Waiting on the Platform

After a fanfare of message alerts and email notifications my copy of Literacies in the Platform Society arrived today. It's a collection that's skilfully edited by Philip Nichols and Antero Garcia and I would like to wish them every success with it. The book has a chapter that Cathy and I wrote which may or not pass the test of time, but it reflects on the way that academic work has become commodified and drawn into a market economy under the influence of technological processes. One of the features of this piece is our use of an imagined dialogue with the software. We use that technique to capture or characterise the internal experience and affective responses of those scholars who have to engage with journal publishers' platforms. That strategy of layering fictional accounts into the academic practices of theory and data has been a long-standing pre-occupation of ours. It might make for a more readable text, it's fun to do, but more than that there is a sense that fictional work can carry more complex meanings than something that is baldly scientific. In a way it's the next logical step forward from narrative research. There's quite a lot of it in my new book Rethinking Digital Literacy which is due to be published in October. Since submitting the manuscript of that book my writing life has turned quite decisively towards fiction. Of course, I've been doing bits and pieces for some time now, but this is both more serious and more playful. My first short story, a fiction that seems to me to be more or less complete in that it stands on its own two feet, is finished and I'm poised for a follow-up. I have no particular ambition for this new writing. No contract. No deadline. Free from all that I can just explore writing as a purely creative process - one that I have considerable investment in and derive a certain sort of pleasure from - and then see where that takes me. I'm happy with the transition although I have nothing but fond memories for the academic writing I've had the privilege to be involved in - even a strange sort of nostalgia for those journal platforms, successor to what we once called 'electronic submission'. Looking back on it that seems like such an odd term. Were we even then submitting to an unknown power? The power of the electronic. In contrast 'platform' is such a neutral term, but as our chapter title suggests, it's where you wait.

Why writing still matters, too

 

For the cover of Why Writing Still Matters I wanted an image that conveyed some of the messages that are to be found in the book - and that's quite a big ask. This image of Tom Price's wonderful piece called Network, which is in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was an obvious candidate. It might make you think of writing as it is becoming - writing with technology, which is consistent with the book's subtitle, 'Written Communication in Changing Times'. The fact that I'm in the picture as well is a bit of an in-joke. But in the end we went for the more abstract image which is credited to Nick Oakes but doesn't actually get any commentary. It's a photograph of initials and names carved into a tree trunk near the Alhambra in Spain. I like it because it references an everyday, but unofficial use of writing - using your name as if to say 'I was here, too' - here for as long as this writing surface remains. It will outlast the act of inscription, but anything further is uncertain. It is the trace of an action - a penknife gouging out the crusty bark of a tree. Someone leaves their mark, announces their existence, expresses their frustration, pledges their love or whatever. I like it because it can be read in different ways, and because it might provoke all sorts of different reactions. The specific detail of its origin and author(s) are unknown. The fact that it has been coloured with the primary colours that Miro was so fond of adds another dimension for me. That and the place in which the photograph was taken - I have fond memories of visiting the Alhambra. Visiting and queuing. Once we waited for 6 hours! It can be like that at the height of the tourist season. But, it's always worth it. The Alhambra and the Generalife are a potent reminder of Moorish rule in Europe and an important part of Spain's architectural heritage. A jewel in the crown of Andalusia. Of course, none of this is in the photograph, but it's what I bring to the photograph. And somehow when you put all that together you get more of a sense of what writing is, what writing does and then maybe, perhaps, why writing still matters.

Doing it differently

I really enjoyed the Doing Data Differently project because it was a move out of my comfort zone and into the realms of educational data - an area that I'd previously been extremely wary of. Cathy has written a great blogpost about the project, there are several journal publications out there and some examples of the postcards and discussions can be seen here. But just like all of the projects and initiatives that I've been involved in, there's so much more to that work that can't easily be told. I notice the same phenomenon with many doctoral students I work with - it's often as if the pulse that animates the work has grown faint, or it's essence has somehow evaporated. The skill in getting a successful outcome is rather like an alchemical process of bringing something meaningful into existence even as it threatens to disappear. Educational projects are nearly always greater than the sum of their parts. And like good teaching you can never be entirely sure about what has really happened. Of course you can have plans and objectives, you can predict some outcomes, and even measure them, but then there's always the particular atmosphere and the sense of being there. Those restless modulations and mutations of affect resist clear verbal description. The complexity and heterogeneity of entangled experience baffles us, and the unanticipated, unpredictable and sometimes unknowable effects slip through our fingers. When we try to include these in our writing what was always messy, as John Law observes, seems to become even messier - and quite a number of us have fallen into that particular trap! Despite these pitfalls I think it's still worth the effort of producing accounts that acknowledge the missing elements, of trying to capture the things that get lost, and of saying the unsayable - or at least gesturing towards it. After all it's very often those very things that should be returned to, and not necessarily the detail that gets written up (although that might be important in other ways, too).

Drawing on something

 

I took up drawing again about a year ago - I say again because I haven't really done any since my teens. Armed with a pocket-sized sketchbook and a couple of pencils we sat outside cafes in Ortigia as I sketched people passing by, photographing the Church of Santa Lucia, delving into their holiday rucksacks, chatting with their friends and on their smartphones. They weren't up to much - my sketches, that is - but I had a particular project in mind, and I wanted to find my way into drawing people. You have to start somewhere. As with my earlier attempts, half a century before, I realised that I don't have much that you might call technique. In fact I don't think I'd really want technique even if it was on offer. I just want to discover what works for me. I want to watch my drawing evolve. Of course it's not quite as simple as that. It's not all about first hand discovery. As art critics have often pointed out we are always governed by what we have seen before. What we draw or paint looks right because we have seen something like it previously. Still it emerges afresh on the page as we draw. We do it ourselves, and that's a creative act whether it's 'good' or just good enough. It's our own expression of something. Anyway, in those intervening years - those between my early drawing and my current rekindled interest, I have been preoccupied with writing. Not particularly good or even interesting writing, but writing nonetheless, and most of it professional or academic in nature. And the most important thing to emerge from all this writing is the realisation that what attracts me most is not actually its originality (although of course that helps) but the creative self-expression itself - trying to represent things in my own way, in my own voice. As with drawing, my writing doesn't have a preoccupation with technique - at least not in a self-conscious sort of way. It's just constantly refining itself. And of course it refines itself in the light of what I read. That's not quite the same as saying it's all imitation, but I think it always draws on something, even if I might not be  sure exactly what that is. The word expression seems to capture that, and if I were to write another book that would be a driving theme. Writing - technology and expression or something like that. Even in writing that it would be perfectly obvious that I'd be drawing on something.

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!

Social networking book

I was pleased to be asked to contribute to Kurylo and Dumova's volume Social Networking: Redefining communication in the digital age and flattered to be in as Chapter 1, apparently acting as a 'launching pad' for the rest of the book. In my chapter Together and Apart: social and technical works, I attempt to locate social networking in the much larger network of material, discursive and semiotic practices in a way that some have suggested is more like actor network theory. In fact I draw on Latour's work to make some points about the wider ordering of things in which social networks, and particularly online social networks, sit. But I'd shy away from calling that an ANT approach, but let's not get into that here! Anyway there's some great chapters in the book that explore a range of contemporary social networking issues including self-disclosure, social movements and networked activism. This makes this whole topic area very live and very relevant, and as far as I'm concerned - the more scholarship on this, the better. Buy the book!

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.

New literacies around the globe

I don't usually gloat over reviews, but if we live in an age of self-promotion maybe we are compelled (?) to put things out there. So I'm quoting Sam Duncan's review of last year's edited book 'New Literacies around the Globe' (Burnett, Davies, Merchant and Rowsell, 2014) sent to us by or publisher, Routledge. I'm not sure where this review will appear but it picks up on some of the high points of that work. (Sam, by the way, is an expert on adult literacy. ) Here goes: 'Of all the literacy-related books I have managed to get my hands on this year, this is the one I am most pleased to own. By far. This is a wonderful book: stimulating, engaging, exciting, varied and just so useful. It is useful in providing new ideas for practice and it is useful in providing new perspectives on research. It begins with a foreword (by Peter Freebody) asking: “aren’t we all, perhaps, a bit tired of seeing words like ‘new’ and ‘global’”? And don’t we need to examine what exactly is ‘new’ about literacies and what is ‘global’ about literacies? Freebody’s explorations of these questions alone make this book worth reading; he examines how relationships between technical, economic and social factors produce new literacy demands, and encourages us to think about the ways in which these demands reconfigure how we may understand the local and the global, and what it means to be literate. He asks us to think about, as this entire volume asks us to think about, the relationship between ‘school’ literacies and the other, the wider, the more ‘multiple’ literacies of our lives, “because many of literacy’s riches haven’t been missed; they’ve been omitted” (p. xviii).Each chapter has something important to say about literacy development, each chapter provides valuable references and ways of expressing, imagining and reimaging puzzles of teaching and research.  Like most books concerned with ‘literacy’, the focus is more on children than adults, but there are chapters with specific foci around teenagers and young adults (for example Davies on young women’s Facebook spaces or Williams on university students’ engagement with digital texts). Yet, every single chapter addresses issues of relevance- of importance- to adult literacy educators and researchers. For example, Beavis’ chapter on ‘Literature, Imagination and Computer Games’ forces us to examine what we mean by the subject of ‘English’- something of increasing importance as adult literacy provision is labelled, by some, as ‘adult English,’ and Merchant’s chapter on ‘Interactive Story-Apps’ reminds us to keep broadening our conceptualisations of reading (that reading is not one practice or process; it is multiple and ever-evolving). Reading this volume (and I did read every chapter; I would have been unable to resist it) also reminded me that though we want, as adult literacy specialists, to emphasise differences between ‘our patch’ and that of children’s literacy, we are still part of a larger literacy context- and thank goodness. As people concerned with literacy (or literacies), we are part of a huge and extraordinarily interesting group. We have so many colleagues from whom to learn. My favourite part of this volume is in the last few pages: ‘A Charter for Literacy Education.’ Burnett et al have created nine key points, all of which are of fundamental relevance to adult literacy scholarship and practice. I’ll end with three of these: 1. An empowering literacy education involves a recognition of the linguistic, social and cultural resources learners bring to the classroom whilst encouraging them to diversify the range of communicative practices in which they participate. 2. An empowering literacy education involves a range of activities that include improvisation and experimentation as well as the production of polished texts. 3. An empowering literacy education involves a recognition of the affective, embodied and material dimensions of meaning-making. And there are six more, each helping us to understand what it means to think about what is ‘new’ and what is ‘global’ about literacy.'....Thank you, Sam!

Nodal events

In trying to analyse the latest tranche of virtual world data, the challenge of capturing and documenting complexity without reducing it is a constant theme. On Saturday at the Sheffield CSL boutique conference, Cathy and I tried working around what I'm provisionally calling an event node. We chose 'the missing castle' as one node. That enables us to trace the fractal literacies that seem to us to diverge from that node in multiple ways - resulting in individuals (both children and adults) constructing different meanings and communicating them in various ways, through speech, note-taking, blogging or within the world itself. Of course, this is just work in process but it's interesting to test out the idea in other contexts. So, in the pic, you can see the proofs of the Virtual Literacies book that arrived by snail mail on Saturday morning. It's in a sort of self-opening envelope. An envelope which at least reduces some of the reader's labour (it is, I hasten to add, undamaged). The node might be the emailing of the MS, but that event has provoked a whole chain of conversations, jottings, postings and so on. A moving thread of activity that pauses briefly in this reflexive moment. Work in progress....I know.

You don't say

What you don't say or write about can be as interesting as what you do. I mean this in a particular kind of way, though - not in the sense of self-censorship, or anything like that, but with reference to the ideas that seem to slide away in the act of expression. In writing about virtual reality and virtual worlds, I've been noticing this. A small tribe of ideas scurry away into the darkness each time I approach them. Partly this is because they don't really belong in the daylight of what I'm writing about. But I thought I'd sketch an approach here. Describe the hidden people, why not? The tribe belong to the fellowship of strong social constructionism. To begin with, I started thinking a year or so ago, that the socially constructed space of a virtual world (I think Gibson talked about a 'consensual hallucination') was a pretty good guide to how things actually work when we strip away the taken-for-grantedness of what we call reality. So reality forms from data as we experience or co-construct it. We inhabit a consensus reality which is established through some pretty sophisticated programming. The little that I know about consciousness studies seems to point in this direction. Work in that field suggests that the selectivity imposed upon us by the limited bandwidth of our perceptual faculties makes the world appear in a particular way to us. That takes you to a sort of psychological constructionist point of view. I don't know if that's an official term, but it has the right sort of feel to me. Philosophically, of course, that leads one to ask if there's anything really out there at all. The example of the virtual world can be helpful in addressing this. There is something there (of course), but we create it at the same time that it creates us. What's more its created out of stuff that we wouldn't recognise as a virtual world in the first place. So it gets metaphysical. I imagine the discussion on the holodeck 'There's something out there, but it's not what you think it is.' Thinking about the virtual can, in this respect, be quite powerful. I think. OK, maybe its best not to write it after all, but I'm glad I tried!

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.

Multimodally Jung

Published in October 2009, Jung's Red Book is of interest to literacy scholars not simply because of its rich multimodal style. As you can read here, it was locked away in a bank vault for nearly a hundred years. Was it ever meant for publication? Well I suppose we'll never know. But what is really interesting is that Jung, who after all was a man of letters, chose this highly visual form to explore material, his own journey if you like, which would later inform more conventional scholarly work. You can see some more of the visual material here.

Scrappage

Old cars taken away from my brother’s house are material objects now emptied of their previous significance/use value and are about to become scrap. I wonder if anyone working in the field of material culture is looking at this trajectory of objects and the changing meanings that are involved as stuff becomes trash? Something about the topic reminded me of how the great Russian intellectual Bakhtin used his notes for 'The Novel of Education' as cigarette papers. The tragedy of the story is that this substantial work was lost when the publishing house was bombed. Unknowingly Bakhtin, who was heavy smoker, used his remaining notes in this way. Because of the wartime paper shortage he literally smoked his own greatest work! He began at the back, so that all that remains is the opening section on Goethe.

Remixes

Hot Bikes Madeira Drive Brighton

The DJ metaphor, and its associated ideas of sampling and remix have now been adopted in a number of contexts to explain how new cultural material is generated: in young children’s writing (Dyson, 2003); in the production of AMV (Ito, 2006); and in the writing of fanfiction (Jenkins, 2006). At root the basic idea is nothing new. Mahler’s use of Frère Jaques in his 1st Symphony, Luis Buñuel’s Last Supper sequence in Viridiana and the work of the brothers Grimm all suggest themselves as examples of the same phenomenon. How do we create something new? Use the materials to hand.

Second

casual
n.
The second edition of Desirable Literacies is out! I know because Jackie had a copy on her desk. I have a chapter there on early reading, and it was really interesting doing a re-write. Nearly 10 years have elapsed since I originally wrote the chapter and whilst I reckon my writing is about the same, my ideas have gone through some sort of transformation. It would be really good to do a reflective commentary, but it's unlikely I'll find the time. But here's the headlines. Then I was immersed in the world of picture books as if they were a solution to every problem. Then I saw print literacy as the fundamental issue (I was a print literacy capitalist). Then I saw home and school as two completely separate domains and despite the occasional liberal get-out phrases, I thought that we should colonise homes with schooled literacy pedagogies. Now picture books seem quaint, print literacy one of many, and home, school and community as overlapping worlds. What was a one-way street is now a busy intersection; what was single and reasonably straightforward is now multiple, contested and devilishly complex. And so without further ado, here's a link to the publisher's blurb.

Reprise

Eternal knot
Last week I wrote about a study of the information behaviour of the future and the resulting scare headlines about the google generation. John Naughton’s article in the Observer last Sunday gave a more thorough consideration of the findings which made me realise how my own reading was rather hasty. In this book, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel talk about the emergence of new kinds of reading and this is a good example of what that looks like. Here’s John Naughton: The findings describe 'a new form of information-seeking behaviour' characterised as being 'horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature. Users are promiscuous, diverse and volatile.' 'Horizontal' information-seeking means 'a form of skimming activity, where people view just one or two pages from an academic site then "bounce" out, perhaps never to return.' The average times users spend on e-book and e-journal sites are very short: typically four and eight minutes respectively. Well that’s so interesting, because that’s exactly what I just did….but then I also returned to the topic from an alternative source, wrote about it and passed it on, links and all! All in all that must count as a case study in new literacy - read, think, write, link, read, think, write, link...

New

three2
Here’s Ruth’s trio, Brown Eyes Blue, from last night (Ruth’s the one in the middle). I commented here about academic blogging and the birth of the academic/researcher/journalist hybrid – here’s an example, Constance Steinkuehler’s blog on MMO gameplay and associated literacy practices. It’s statement of purpose says it all: ‘This site has been created so that we might be able to share our research findings more quickly and efficiently with a broader audience than academic print journals sometimes allow.’

Degrees of fixity

financial market #2
I love the way these glowing messages chase each other round the buildings of Canary Wharf. I know just about enough about financial markets to get the gist - but there are plenty of holes in my understanding. Although their meanings are ephemeral, they're not simply open to any old interpretation. In fact their meaning is far more anchored than that of authors who need a degree of open, unfixed and flexible interpretation - and keep reminding us that the words and the things they represent are not the same and that meaning must be shaded by personal experience and perspective. For the occasional news-fix I really enjoy The Week, partially because it loosens the certainty of the newspapers it extracts from. "Facts" become less fixed when they are prized away from their context and just about everything you read is cradled in quotation marks. Wasn't it Derrida who said that all writing should be contained in quotes? I read that once and have been looking for the reference on and off for about eight years!

From version to mash up

Betty Boo
It’s interesting to see how ways of describing new cultural forms are being borrowed from the history of black music. Reading this on remix – and particularly the idea of culture-as-remix and remix-as-culture – brought to mind the original mixing desk antics of some of the greats of reggae music. Surely the undoubted champion was the Upsetter, Lee Perry. Yet all the great dub versions, usually produced as ‘B’ sides were just that – versions, with the bass line exaggerated, bags of reverb etc. etc. etc. They differed to previous ‘cover versions’ because they were simply a new way of presenting/hearing the original material, rather than a new recording with a different artist. In fact, I seem to recall King Tubby recording a whole album based on remixes of the same track. Of course, this was all a result of the convergence of technology and the creative flare of the studio producers. A mash up is something rather different, being made up of bits or samples from other material spliced together. In a rather primitive way the Beatles did this on Sgt Peppers, but the real leap forward came with digital recording techniques and some of the original hip-hop artists – and, of course, this opened up a whole can of worms about copyright. But more importantly, the notions of adaptations (eg early Dylan), cover versions, remixes and mash-ups generalize across cultural forms. After all Shakespeare did all four, and that would make an interesting study, too.

Bad taste?

Today was the last meeting of the Critical Literacies project. Findings will be disseminated at the UKLA conference (here). There is a collection of fascinating studies all of which include children and young people as active and critical producers…an important antedote to the dominant discourse of ‘literacy as reading’. A couple of the projects include a critical reading of the healthy eating agenda, and that’s where I picked up the Big Mac spoof – an interesting tie-in with yesterday’s YouTube post.