Enchanted

In a current writing project we've been exploring Bennet's notion of enchantment - eloquently developed in her book The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001). Bennet has become a bit of an academic superstar, and most people seem to rave about Vibrant Matter which apart having a cover design to die for is, in my humble opinion, not nearly so good. Although the argument about a politic of enchantment is hard to sustain, it can work. In an educational context, I think we may have resolved it adequately if somewhat simply. Here I'll just put it in a sort of aphorism - better to be enchanted by the inventiveness of children than fall under the spell of a stultifying curriculum. It all stems from a simple question. How can we, as educators work with teachers who are labouring under the dead hand of a one-size-fits-all lockstep curriculum driven by a draconian regime of accountability? To me it seems that most teachers are attracted to the profession because they are interested and inspired by children, by watching them play and learn, and being with them and not by measuring their progress against arbitrary measures. If we can re-orientate towards some basic professional values, or become re-enchanted by the actions and activity of young children we unlock what Bennet would call 'virtual possibilities'.

New book!

The increasing popularity of digitally-mediated communication is prompting us to radically rethink literacy and its role in education. In our new edited collection Cathy Burnett, Julia Davies, Jennifer Rowsell and I draw on cutting edge research from the USA, Canada, UK, Australia and South Africa to launch international debate around these changing literacies, how they might shape policy and practice, and how they articulate across national boundaries. Currently many national policies promulgate a view of literacy focused on the skills and classroom routines associated with print, and these are bolstered by regimes of accountability and assessment. As a result, teachers are caught between two competing discourses: one upholding a traditional conception of literacy and the other encouraging a more radical take on 21st century literacies driven by leading edge thinkers and researchers. The book explores studies of literacy practices in varied contexts through a refreshingly dialogic style, interspersed with commentaries which address the significance of the work described for education. The book concludes on the ‘conversation’ that develops to identify key recommendations for policy-makers through a Charter for Literacy Education. The book is due to be published by Routledge in July. Advance orders, library recommendations and more information can be found here.

School collaboration

The idea of connecting schools and school children has been around for some time. Serving worthwhile goals of promoting cross-cultural understanding, developing language awareness and language skills and even contributing to wider notions of citizenship, school collaboration often ticks all the right boxes. Anastasia Gouseti's new book, Digital Technologies for School Collaboration, explores some of these themes and recognizes that although programmes that provide opportunities for transnational collaboration between schools have a respectable history, the potential expansion of these opportunities through new technology has yet to be evaluated in a principled way. Gouseti's book does just that. Based on a case studies of teachers' and students' experiences of the European eTwinning programme she provides a detailed analysis of the promises and pitfalls of web-based school collaboration. But the book is much more than that, providing an excellent overview and critique of the rhetoric associated with web 2.0 and 'participatory culture.' This is a book that is well-informed, well-argued and scholarly throughout, offering practical guidance on how to develop school collaboration through new media.

Is it a book or is it an app?

With World Book Day approaching, it is anticipated that children's literature and its authors will get plenty of coverage - but what about the growing market of digital fiction, e-books and story apps? Recent developments in app design have begun to show the way forward in new interactive texts for young children and work by researchers at the Sheffield Institute of Education and the University of Sheffield has been investigating the potential for using apps in story-sharing activity with young children.  We've seen how size, portability and touchscreen operation make tablets like the iPad attractive to young children and their teachers. And young children enjoy the interactive nature of some of the better story apps, and although it's still early days, the potential for innovative development is clear. Here's three examples of story apps for the iPad that show how the technology can be harmonised with story meaning to offer a strong learning experience for young children. For toddlers, Nighty Night is a great little app in which young children explore a farmyard scene, turning the lights off and saying goodnight to each of the animals (see here for more). This app depends on interaction from the reader who taps the screen in each location to move the story on. For slightly older children, there's a number of different versions of the traditional tale 'The Three Little Pigs' on the market - but the version by Nosy Crow is by far the most engaging and attractive. It's great the way that blowing into the microphone can involve children in the repetitive sequence of 'blowing the house down'. Young children love it! A more sophisticated story, 'The Heart and the Bottle' has been around for a while. It is beautifully illustrated and uses many of the iPad's multi-tasking gestures through a number of puzzles that are woven into the story. My favourite is the way that it uses the built-in accelerometer so that youngsters can create a snowfall by repeatedly shaking the iPad! In short, there are plenty of story apps out there, but these three really show the potential - and that lies in how an app can engage young children, actively involving them in making meaning. They won't be replacing print stories and picture books, but they certainly sit well alongside them. Whether they class as digital fiction, multimedia, or apps seems rather irrelevant. They are good stories, a new kind of book, and their development should be celebrated and encouraged on World Book Day.

Digital futures for teachers

The need for teachers to engage with digital literacies at all stages of education has been articulated in numerous policy documents and directives in many parts of the world. Often the economic desirability of 21st century skills is seen as the central rationale for this, but commentaries also make reference to the increasing importance of digital literacy in citizenship and participatory culture. In education theory and research, the importance of acknowledging and using children and young people’s knowledge of popular culture has become a key theme, with a growing number of studies addressing the rise of digital culture. In the face of this, educators now realize that levels of participation in popular digital culture vary considerably between populations and social groups (Warschauer and Matuchniak, 2010). To add further complication, the understandings and experiences that learners and their teachers have, and need, are rapidly changing as technology itself changes (Davies and Merchant, 2009). Preparing teachers to operate effectively in this volatile environment presents a number of challenges. In our chapter in this book we look at some of the driving and constraining forces, concentrating particularly on the ways in which open educational resources (OERs) may have the potential to support teachers and trainee teachers in developing their capacity to address the ‘digital challenge’ (Abrams and Merchant, 2012). All this receives a detailed treatment in the chapter that Julia and I have written for this collection (now available). The chapter draws on the work of the DefT project.

Translocal assemblages

In the current book project New Literacies around the Globe, we've had to confront some of the myths surrounding the idea of 'the global' as unbounded free space. In its place we use the term 'global assemblages' (from McFarlane, 2009) to capture how complex and multiple forces coalesce as place-based events. We suggest that these events are constituted by the exchange of ‘ideas, knowledge, practices, materials and resources across sites’(McFarlane, 2009:561) as language and power intersect with socioeconomic status. Although the word 'global' is so much easier, it often erases all this. Increases in the extent of broadband connectivity, and growing access to resources (particularly powerful handheld devices) is accelerating the sorts of exchanges that constitute translocal assemblages. But this isn't a universally even process. In the studies featured in the book, we see how practices are patterned by local forces as cultural resources are accessed (or not), appropriated and recontextualised within specific social networks. To be specific: things like PlayStations, jacuzzis,and mobile phones take on different meanings in different settings and practices like texting, chatting and flirting are given local nuances. More often than not, in translocal assemblages we see that sociotechnical practices are absorbed into existing ideologies, sustaining and sometimes amplifying them. In other words, technologies and the global flows that are associated with them rarely flatten out inequalities, but they certainly can draw our attention to them.

New writing

At the moment I'm writing about textual toys and the commodification of early literacy. I've noted before how a wide range of games and activity centres designed for young babies now have digital components - as do baby walkers, play mats and plush toys. Embedded in these toys are digitally-reproduced nursery rhymes, counting games and alphabet songs providing ‘edutainment’ for infants and toddlers. Although toys and toy manufacturers have always played an important part in early childhood, their role in young children’s learning is ill-defined,and under-theorised. This is especially true for early literacy in which everything from alphabet building blocks and jigsaw puzzles to  educational tablets like,the LeapPad, carries an implicit message about what literacy is, how it develops, and what roles adults, care-givers and children themselves should adopt. What is more, these implied roles blend in with current conceptions of parenting, defined by ‘social investment’ initiatives that reach into the relationship between children and adults to underscore the significance of what is done with as well as what is provided for the very young. Scollon's idea of a nexus of practice is proving to be a useful way of articulating the confluence of play practices involving literacy that are singular and situated, whilst at the same time acknowledging that play objects themselves are part of a political economy located in a global mediascape.

Placed resources

New technology means different things in different places as we can see in the variety of ways in which hardware and software are taken up and integrated into existing and emerging social practices. Mastin Prinsloo's concept of 'placed resources', and the way in which he uses this in documenting practices in South Africa is particularly useful in this respect. I'm also interested in how the resources themselves are adapted and this is illustrated in Glenn Auld's work with the Kunibidji community in Maningrida in Australia's Northern Territory. Central to this work is the adaptation of old-style iMacs so that they can be operated as touchscreens, and this is described in non-technical detail here. It's a fascinating account, strengthen by the description of how the adaptation supported literacy practices that were embedded in the everyday social practices of the Kunibidji. This sort of approach could be a template for the next wave of iPad developments.

Digital development

Over this holiday I seem to have been surrounded by electronic toys. It seems that nearly every present for babies and toddlers comes with batteries and chips - perhaps the same could be said of gifts for adults too. It appears then, that digitally-assisted development is part of the way we live, and certainly the major toy companies have cashed in on the phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, the toys produced as a result of this are variable in quality. For me, the best are engaging and participatory, whereas the worst seem to have been scripted by a would-be politician with a very limited view of education. Take, for example, those digital toys that purport to teach de-contextualized phonics routines on a model of rote learning - unlikely to be of any benefit to the enquiring mind, and probably not very good at preparing children for the embarrasing  non-word reading test, either. The worry lies is the ways in which these toy manufacturers construct parental pedagogy. Implicit in their scripted routines are notions of what parents should be doing. As Sue Nichols, Helen Nixon, and Jennifer Rowsell (2009) argued, they construct an idea of what the “good” parent does in relation to early literacy. Now I'm not a romantic advocate of all things natural in a mythical golden age of 'play with natural materials', but my simple comparison is with wooden building blocks (in fact they don't have to be wooden - they could be digital, I expect). The basic point is that simple construction materials are only very loosely scripted. They can represent different things and can be used to build just about anything that takes your fancy. Megablocks, Duplo and Lego are of course comparatively more scripted - particularly when they are 'themed'. In comparison, then, a lot of digital toys have a very narrow, linear script. Maybe you could apply the same scripting concept to more technical complex digital entertainment. Would it work, for video games? Someone may have tried that already, of course. And on that note, I found this piece on video-gaming particularly useful. For someone who has not really engaged with the key debates yet, I reckon they're all in here.