Doing data differently

Reading that 8 million horses died in the First World War or that 200,000 were slaughtered with the collapse of the equine market after the Second is extremely disturbing. More so than if it had been a 'large number' or a 'great many' - and so, in such matters, numbers count. Being a literacy scholar with a background in the humanities and qualitative research often puts me in a particular position with respect to numbers. When paradigm wars break out, as they do from time to time, I repeatedly find myself in opposition to the bean counters. But as Jackie once pointed out to me, quantitative studies can be really useful in offering a broad view of trends and patterns. I just didn't listen. But now, working on the British Academy funded project Doing Data Differently I'm beginning to learn the error of my ways. In fact I'm learning a great deal, most of which I'm still mulling over. But here's a random collection of thoughts. First - and central to the Doing Data Differently project, is the significance of what you measure and what you don't (the shadow side if you like). Second, and related to this, is the sheer power of numbers, the 8 million horses effect as I shall now call it. Third is about how you visualise data. Visualisation is representation, and as a result it can highlight, it can exaggerate or it can distort information And finally, in this whole quantitative field it's all about relations, what can be mapped on to what, who or where. This can be a highly creative act (highlighting new relationships), or a selective act (implicitly suggesting that some relationships are more important than others) and probably much more, too. I'm guessing that this sort of critical perspective is all very familiar to those working in this tradition and it's probably part of the basic mathematics that I've conveniently forgotten - but it's a useful antidote to the intoxications of post-qualitative theory and is certainly helping me to think about educational data differently and equally importantly, we're sharing this journey with a wonderful group of teachers.

New media in the classroom

Over a number of years and across a variety of projects Cathy Burnett and I have been working with groups of teachers to develop authentic ways of using technology as literacy in primary school classrooms. Along the way we have developed a set of principles for 21st Century Literacies (with Julia Davies and Jennifer Rowsell and published in New Literacies around the Globe). We like to think of our work with teachers as a partnership of equals and are always mindful of how challenging classroom life can be. Yet we are continually reminded of the enthusiasm, commitment and creativity of primary practitioners - and, of course, the children they teach. Our new title New Media in the Classroom: Rethinking Primary Literacy is hot of the press. Published by Sage it describes a lot of this development work, unpacking the nine principles of 21st Century Literacies and setting them in the context of our ongoing work on sociomaterialist approaches to understanding literacy. We've tried to write it in an accessible style so that it speaks to student teachers, practitioners and literacy scholars. There's more work on the way, but in some senses this gives an overview of our recent work together. Am I trying to sell it? Yes, I am - the royalties won't make us rich, but it is a celebration of a number of collaborations and we hope it captures some of the enjoyment and some of the surprises of the journey - and of course we want it to be useful, too.

Dwelling in error

Creative processes can be as interesting as their final products and that's partly because they are occasions in which thinking really is live, where something different could always come into being, or fail, or just remain in potentiality. I was reminded of this listening to dramaturg Ruth Little speaking about her collaborations with award-winning dancer and choreographer Akram Khan. Part of a Radio 4 series Behind the Scenes followed the development of their project Xenos, the story of the 1.4 million Indians who fought in the Great War. It is reported to be Khan's final outing as a dancer. The process of developing the piece is all about exploring possibilities, working on a difficult theme with a challenging set design. 'It's dwelling in error that takes us forward' explains Ruth Little, working with 'things that are right on the margins of possibility, or likelihood, or logic, in order to discover where they collapse.' I'm convinced that all the experimentation somehow gives weight and texture to the final performance. In the process, though, there's a wonderful sensitivity or faith in what emerges out of uncertainty. What's more, the very idea of dwelling in error is very appealing to someone, like me, who's always making mistakes!

Fifty years on

In the recent history of radical progressive politics the student unrest of the late '60s holds a very special place. The momentum for social, cultural and political change, although diffuse in its aims, spread like wildfire particularly across Europe and North America leading to sit-ins, demonstrations and student occupations, often resulting in fractious clashes with the State. This unrest was relatively short-lived but arguably it sowed the seeds of some more lasting social reform as well as a variety of struggles which continue to this day. One of the more colourful, violent and potentially revolutionary manifestations of unrest took place in Paris - culminating in civil disturbances between May 15th and May 29th, 1968 - fifty years ago this week. The dissatisfaction of a growing student population, subjected to archaic regimes and routines was vociferously expressed. Their protests were supported by many public intellectuals, artists and cultural luminaries. At the same time a simmering resentment of the economic conditions under the Gaullist government led to a General Strike and for a short while, at least, France teetered on the edge of revolution - or chaos, depending on your point of view. Les événements (the events), as they came to be called, had a profound effect on French intellectual life. Those working in the social sciences that look to contemporary European thinking - and particularly to what is sometimes dismissively referred to as 'French theory' could, and perhaps do, reflect on this. Like it or not, les événements profoundly influenced Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and many other too. Given that we are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of these events it's hard to work out whether we should mourn the lost opportunity, celebrate their impact or draw a veil over those heady times. I half expected more media interest. The BBC's Vive La Revolution was rather disappointing being more about Joan Bakewell than anything else. An extended interview with one-time student leader Tariq Ali is a lead feature in this month's London Review of Books. Although That Was The Year That Was is both informative and analytical it again tends towards the autobiographical. Hazanavicius's movie Le Redoutable (or Godard Mon Amour) adopts a different approach by explicitly focusing on New Wave filmmaker and political activist Jean-Luc Godard, offering a humorous and rather unflattering portrait of his political activity. This has the effect of lampooning the political rhetoric that circulated around the events May '68. History is inevitably selective and what matters for one generation may not for another. However, it would be a loss if les événements ended up being the story of a few individuals. In fact it would be a grand irony.  The very least we should expect is a reprint of Julian Bourg's excellent study 'From Revolution to Ethics'.

Uncertainty

One of the things I admire about Virginia Woolf's writing is her precision in describing uncertainty. The most obvious example is her first published piece, The Mark on the Wall, but I suspect it was an ungoing preoccupation or predisposition in her writing life. It's something you can't do so well in academic work where claims, warrants and certainties are only slightly softened by talking about caveats, limitations or alternative perspectives. No matter how uncertain I feel, the writing I do often sounds certain as I read it again. So here is an arena of uncertainty....when I hear about 'data as the new oil', I get that not sure sort of feeling. Of course the analogy - data as oil - has well-rehearsed shortcomings, but I think it may be in danger of missing the point (although note the same theme of exploiting natural resources is found in 'data-mining' and 'harvesting'). The Cambridge Analytica story seems to me to be more about exploiting and monetising private information than about data itself - that comes later. And this monetising is made possible by the ways in which we leave trails of personal information. The way we overtly make our private lives public on social media couples up with the surreptitious tracking of our online activity and that's how we come to produce data - which some argue is the digital labour that fuels a new sort of capitalism. All this may be the case, but where does that leave the poor knowledge worker who is now continually required to update his or her academic profile, to maintain a healthy score on Research Gate, accumulate impressive ratings on Google Scholar and use Twitter to generate impact? I suspect that sort of performativity may be beginning to eclipse the actual contribution made, although I hope not. But that's not the source of my uncertainty. No, it's more about who benefits from such activity as institutions, colleagues and publishers all encourage us to market ourselves. Does our labour just become someone else's data, and someone else's profit? Or is it genuinely a good idea, a more open gesture to draw things to people's attention? Well if that's the case, then I'm encouraging you to look at our piece on reading for pleasure in the digital age, and the paper that's had a longer gestation period - literacy as event. Which leads me on to a whole string of other uncertainties, but you'd have to be Virginia Woolf to get into all those.

Synthetic reading

Sometime in the mid '60s my father discovered drip-dry shirts. They were one of the many products of the modern world; a world in which science and technology seemed to know no bounds. They released my mother, at least temporarily, from the chore of ironing, because that's how the domestic economy was for them back then. The shirts were hung, rather unceremoniously, over the bath to drip and dry, and that could take rather a long time in the days before central heating. But they were something different, and they were, my father explained, man-made (not that other shirts weren't), and  they were artificial, they were synthetic. And therein lay their downfall. They were still a little creased after drying and what's more they didn't perform particularly well when it, or should I say he, heated up, which happened on regular occasions. Soon he'd had enough of what he called 'that synthetic rubbish', and as a result, synthetic, the very word, became associated in my impressionable mind with the artificial, or the inauthentic - something rather inferior that imitated the real thing but clearly wasn't. So now, when I see that word synthetic associated with reading teaching, I can't help but think that the obsession with phonics-above-all, and particularly phonics taught in a very specific way kind of way, is just that - an artificial product. To cling to that particular dogma, because I'm afraid that's what it is, seems rather like exhuming those shirts from the '60s, hanging them up to dry without central heating and somehow conning yourself into thinking that they perform better than any others. They don't.

The future of handwriting

It's perhaps unsurprising that in a discipline so firmly anchored to immediate and practical concerns, educational debate finds it difficult to float free of historical preoccupations. In fact, since the demise of educational philosophy - a useful, but by definition entirely unpractical sub-discipline for teasing out values, purpose, concepts and other fundamentals - there has been precious little scope for the development of rigorous, critical thinking. That seems a shame, because rigorous, critical thinking is just what we need right now. In England, hamstrung by a backward-facing curriculum, education is hobbled by an unpopular and draconian regime of accountability. Furthermore the system has been vulnerable to the capricious meddling of a succession of ill-informed politicians. Thinking clearly about what we might do, how we might respond to a wide array of changing circumstances - environmental degradation, climate change, economic uncertainty, population mobility, shifting social norms and patterns of employment (to name just a few) is important. They are fundamental, educational challenges. The gradual insinuation of new technology into different facets of social and educational practice is another, more immediate concern. And it's one that was hastily resolved into pen or keyboard skills at last week's Guardian Roundtable on the future of handwriting. It is to their credit that the participants agreed that the 'or' choice simply reinforced an unhelpful binary. But there were some old ghosts in the room: penmanship as the mark of good character, handwriting as something that novelists do, the seamless fusing of body and mind in the creative process, the significance of making letter shapes in learning to read. All are open to question. I modestly proposed that we might re-channel the debate to consider 'writing by hand' which seems to me to be inclusive of a much broader range of communication, including, as it does, nearly all of the writing we do. We might also recognise that handwriting (in the traditional sense) can become yet another obstacle to those who are already struggling to keep up with a demanding, traditional curriculum. So what should we do? Perhaps we could allow teachers a little more freedom and discretion, perhaps we should not imagine that yet another debate could be resolved by an RCT, and perhaps we might allow ourselves more time to think, discuss, and evaluate - after all these are central to the business of education - aren't they?

Here come the non-humans

It's not just the fact that we're sailing in the wake of Latour's Re-assembling the Social - the growing appetite for all things socio-material or post-human represents an impulse to think differently about our place in the world. Suddenly, or so it seems, the non-humans have risen up to challenge the endeavours of social science. Is it strictly social anymore, you might well ask? That challenge, if taken seriously, is a challenge to what we focus on in research, how we go about studying it, analysing and even reporting it. Conceding to material agency must surely be an all or nothing affair. I've just been reading Adams and Thompson (2011) on 'interviewing objects' - yes, that's right, interviewing objects. Well, the sort of objects they are concerned with are technological, and if we allow them the temporary grace to separate (human) subjects so cleanly from (technological) objects, they make a compelling argument. I resonated with this observation, for instance, 'The technological milieu is shaping substantially - insinuating itself, habituating us and simultaneously informing and interpreting - how we act in and perceive the world (2011:13), and I enjoyed reading about the 'invitational quality of things'. I remembered a conversation with Julia a while back when she wondered out loud if the idea of affordance still worked in a socio-material universe. I suppose in a way an affordance is rather weaker than an invitation. Perhaps it suggests less agency? I can't help thinking that Twitter's 'What's happening?' prompt is a bit more like an invitation, and similarly that the little red dot that says 158 next to the envelope icon on my phone is an invitation - an invitation to worry or to read and delete. So, here come the non-humans, and really when you think about it they're all over us; they have us surrounded.

Immersive reading

I think I may have coined the term 'immersive reading' in an attempt to draw parallels between the experience of dwelling in the imaginary world of gameplay and the more traditional experience of reading print fiction. It still works for me, and I imagine a continuum that runs from lightweight to immersive engagement. Not that immersive is in anyway better, it's just a different sort of experience, and one that may, on occasions, be appropriate. Having just spent 3 weeks in India, and a considerable amount of that time on very long train journeys, immersive reading was certainly appealing. I'd taken with me a substantial tome - what you might call a European classic - slow moving and highly descriptive. That turned out to be quite a challenge, partly because of frequent disruptions to my reading, but also because the narrative context (the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) seemed so far removed from the dust, heat and general mayhem of the sub-continent rolling past my open window. Somehow or other there was a dissonance between the jolting carriages, the clanking of couplings and the click-clacking of the train and the slow, dignified conduct of the story's characters. I had to work in order to conjure this faraway place, despite the fact that it was so meticulously described. I returned home with a few chapters to go, and this seems an altogether more fitting context for an immersive reading - at least of this particular book. I now feel I've missed out! Thinking about this, I was reminded of how I'd become completely hooked when I picked up a copy of Panjak Mishra's novel 'The Romantics' where I was staying in Kathmandu a few years ago. It just seemed to fit my mood. Context is a strange thing. Clearly there are no golden rules; if there were, stories would never travel, but nevertheless immersion appears to be a delicate experience and subject to all sorts of complex factors.

Waxed jackets (short form)

Reflecting on my last post I realise that I'm quite drawn to what you could call 'short form' writing, and that's what blogging seems to invite. My research collaborations with Cathy have really brought this out. After all, the idea of stacking stories depends on short narratives (or narrative extracts) based on research observations and field notes. In recent iterations of this I've been trying to capture the essence of an event without faithfully rendering every detail. In some of these attempts, I've been inspired by the short prose poems of Francis Ponge. I suppose the idea of drawing out the detail or the nuance of small ephemeral things can, if successful, work on the reader in interesting ways. There's something similar going on in the journalism of Joseph Roth. His shorter pieces, sometimes referred to as feuilleton, often draw attention to the minutiae of everyday life but, in doing so, also manage to comment on larger issues. For example, ahead of his time Roth, to whom the idea of the anthropocene would have been unknown, was keenly aware of our tendency to separate out something called 'nature' as a thing that has to satisfy a human function, to be of use, even if that is just as a place for recreation. He disdainfully describes that sort of attitude as a 'waxed jacket relationship with nature'. At the same time, however, he manages to celebrate 'the sudden, unexpected, and wholly meaningless rising and falling of a swarm of mosquitoes over a tree trunk. The silhouette of a man laden with firewood on a forest path. The eager profile of a spray of jasmine tumbling over a wall.' (Roth, 2003). It's a kind of attention to detail that works well for me. Detail, but in a compressed piece of writing (four pages in my paperback copy). Well then, the short form is at least something to aspire to, an ongoing project for 2018.

Fifteen years blogging

I thought I just might post something on the anniversary of my blog. It's exactly fifteen years ago that I registered this account with Blogger and, although the frequency of my posting and some of the old enthusiasm has waned, I still keep showing up. Why? Not for the same reasons for sure. That first day, that first post was undertaken with a particular kind of excitement. Little old me could type something on my keyboard, in Sheffield, and then, magically, there it would be on the internet for all to see! It seems rather gauche now, but back then the internet still seemed rather new and most of what you read was written by geeks or by companies that employed geeks. It felt with a blog you could get hold of the printing press and publish, just like that! But of course that feeling completely elided the fact that writers need readers - but then that small detail wasn't going to put me off either. And in fact it was only when Colin and Michele commented on my blog from Australia, Canada or Mexico, or wherever they were at the time, that I thought oh my god, people will read this stuff, too! That actually fired more enthusiasm. The posts were still highly experimental and at that stage I was more or less stringing together links about strange, quirky things on the web - a bit like the original bloggers did. Colin and Michele rather flatteringly described my blog as a wunderkammer. Perhaps that was just a kind way of calling it a mess. But all in all it meant that writing could change. Pictures, links, tags and all the rest were new. And what's more a small band of academics began exploring blogging. Working with Julia Davies, who started blogging around the same time as me, I began to write about this phenomenon. A community of literacy academics started blogging too, and there was a tangible feeling of being on the edge of something important. Then that something changed. Blogging lost its playful, experimental edge, it became popular, it became formulaic and in came the 'A-list bloggers'. Usually white, mostly male, and predominantly American, this group effectively standardised blogging. It became - dare I say it - a genre. And now commercial outfits, media companies, universities, this group, that project and just about everyone else has a blog. Slowly my own posts began to shift from that heady 'isn't the internet weird' phase into more critical and reflective pieces. I began to use my blog to try out ideas. Ideas that might later get absorbed into articles or book chapters. And that's what it has become for me - just another opportunity to write, to publish. Guess what, I'm fifteen years older and my priorities have changed! But if I've changed, so has the online environment. I care less about who reads my stuff and in that sense I'm right back to my first post. But strangely enough, I care more about what I write than I ever did before.

From Derbyshire to Alberta

I'm recently back from a week in Calgary on a fascinating project which I may write more about later.  The preparatory task was to write a 'possibility' piece, and that in itself was an interesting exercise even though, as things turned out, that got shelved. But the writing got me thinking about how meanings get made in public spaces, like those in and around the iron age sites of Derbyshire. Here's part of what I wrote: ">Various objects decorate an old oak tree. The oak, bent and gnarled juts up from a fissure in the gritstone crag. Wicker, woven into heart shapes, strips of coloured fabric, ribbon, metal rings and bells dance in the wind. The wind is an unseen force; there is no-one about. This is an ancient landscape. A stone’s throw away the Grey Ladies of Harthill Moor stand tall and serene, Bronze Age megaliths marking an enduring relationship between land and people. Now they quarry for stone here, in and around honeypot villages of the Peak National Park. Sheep snatch at the grass at the foot of the rocks, cattle graze in a field below. Each of these decorations has been crafted with a purpose in mind – recalling the life of a friend or family member, marking a lovers’ tryst, celebrating a significant date – wishes and hope, fashioned from the materials at hand. On some there is message, a name, a date, but others are read by the wind whispering to one another, then blown across the land, carried like spore. It’s not always windy up here, but the bent limbs of the oak record a century or more of turns in the weather. Unseen, far underground, its network of routes fan out, a hidden web of fungal fibres in communion with others, the thinking trees. And three thousand years ago these crags served as a look-out and perhaps that still matters. This place has a tangible, magical atmosphere. I’d expected initials old and new carved into the gritstone - that, and a good view. But I just hadn’t imagined a tree decorated in this way. Maybe there’s a sort of animism at work here, connecting the landscape, the ancient world and the intimate secrets of the people who have been here before me.' And even though that fragment of writing didn't connect directly with what we did in Calgary, it did in another way. To get another sense of the place we visited the Blackfoot Medicine Wheel on top of Nosehill, and again became part of, or witness to, meanings being made 'on the land' and making connections to other places, other times, and other ways of being.

21st Century Literacies

I'm just putting the finishing touches to a co-authored book on literacy and digital media for Sage with Cathy Burnett. It's been an exciting project and one that brings recent work into dialogue with some older material. Nine years ago I wrote a similar book with Julia Davies, called Web 2.0 for Schools and I've been reflecting on the shifts in my thinking. Of course, it's partly the case that different collaborators enrich your thinking in different ways, but it's also inevitably the case that other changes occur with the passage of time. The shift from unbridled enthusiasm to a rather cautious, perhaps more critical stance to new media is clearly apparent to me, although it may not be so clear to readers - we'll see about that. Changes in digital technology itself are one cause of this, but actually that's mostly about ubiquity and the notable distribution and take up of mobile devices and apps. The more significant thing for me is what digital communication - and social media in particular, has become. Rather like Matt Haig, I think there are good reasons for taking a wider and more critical view.  I still think its crucially important for teachers to look at what literacy in everyday looks like and to adjust their own practices so that they are in step with this. And its equally important for policymakers to remove the obstacles that prevent this. But, promoting practices that help children and young people to navigate new literacies in ways that are ethical and empowering seems to be crucially important. It's actually untrue to say that was absent from Web 2.0 for Schools - it certainly wasn't - but it seems a more pressing agenda now. The current book attempts to emphasise this by exploring the nine principles of the Charter for 21st Century Literacies that we developed in New Literacies around the Globe and are shown at the end of this document. 

Event, eventually

Trying to think differently about literacy, emergence and potentiality (amongst other things) has led to some experimentation with the concept of literacy-as-event. Here we've been drawing on the work of Massumi who writes 'Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity or rules into paradox.' (2015: 27). In taking this route we've stumbled rather blindly into some quite contradictory conceptions of event. Anthropological perspectives have traditionally focused on ritual events or public performances that play an important role in socio-cultural life. For example, if you take a qualification in Event Management, this, I assume, is what you end up dealing with - logistics, planning, organisation, health and safety, customer satisfaction and so on. In other words what you need to have in place to make a wedding, a concert, a carnival or a festival run smoothly. It would be based on an understanding of the predictability of events. In contrast, for someone like Derrida, event was about 'surprise, exposure, the unanticipatable' (2007:441). Events, in this view, are marked by unpredictability. An extreme form of this occurs in Badiou (2005) in which event is about rupture - Paris 1968; the Arab Spring; London 2011 - situations in which new identities and discourses suddenly become possible. But is there a smaller scale version of this, in which we can keep hold of unpredictability, possibility and intensity in a moment-by-moment unfolding of event - this is what we're working with.

Precarious

It seems hard to believe when you're in the full beauty of the English summer that the environment is any sort of danger at all. It's in full bloom, bountiful, green, just as it should be - what on Earth could be wrong? Precarity, that rather ugly word, is at the height of fashion, and it gets used to describe the nature-culture complex in all its inherent instability. Socially, politically, economically as well as environmentally, everything can be seen teetering on the edge of collapse. As a case in point, the fragile structures of law, order and security seem threatened by terrorism. Random attacks, followed by rapid responses and shoot-to-kill policing that shortcuts the requirement for evidence, identification and prosecution seem set to engulf us. News breaks as events unfold and ideological conflict spills out over borders. The situation is fluid, mobile, precarious. Yet at the same time, there are points or places in which the very opposites obtain - stability, stasis and security seem to uphold an undisturbed order. Perhaps the same is true of the natural world. Order and chaos co-exist like the two sides of a coin. Dwelling on precarity may be important in assessing the lives of vulnerable populations, fragile ecosystems and political conflict, but it is also itself a product of highly mobile information flows. Media, in all its proliferating forms, provides a continuous stream of bad news which sometimes has the effect of rendering us helpless, flailing around in a tsunami of death, disaster and degradation. The challenge, then, is to find expression for ethico-political action (or non-action) that acknowledges what is precarious, but is not defeated by it.

The Case of the iPad

In a rather lengthy email earlier this week, our publisher announced that The Case of the iPad is now out. What exactly out means is, of course, a moot point. The work, also called a book, was completed about six months ago, although at that stage it was only really a document in Word. Somewhere along the line it adopted that rather quaint epithet 'manuscript', even though it was never handwritten and only ever illuminated by the thought that went into it. The publishers (Springer) have, inevitably, worked their magic on it and in doing so it has taken on the virtual form of a published volume. It's not quite clear yet, when the printed copies will roll off the press or whether that process is complete, or how much it matters but nevertheless the book is already out...in some sense, somewhere. Things are moving. On Amazon, for example, the picture of a Union Jack t-shirt, which for some inexplicable reason had been a placeholder, has now been replaced by an image of the book, which you can metaphorically 'look inside'. You can place an order for a print copy or the Kindle version. It looks like you can have the Kindle version right away, but the print version won't itself be released for another ten days. So you get the idea that published but not yet released may have something to do with distribution, which of course is pretty much instant in digital formats. But more interesting than all of this is the fact that the book - if that word still holds any fixed meaning - is unbundled. If you are a die-hard fan of Simpson and Walsh, or Karen Wohlwend (or any other of our wonderful contributors), Springer will sell you their chapter, as a stand alone, for just shy of thirty dollars. It makes some sort of sense. If that's all you want, that's what you can get, without having to shell out for the whole volume. It probably makes sense for Springer, too. I'm sure they've done their research. For an author and editor, and possibly for a reader too, there are some down sides. People are less likely to stumble on your chapter if they take the unbundled route. One of the reasons I like edited volumes, is that you can accidentally, as it were, find yourself reading somebody or something that you wouldn't otherwise encounter. Unbundling also changes things for editorship. In The Case of the iPad we purposely gathered together scholars with different takes on mobile literacies, and we spent some time in Skype meetings, offices and hotel bars discussing what their work did, and what it did alongside the work of others. The book is an ensemble of these and I think Cathy, Alison and Maureen would agree with me, that it's greater than the sum of its parts. But that's old-school, more like a prog-rock concept album or a sampler (remember them?), when what people seem to want now is their favourite DJ using a remix of the work and artfully fading across into someone else's with approximately the same BPM. Anything really, as long as the punters come in, and the dancefloor is full. Or is that the wrong idea? Do we just become our own DJ mashing up Bergson and Baudrillard, for example? And wasn't that what good readers did best in the first place? I don't know, but something has shifted. Buy the book!

Technology and the war machine

Iraqi security forces, and Peshmerga fighters together with Sunni and Shia militia are about to take possession of Mosul, liberating it from IS. Defeat is imminent, and has been for about a week now. This part of the conflict dates back to October 2016, and the ground forces are part of an alliance that is backed by US-led airstrikes. Deleuze and Guattari seem unlikely prophets in this context, but still what they say has predictive force: 'The State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will continually cause it problems.' (1987, 391). Technology and weapon-speed, which they also write about, are an integral part of this war machine. Technology may not be evil, but it has a chameleon-like nature. If you want to taste the flavour of modern warfare Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's piece called The Baghdad Road is hard to beat. You can taste the dust, sense the confusion, the weariness and the machinic quality of it all. Technology, of course, plays a massive part in the war machine, accelerating weapon-speed. One officer talked to Ghaith while he 'pinched and zoomed a satellite map on his tablet'. Later he writes how other officers have 'smartphones and tablets arrayed around them' like 'children playing a video game'. A fighter called Ali moves from building to building. If there's resistance he sends the co-ordinates and 'friendly' planes dispense heavy bombs within minutes. Slowly they inch to victory, destroying buildings, rooting out IS, injuring and killing innocent civilians. For all its sophistication it's a primitive affair.

Social media and the end of May

As pundits and politicians reflect on surprising gains in Labour support in the recent election, many sense the emergence of a new style of political campaigning. Whether the unpredicted swing marks a resurgence of interest in the politics of the Left, a lean towards social democratic egalitarianism or a more general thirst for a progressive political agenda is hard to tell at the moment. Disenchantment with the ruling elite and uninspiring leadership clearly played a part, but high on everyone's watchlist now is the youth vote and the role of the media. It has to be conceded that mainstream media, including those more traditionally aligned with the Left had shown little support for Corbyn's leadership both before and during the election campaign. In fact, from this quarter, Corbyn has had nothing but bad press. So what? By all accounts the social media story looks rather different, in fact it seems quite likely that Labour's social media strategy worked extremely well for them. We should take note. Obama's electoral success in 2008 was orchestrated in part through social media. Two years later in the Arab Spring, commentators were quick to draw attention to a similar phenomenon. However, it doesn't all cut one way. I just don't buy into the communitarian, wisdom of the crowds story. It might of worked for earlier notions of the Internet, but we've outgrown that now. Put simply good and bad things happen in new media, it just depends which things, ideas, experiences, events they connect with. If the present and future political debates are conducted online we need to know how users assess credibility, how they critically evaluate what is fed to them and on what terms they participate. Informed by this, we might envisage more informed and politically active communities. Without this, political victories will simply be won by those with the better strategy rather than the better ideas.

Doctoral literacies

Sometimes its the smallest of comments that can stop you in your tracks. Like yesterday - the doctoral students were talking about reading in the car, and I don't mean reading in the passenger seat but reading while driving. Now that might sound downright dangerous until you realise that they were talking about using apps on their phones that would read documents out loud over a bluetooth connection. It would come as no surprise at all to the non-sighted, but you don't actually have to look at words to read them. It's hardly new, but I could feel some old-school habits of mind kicking in and saying, well that's not proper reading, is it? But it is. So I suppose you could try to marshall all sorts of arguments about concentrating, re-reading, underlining, note-taking, but I don't really think any of them are robust enough. You can read high-level, dense, complex research texts whilst driving (not that I've tried). That whole realisation chimed in with the memory of a time a couple of years back when a teacher showed me some very sophisticated writing by a seven year-old. What was really interesting about that piece of writing is that it had been entirely mediated by speech recognition software on an iPad. Writing, without the act of writing - from a traditional point of view, at least. Now I've never been particularly impressed by the tipping point idea, not just because it was over-hyped but more because it seemed so obvious. But it works well here. Small, incremental changes to audio-book technology and speech recognition software combine with access to powerful portable devices to make reading and writing something different. Something that sidesteps alphabetic encoding and decoding. Returning then to these doctoral students, it is at least theoretically possible that one could do all the background reading just by listening and then write a whole thesis just by speaking it. Maybe someone's already done it. The provocative work that this reflection does is to gnaw away at what literacy actually is and to prompt us to think about the function of those hallowed practices often described as study skills.

iPads and digital literacy

This new volume will be published in the summer and is the result of a collaboration with Alyson Simpson and Maureen Walsh. It's been an exciting project to work on and follows in the wake of Literacy, Media, Technology in which we attempted something similar - that is to take a number of quite different perspectives from scholars in the field in order to outline the complexities of digital technologies in the lives of children and young people, in and out of educational contexts. There are no easy answers and we'd be fooling ourselves if we said there are, and of course that all assumes that we know what the question was in the first place! In a scene-setting chapter, Cathy and I had a lot of fun exploring the whole notion of mobility, or mobilities. Obviously we couldn't go as far as John Urry does in his excellent book, but we had a good, quick stab at it. It seems very important to me to think about what's mobile and what isn't, and just as important to think about who's mobile and who's not. These are pressing issues in a world that has both wars, walls and migrant camps as well as unfettered multinationals, rampant capitalism, and mobile capital. Urry argues that mobility requires different kinds of anchorage, immobile platforms that control the flow of people, goods and information. Platforms, gateways and gatekeepers. There's a great feature by James Meek on chocolate production in the latest edition of the London Review of Books and it provides a really clear illustration of how late capitalism profits through its knowledge of these flows, relentlessly driving down the cost of raw materials, seeking out the cheapest and least disruptive labour force, and distributing to new and emerging markets. All in the name of maximising profit. And, in one way, that's all part of The Case of the iPad, too.