday life in the consumer market-place. Sometime in the 1980s shop-owners - particularly those in urban areas - began to worry about civil disturbance, disturbed, no doubt, by images of rioters putting bricks through shop-windows and helping themselves to stuff they ought to pay for. They began to install shutters to protect their interest and city streets, at least on Sundays, became greyer places. When I first got into Flickr, partly as a homage to my days as a window-shopper, I started photographing shutters, putting them in a set. I was interested in the way that shutters were becoming a surface for art-work and graffiti. The security barrier of the shutter effectively kept most people out, but while the goods were protected another form of expression was errupting. Now many shops commission artists to decorate their shutters. So you'll see The Rude Shipyard, itself a wonderful boho artsy venue has followed the trend. Must upload to Flickr!

If it's not baroque....

I'm still on the romantic/baroque theme today and savouring Chunglin Kwa who makes the case for the baroque so eloquently: 'It may seem unnecessary to use an overloaded word like baroque, especially because it is not immediately apparent that there is a historical continuity with the grand style of the seventeenth century. In the case of romanticism it is much easier to argue for an uninterrupted lineage. Yet several important characteristics of the historical baroque make the term baroque attractive to use for later periods, including the present. First the historic baroque insists on a strong phenomenological realness, a 'sensuous materiality'. Second, this materiality is not confined to, or locked within a simple individual but flows out in many directions, blurring the distinction between individual and environment. And third, there is also the baroque inventiveness, the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements, for instance as in baroque music. Similarly, action in early baroque theater is not based on the logical development of a plot but rather on a sequence of monologues, debates, and allegories.' (Chunglin Kwa, 2002:26). And it satisfies the inner-geek to copy this out of my Evernote notebook entitled 'Folds'!

The modern disease?

In 'The Wild Places' Robert Macfarlane dichotomises the human social world and the natural world, and I think that's the weakness, or at least the romanticism, of his project. At best, in his writing, he captures the baroque in ways that equal Deleuze, and details the specific in a style reminiscent of Bachelard. But I think that the thesis that man is alienated from the natural world in a sort of latter day fall is a romantic fallacy. So the author slips all too easily from observations of our current condition into a sort of moral panic as the following extract illustrates: 'In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different forms of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world - its spaces, textures, sounds smells and habits - as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our innere world of imagination. The feel of hot dry wind on the face, the smell of distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a bird's sharp foot on one's outstretched palm: such encounters shape our being and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt.' (Macfarlane, 2007:203). Bring back Rousseau! It's an argument that's not exactly wrong, but incomplete. But in the end, you have to admire Macfarlane's rugged frontier spirit - when things get really wild his unstoppbale reponse is to strip off and go for an icy-cold swim - naked probably, although that's the kind of detail we're spared!

Texting change in language

Anthea Rowan had a good piece in yesterday's Telegraph. As to be expected it drew the usual range of comments. The full text from which she quotes (which I wrote for UKLA) runs like this: Language and literacy change over time. Social, economic and technological conditions influence these changes in significant ways. The development of mass media and, more recently, digital communication has accelerated the spread of language change and innovation. We now routinely communicate in different ways - such as emailing, instant-messaging, and making Skype calls. We use different technologies - laptop keyboards, mobile phones and webcams - to do this. These different channels of communication have led to the emergence of new communicative styles including text abbreviations, acronyms on bulletin boards, and microblogging conventions such as the use of @ and # in Tittwer. Writing, often a relatively stable or conservative mode of language, is currently enjoying a moment of creativity. This is a rich area for the study of literacy and one that has an unavoidable impact on children and young people. In fact young people are very often at the forefront of these innovations. It is too simple to suggest that 'new ways' are replacing 'old ways' or to suggest that the 'new litearcies' are somehow better than traditional practices. They co-exist and are likely to do so, at least for the foreseeable future. Most new literacy practices depend on the familiar -being able to read a familiar image and to encode and decode alphabetic writing. In fact they extend the possibilities for meaning-making and interconnection. Literacy is a much larger topic than it was twenty years ago, in an era when digital communication was still in its infancy. To fully participate in contemporary society, children, young people and adults alike need literacy more than ever before. They need to be able to write letters and send emails; they need to be able to fill in forms online and leave notes for friends and family members. There is no evidence that literacy is in decline. In fact there has been a massive increase in vernacular writing with the advent of the internet. At the same time, though, the ways in which we write and the ways in which we read are changing. In our capacity as an association for the promotion of literacy and with our interest in education, we are committed to supporting the reading and writing for all - reading and writing in whatever form is advantageous.

Research pedagogy

Provoked by some discussions on the return journey from Belgium, I've been reflecting on the hidden pedagogy of research. In disciplines like education that are driven by professional activity, the application or impact of research is often a topic of conversation. But at the same time a lot of research (mine included) addresses itself to the ongoing construction of knowledge and theory, and pays less attention to direct application. In fact, in the research community, something as simple as an effective solution to an everyday problem can seem to be too trivial. Nonetheless it seems that even the more abstract or theoretically-orientated research has a hidden pedagogy in that it privileges particular ways of finding out, particular ways of seeing social actors and social institutions and in doing so holds up particular actions or activity as worthy of interest. This suggests that it may be fruitful to look for the implicit assumptions about what is worthwhile in the design of applied research.

Participation

OK, well here I was just trying to uncover my own preoccupations by feeding one of my own academic papers into the Wordle machine - it's something I've criticized students for doing, but it was helpful for me, particularly in noticing how frequently I've been using the participation word. Working with a colleague on the theme of participation has made me realise how I need to spend more time unpacking this concept. What does it mean when we talk about 'participating in civic life'? What do we mean by 'learning through particpation'? Anne Edwards (2005) warns us that the meaning of the concept of participation may becaome opaque through over-use. Now there's a thought.

Reading campaigns

On the surface of things it would seem like a very good idea to mobilise public support and interest in helping young children's literacy development, and in fact the Volunteer Reading Help scheme has a good track record in doing just that. But somehow the Evening Standard's campaign GetLondonReading pushes all the wrong buttons. Politically it plays on the Big Society agenda and regularly features donators who are models, celebrities or former politicians - in other words public or media figures who want to do something worthy. But celebrity support is no substitute for public education and the high expectations placed on the volunteers themselves may not be the best way forward. You might predict that if the campaign makes a massive impact, there will be political capital to be made. If it doesn't it will sink from view. No surprises there, because that's just the same story that we associate with governmental interference in matters of curriculum. What worries me more is when the transport networks of London are flooded with travellers waving the banner headlines 'One in five parents cannot read aloud'. Although that's based on evidence produced by the National Literacy Trust (another reputable body) it's a scare story. Firstly, literacy is more than reading and certainly can't be reduced to 'reading aloud', but secondly, and more importantly it neatly ducks some key characteristics of the fluid multilingual demographic of our cosmopolitan capital. On the 9th June Free Standard the grinning picture of blonde (?) white model Laura Bailey - who donated £1000 - appears to be the solution to a hyped-up problem. And in the text, reading is clearly connected with empowerment, which is ironic when the most evident power lies elsewhere.

The future of the past

In our discussions on Monday for the It's the learning future project some of our teachers talked about children living in the technological present and then stepping into the past when they come to school. According to this view school becomes a sort of working museum in which children are in role as learners of the past - enacting how we used to live. At the same time we can only imagine the future on the basis of the present, or at least in our experience of recency (which is in effect the past). Although it may sound like word-play there is a very real sense in which these timescales reveal complexity and seem, in fact, to overlap. I thank Chris Thomson, someone who is also trying to imagine the future with pupos[ed], for introducing me to the design concept of the Skeuomorph which is another example of how the past is useful. So, not all history is bunk!

Mapping the mind

I'm in Belgium at the moment, but I'm reading Robert MacFarlane's evocative and excellently written book 'The Wild Places' which is a first-rate exploration of wild-ness and one which is tied to the British landscape. In a section on mapping, he tells us that over a million road atlases are sold in England and Ireland each year and that there are thought to be about 20 million in circulation at any one time. That's a lot of geographical literacy that's going on - and that's before you start thinking about AA maps, Google maps and various sat nav systems. Wow! But, as he observes, "The fells, the caves, the tors, the woods, the moors, the river valleys and the marshes have all but disappeared. If they are shown at all, it is as background shading or generic symbols. More usually, they have faded out altogether like old ink, become the suppressed memories of a more ancient archipelago....The priorities of the modern road atlas are clear. Drawn by computers from satellite photos, it is a map that speaks of transit and displacement. It encourages us to imagine the land itself as a context for motorised travel." In other words (my words) maps help to produce a kind of social identity - a mobile identity - in which we are constantly on the move between urban spaces, and the rest is something that is blank or something we go through.

Post-modern literacies

I'm reading a pre-publication version of Colin and Michele's New Literacies (3E) at the moment. The opening sections provide a really useful map to 'where we are' and 'how we got there' in literacy studies. They've just about got it right with a definition of literacies as 'socially recognized ways in which people generate, communicate and negotiate meanings, as members of Discourses through the medium of encoded texts'. I know it doesn't exactly trip off the tongue and I suppose that nearly every phrase needs translating (which is, as you'd expect, what haoppens in the book). I still have a problem with the social spread of new literacies and wonder to what extent the exciting practices which appear to be the popular everyday practices of children and young people are actually niche interests. On a more abstract level I enjoyed reading about Andreas Reckwitz's work on practice theories and made a note to follow this up. The football analogy reminded me of Bourdieu which sent me scurrying back to The Logic of Practice. Bourdieu, at least in the translations that I read, can be hard going, but one of his clearest pieces (Chapter 4 ibid) actually uses the football metaphor to good effect. But here he is on 'practice', the principle of which is found 'in the relationship between external constraints which leave a very variable margin for choice, and dispositions which are the product of economic and social processes that are more or less completely reducible to these constraints, as defined at a particular moment.' (p.50). That makes me think twice about agency in cultural (re)production and is something to pit against remix and participatory culture.