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.

Perspective

In our paper, Points of View, Cathy and I use some virtual worlds data to problematise a whole range of issues in literacy studies. Starting from the use of virtual worlds in classrooms a number of common assumptions about the material and the virtual; space and place; and even temporality are called into question. But we also go further than that to offer some alternative perspectives on researching literacies. In looking at this data, the whole notion of segmenting our observations into discreet events was a fundamental challenge and so we experiment in the paper with providing alternative accounts, or stories, which we suggest can 'stack up' in different ways. The theoretical dimension of the paper is inspired by Kwa's reading of the baroque. Following this we suggest that a focus on baroque complexity helps us to ask the important question: what else is going on here? In doing this it provides a useful counter-narrative to over-simplified conceptualisations of literacy. Read all about it over here!

The Trashmaster: literacy and new media

Language and Education have just published my paper 'The Trashmaster: literacy and new media' which is an attempt to turn the tables on the whole disadvantage debate. I argue that schools are failing students by not providing them with the skills to negotiate the new media environment. I use an analysis of the Trashmaster machinima to explore the literacy practices that are associated with new media and then bemoan the fact that children and young people are not provided with tools that might help them to produce and consume in these textual environments effectively or critically. I'm sure friends and colleagues will point out its shortcomings, but from my perspective, I wish I'd had enough space to put this analysis alongside some extracts from curriculum documents. That would sharpen the argument - I don't know, maybe there's a chapter to be written from that. Going forward from that there is a complexities paper with my colleague Cathy Burnett (that's very exciting) and then I'm sketching out a first piece on very young children and their interactions with iPads. Somewhere, also, swishing around in virtual space is a book chapter written with Julia Davies which looks at digital literacy and teacher education, drawing on the work of the Deft project. Plenty of writing....and then there's the day job!

Coding and all that

The English curriculum has repeatedly been the site of ideological conflict. Opinions on how we should teach students to talk about language have often divided educators. Traditionalists have tended to extoll the virtues of grammar teaching as a way of maintaining or improving standards of English, whereas radical voices have argued for teaching different kinds of meta-language, often aimed at exposing the operation of power and manipulation in various kinds of texts. The original formulation of the genre approach, and the wranglings over Knowledge about Language reveal the highly contested nature of developing a critical or emancipatory perspective. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to demonstrate the relative merits of inculcating a critical perspective through different approaches. But now the whole debate seems to be shifting from English to the technology curriculum. Coding and programming are being touted as the magic bullet to giving students a better understanding of how technology works 'under the hood', as opposed to 'in the 'hood'. John Naughton is an academic and journalist who is usually worth listening to, however, his celebration of the inclusion of programming in Gove's flawed EBacc is misguided. The idea that understanding coding might somehow inoculate us and our children against the ravages of corporate manipulation (ie: Facebook, Google etc), has already been elaborated by Lanier in his book 'You are not a Gadget', but if we look at the parallels - ie grammar in the English/literacy curriculum, we may have serious misgivings. In fact, given that digital communication is the cutting edge of new and emerging social practices we might be better to focus on promoting productive and ethical consumption and production. In an article written in 2007 'Writing the future in the digital age', I called this approach critical digital literacy. The term has been rehashed and developed by others since, and last year I revisited the idea, with my colleague Cathy Burnett. The result is here - I'm not claiming that it goes the whole way, but I think it introduces a perspective that the hastily reconstructed ICT brigade are in danger of missing.