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.

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.

New work in new literacies

I was flattered to be asked to present for the Global Conversations in Literacy series. The video is a screen capture of the talk, probably a reduction of the live experience, but useful to share anyway. What Peggy Albers and her colleagues are doing here is important, and although I'm familiar with all the affordances of elluminate and other similar video conferencing/virtual classroom environments the idea of doing what is in essence a large scale public lecture online is significant in bringing ideas and scholarship to a wider audience. I definitely recommend this to students, researchers and fellow scholars. In playing with the idea of mobile literacies in that talk I was acutely aware of what exactly becomes mobile and what doesn't with the advance of new technoliteracies, and this will be a theme I'll be pursuing soon. In the mean time, it's good to see the Handbook of Research on the Societal Impact of Digital Media published. I have an overview chapter on virtual worlds in there. There's also  a new paper co-authored with a former doctoral student of mine (Ruth Barley) in Childhood based on her fascinating ethnography of young children in a cultural diverse classroom setting. A fuller account of her work is available in the book Identity and Social Interaction in a Multi-ethnic Classroom. And finally, you can read about The Challenge of 21st Century Literacies in the current edition of the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.

iPadology

Observational studies of children working on desktop computers sometimes drew our attention to how those particular material conditions established a new sort of physical discipline. In schools early digital literacy was predominantly a sedentary desk work with the textual display on the vertical axis. In contrast navigation, control and transcription was on the horizontal plane. As in traditional reading and writing students were seat bound but what had changed was the direction of the gaze as well as the work of the hands. So the move from page to screen involved, amongst many other things, new bodily engagements. The most challenging of these often turned out to be the keyboard and mouse operations. Young hands had to learn how to do new things - yet, perhaps unsurprising these new forms of dexterity were quickly mastered. The more recent adoption of tablet computers shifts this yet again. As always literacy practices have an embodied dimension, but now new literacies are more like the old ones in the sense that the text is portable. More or less the same weight as a print book, or notebook, the tablet has portability in its favour. And touchscreen control involves a close physical interweaving of production and consumption. In common with earlier practices this literacy involves the work of the hands, but those movements are new all over again. New for young hands, but quickly learnt. And as with other technological innovations the name of the inventor or the brand has become interchangeable with the thing itself. We tended to prefer to use the name of the Hungarian inventor 'Biro' to refer to the ballpoint pen, and like substituting the verb 'google' for looking something up, 'iPad' has come to stand for all things tablet - even though tablet computers preceded this particular product. It's as if literacies have become mobile all over again. This just could mean something new in learning situations. iPads are unlikely to blow away in a breeze, writing on them is free from blots, but you can still drop them, crack the screen or run out of power. Same same, different different!

Writing, thinking, knowing

It's good to see the Second Edition of this book in print. and I think it provides a very useful overview of contemporary work in literacies. The case study I wrote with @Kate Cosgrove looks good, and the carefully-crafted introduction references the great work done by the DeFT project. It's also nice to see some acknowledgement of the Points of View paper, too. Sometimes it all seems a bit like a production line - the next lot of proposals are in, there's something new to write, something to revise, something that needs proof-reading and usually no time for reading! So, as much as I dislike New Years resolutions, this is going to be mine: read more. That's it. I'm trying to get involved in some academic reading groups, and I'm particularly interested in one Chris Bailey's setting up, in which we'll be exploring the literature on children and video games. Having just finished a chapter that deals with the topic of virtual play, I think I've just about worked out what I don't know about the topic - which is quite a lot really! And I suppose, for me, that's the whole cycle that I'm referring to - from proposal to proofs it seems like a continuous process of finding out what I don't know, working out what other people know, trying to work out what I think and then realising that there are whole lot of other things I don't know. If experience counts for anything, it must be about being quietly confident that you don't know very much at all.

Embodied expertise

Over the last couple of weeks I've been involved in a lot of discussion about how teaching and learning get conceptualised in the on/offline blend. Sometimes that has involved avatar instructors organising a kind of cybergogy, at other times the idea of heutagogy and on a more fundamental level the differences between VC delivery and face-to-face teaching. What becomes clear is that there are all sorts of different blends and possibilities for creative learning designs, and although institutional systems tend to be a bit primitive (with the exception of thin VLEs) there's plenty of ways to enrich the student experience. But in a discussion with Masters students, what impressed me most was the value they placed on the 'tutor in the room'. Here you got the sense that what I called embodied expertise has a significant, affective impact. Watching the expert, who is perceived as being at the cutting edge, thinking on her feet, responding to questions, outlining the dilemmas live and unplugged as it were, was still one of the most valued experiences. So, in situations in which this is still possible the real challenge is how to make other modes work effectively and creatively to free-up live performance. And of course, the related to challenge is to find the kinds of online experiences that could be the next best thing to witnessing embodied expertise.

In-story purchases

Last week I bought a goat, a spider and a stork. They cost 99p for the job lot. I know that because of the helpful receipt I got from iTunes. Now I've done some strange things in the name of virtuality, and this wasn't really one of them, but it is what they call a telling case. You see, as it turns out, I bought the goat, spider and stork as a way of upgrading my grandson's favourite story-app: the story that he calls 'Night Fours', which is his rendering of the opening line 'Night falls'. It's an app I recommend (it's real title is 'Nighty Night'). It's his favourite because it's an engaging app, and just right for 2-3 year olds. In the story, it's night time and most of the village is in darkness - apart, that is, from the farmhouse, which is still blazing with light. The reader is invited to 'go' to each light in the farmhouse, say goodnight to the animals found there and turn off the light. Once the light is turned off, there's no going back. Sure, you can return to the barn, the dog's kennel and so on, but they've gone to sleep and there's nothing at all you can do about it. It's a simple scenario, that helps with prediction, naming animals, and the simple and repetitive night time rituals of saying goodnight and turning off the light. So in this way it does what good picture books tend to do, in supporting language, helping children to make predictions and making connections to firsthand experience. What might the app add then? Well first off, even though, it's made for sharing, the child can look at it independently and still hear the story being told - a small gain admittedly, but nonetheless a difference from a print book. Then there is the important fact that it is user-driven. This happens in two ways: firstly, the animals and insects won't go to sleep unless you switch off (tap) the light  and secondly, the order in which this is done is entirely up to the reader - so it's not unilinear, the child dictates the reading path. Because this is an app for young children, these features are simple and easy to see, but  imagine if they were scaled-up and you begin to glimpse the future of digital fiction. Rather like a videogame, you are in 'Nighty Night' because you change the story environment as you go along. And then, of course, there's the upgrade I started with. I really enjoyed the surprise Dylan felt when he suddenly discovered that, overnight, more animals had moved into the farmhouse! The potential for a story that has add-ons is quite something. Of course, the same business model as in-game purchases is lurking behind the scenes - but I want to keep that in proportion. The app plus add-ons, is cheaper than most good quality picture books for this age-group.

Tenth anniversary

The act of writing has held my interest for a long time. It's partly because of its openness: the fact that possibility exists. There may be an idea that you hadn't quite thought through yet, but somehow it can come out in the process of writing. Writing, it seems, is a tool for thinking. Perhaps that's simply because writing is an imagined conversation with another and the presence of that imagined reader confers upon it a dialogic character. That conversation, it seems, is very attractive - almost to the point of addiction. Despite that, I completely forgot the tenth anniversary of this blog (here's my first post), but what surprises me when I look back is that even then I was preoccupied with trying to make sense of writing. A lot has happened in the intervening time, but that fascination certainly hasn't dimmed. Blogging for me now is about condensing my reflections into something that's about the size of an average paragraph and then finding a still or moving image that can sit alongside it. The post may be more or less complete in its own right, or it may simply be work in progress. But always it's what Rosenblatt describes as a transactional process: '....always an event in time, occurring at a particular moment in the writer's biography, in particular circumstances, and under particular external and internal pressures. In short, the writer is always transacting with a personal, social and cultural environment.' (1989:163). And in posting on the blog, at times it forms the basis of something I'll write more about, extend in some way, but more often than not it's just a sketch, complete in itself. The piece of writing that I started the first blog with actually turned into a book chapter entitled 'Barbie meets Bob the Builder at the Workstation', but many subsequent posts have been of the moment, a passing observation or a whimsical thought. Nevertheless they all form an important expression of writing as exploration, as a transactional process.

Technology and learning

You might guess that a publication addressing the state of the art in pedagogical uses of technology would include MOOCs, learning analytics and badges - and that's exactly what you get in the OU review Innovating Pedagogy 2013. But you also get more varied material on geo-learning and 'maker culture' alongside useful critiques of familiar topics like learning from gaming and digital scholarship. I thought the idea of rating the impact and timescale for adoption was an interesting and original approach - much better than that tiresome trick of lifting a sentence from the text and putting it in a large font, as if it is more significant or somehow captures the essence of what's being said without subjecting you to the chore of reading the whole page. One of these inserts is 'technologies may change, but the innovations in  pedagogy bring lasting benefit' - it's a rather vacuous statement in my opinion. Meanwhile the idea of 'one tablet per child', recently adopted in Thailand shows the extent to which national governments are willing to invest in technology - the scheme, still in the pilot stage is apparently paying off already. It's the sort of investment that's needed before innovating pedagogy can take place.

Twitter paper

In retrospect I think Julia Gillen and I managed to capture something of the essence of microblogging in studying how Twitter was used in what you might now call 'the early days'. But it was still great to see that the paper 'Contact Calls: Twitter as dialogic social and linguistic practice' was the top downloaded article in Language Sciences, and as a special deal it's now available free till 31st October! The paper has a natural partner with one I wrote with Julia Davies on blogging. Both are insider accounts of how we as academics have taken up social media and used it for our own purposes. Trying to describe the approach we used is quite hard - insider account is probably the best, but we've also tried 'dual autoethnography' to try to capture the idea of a parallel and reflexive endeavour. Neither study really has the depth and nuance of autoethnography, but the idea of a two-handed approach in looking at adoption/ early adoption has its advantages. See what you think!

All fingers and thumbs

I've just been writing another paper about toddlers and touchscreens, and it returns to the same themes about gesture that I explored before. Essentially, looking at the video data we have, you see how hand gestures and pointing are woven into adult-child conversations and that they also appear to extend quite naturally into taps and swipes on the touchscreen. Often someone starts off pointing at something on the screen and then ends up tapping - it becomes part of the interactional flow. And the toddlers (see index finger in pic) often seem to have their trigger fingers at the ready, perhaps mimicking adult gestures or maybe in readiness for when they need to deploy them. I'd been using the word 'index finger' so often in the writing that I began to wonder about its origin. For one feverish moment I thought it was connected to print literacy, being the finger that turns the pages at the index. But in the end I was convinced by this account, which simply connects it with indicating or pointing. Well even that is enough to confer on it a very significant place in human communication. I reckon there's a book to be written about the role the first finger plays in human culture. Someone's probably already written it, though.........no, just got lost at Amazon only to discover that someone called Al Fingers has written a book on Clarks in Jamaica (bring on Vybz Kartel). How random!

Imagining the virtual

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

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Searching questions

When I started out in academic lresearch I learned about two important things: one was how to locate information and the other was how to keep my references. The first was, for the most part, achieved by cruising round the library stacks, finding where what interested me was to be found, and the second involved writing down the relevant details of what I'd read on index cards and stowing them away more or less in alphabetical order. I used journals a lot, but nearly always relied on the journals the University of Nottingham subscribed to. Inter-library loans were slow and cumbersome, and often involved a lot of form-filling and repeated trips to the library building. Rapidly, almost imperceptibly, that's all gone and most things are just a click away. For me the real decisions now are about whether stuff is worth printing out or not. And my greatest friend is Google Scholar, but often, and perhaps for more general things JFGI (ordinary googling) is the approach. And in all this my whole approach to information has actually radically re-organised without me having to spare it a thought. It's all so convenient, so quick. Yet, despite this - you might think bad/ mindless victim of technology - my general feeling is very positive. There are downsides to Google culture (some of them simply because it's Google, and hence corporate) but mostly I think its down to us to adapt, and to apply our critical faculties. As should be pretty clear to us, we've all been googled, and ‘we are all the Google generation, the young and the old, the professor and the student and the teacher and the child’(Rowlands, Nicholas et al 2008: 308). So good old Pew - despite all its well-rehearsed methodological shortcomings it regularly tells us what we already know, with authority. The scare headlines are now research=googling. But please, less of the hand-wringing. Look it up? Yeah, JFGI, we all do it: and maybe there's the solution to the problem - thinking about how expert-users or maybe simply ordinary users manage to avoid getting duped. The world keeps on turning, we're OK. That's the sort of apprenticeship needed by the young.

Literacies and complexity

On my idiosyncratic pathway through informal meetings and programmed events at AERA 2012 I became interested in how becoming literate with technology is now being conceptualised and investigated. Researchers I have a close affinity with see digital practices as hard to pin down, difficult to describe and often associated with disrupting assumptions about literacy, pedagogy and curriculum. As the simple attractions of the iPad capture the attention of early years researchers, they raise similar issues to those of their colleagues working with older children and youth - both in school, and out-of-school contexts. Issues of varied experience, questions of what is age appropriate, and re-considerations of the processes and products of meaning-making recur. I seem to have come down firmly on the side of embracing complexity, and resisting simple frameworks and accounts, and search for this in the work of colleagues. At the moment I can see three reasons for upholding this acknowledgement of complexity. Firstly, it seems to me to be the stongest theme in my own empirical work. Secondly, it is in sympathy with post-modernism's rejection of grand narratives. And thirdly, from the educational perpective, it defies the sort of reductions that make learning seem measurable and something to assess and therefore a subject for numerous attempts to monitor and control - to render it as a mechanism that holds those institutions and individuals responsible through the vice-like grip of accountability.

Back

I'm back in the UK, after the annual pilgrimage to AERA, which this year was in beautiful Vancouver. As always it was great to meet up with people and learn new things from the sessions - more on this later. This year I decided to travel in a technologically lite style - with just iPad and flash drive for presentations. Apart from a few teething problems this really does seem to be the way forward. AERA's phonebook of a programme is usually problematic on at least 2 counts. Finding stuff in it can be a challenge, and unless you rip the page out, finding it again is difficult. Then you've got to lug it around multiple venues. Well after some experimentation with the online version, this year we had the conference app. An excellent innovation. You could search the programme, favourite specific schedules and then they would appear on your calendar. Furthermore you could also make notes attached to that particular session and then email them on. If that appears tp privilege the techie, it's not at all like that, because you still have the print version if you prefer it.

Writing Symposium

Last Friday's UKLA research symposium gave us multiple perspectives on children's writing. Debbie Wells-Rowe opened with a critical multimodal analysis of young children framing and annotating photographs of themselves. That was followed by Cathy Burnett's look at digital texts in the classroom, and the sorts of negoataitions that surround textual production. In the afternoon Debra Myhill took us into some of the methodological issues around her project on Grammar and Writing with older children. Although the over-arching issues weren't immediately apparent, each speaker brought a different methodological lens, and each in her own way troubled the definition of writing itself. But for me there was something very interesting about formal and informal adult pedagogies and how children and young people respond to these in their text-making practices. In most cases there were multiple adults, as well - the adult in the writing process, and then the adult as researcher (sometimes they were the same person), and then of course the adult audience at the symposium itself!