4357

orange on black
OMG, it’s so exciting designing this Virtual World! I was chatting with Rich (in the world) for about half an hour, yesterday. Not a day goes past without a visit! I also end up checking the Runboard a couple of times a day, too. We came up with another thread today which must have come from the Department of Esoteric Numerology. Sums of money, telephone numbers, maybe a scrap of paper in someone's pocket, the safe number, the formula, even the lottery ticket number is the same sequence of digits (how weird is that?) And the sequence is always 4357 - 'help' on the keys of a mobile. Of course only the creator and the Goddess (Claire) know the reasoning behind this....

Still posting on digital literacy here!

On tour

don't walk
I spent a delightful afternoon with Catherine Beavis. We went here and talked about video games and virtual worlds (as you do). She told me about the work of t.l.taylor (links to papers). I found the paper t.l. gave with Mikael Jakobson “The Sopranos meet Everquest – social networking in MMOGs” at the 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference in Melbourne, 2003 (full list here). Catherine also reminded me of John Carroll’s work. His article “Digital Drama: a Snapshot of Evolving Forms.” is here. And finally, if you’re into digital literacy please add a comment to this post.

People talked

people talked
The UKLA International Conference was wonderful, as usual. I’ve already mentioned Victoria – but the Digital SIG was kicking and Jackie’s presidential address was fabulous, too! I heard good reports about Clare’s paper (which unfortunately clashed with mine) and was really impressed with Naomi Hamer on the final day. The conference concluded with Ron Carter – steady, thoughtful, and as thought-provoking as ever. And, as for me – my review of Jim Gee’s book “Situated Language and Learning” is published here, in English in Education. I am also very pleased to be invited to this exciting SSHRC event in Newfoundland in October….shipping news!!

Digital literacies (6 things)

paper figure
Debates and discusions about digital literacy have been rumbling on throughout the Lincoln meeting and the Nottingham conference and seem to me to raise a number of issues. These are:

1. The need for a definition - is the term about 'meaning making practices that are mediated through digital technology', for instance?

2. The need to make connections - between home and school and the flow of texts between these and other contexts.

3. The need to identify and distinguish between what's new and what's cool - for example, multimodality, visual culture, play, interactivity, interlinked and continuous texts, interactive wriiten conversations and so on.

4. The need for curriculum positioning - beginning to sketch out what attitudes, skills and understandings are important in the rapidly changing world of digital tecchnology.

5. The need to articulate a critical digital literacy - an approach that underscores the importance of power, ownership/authorship, authenticity and representation in digital media.

6. The need to explore identity performance - to clarify whether this has become salient in the field of digital literacy because it is attractive to a particular group of researchers or whether it is something that is foregrounded by digital literacy and digital texts themselves.

Conference

shop window toys
The highlight of the UKLA International Conference so far just has to be Victoria Carrington's excellent presentation on the focus day. There seems to me to be a pressing need to connect what more established research traditions are saying about reading processes with work around new/digital literacies before the discourses get too polarised. I'm skipping the debate over phonics this morning, but there's a rich an interesting day ahead.

Street Piano Liberation Front

Street Piano 2
How does social networking in digital space become civic participation? Maybe the story of the Sharrow street piano can illustrate this. It begins like this. Ruth, on her way back here from meeting with friends spots the street piano and thinks that I may be interested in it. She forgets to tell me about it, but emails me when she’s back in London. I go down and photograph it and post it on my blog here. A few days later Merrony’s Moll leaves a message on my Flickr stream saying how she’d been to photograph the piano only to find that the messages have been removed. I visit Moll’s blog, find out some more and follow the link to www.streetpianos.org. Here I read the full story and also the connection with Indymedia here and here and find out that the Council is threatening to remove the piano, there’s an online petition, and so on. Mainstream media get the story and then Jackie hears it on BBC Radio 4 – a reporter rings up a local councilor who is now quite sympathetic to the whole street piano thing!!! The Street Piano Liberation Front has brought about a minor coup. The local independent production company, VeryMuchSo Productions, are making a documentary about the piano and its place in the local community. It looks like it may remain (bloggers may chain themselves to the piano, if necessary) who knows….watch this space!

This picture

art reject
This picture, part of Sheffield's growing wall art scene just about captures how I feel right now. It's a busy week, so much preparation and I feel I've only just begun. There's marking and moderation, preparations to a new validated masters programme, preparing conference paper(s) - and on top of this it seems that it's really complicated for the university to put some streaming video on a server for me. I'm sure I'll sail through it all - and that's my moaning over! In the mean time check out the Critical Literacies blog, leave a comment too why don't you?

Authenticity: blogs and wikis

magic realism 2
Students can now do blogs and wikis in our VLE, which is cool, but somehow they seem like a shadow of the real thing. It feels as if social software has been colonized by the education system. So, to resurrect a debate initiated by Colin and Michele, have they therefore become inauthentic practices? We, in education, always seem to be two steps behind, but part of me thinks that some change – gradual though it might be – is better than none at all. The same thing goes for the Barnsley virtual worlds project. It’s tame compared to Active Worlds itself, but then again it’s like a quantum leap for the schools involved. I suppose I’m just going to patiently watch how it fits into the classroom context.

It'll be quiet in the office....

When the office gets noisy, you just might need “shut up tape”. That’s 66 metres of absolute silence. I won’t - mostly because I’m out and about this next week. I’m at Baslow Hall for an away day tomorrow, then here for ESRC seminar series (this on Wednesday), and then at the University of Nottingham for the UKLA International Conference. If I don’t get time to post, this may well explain things.

Feng Shui

sharing ice cream 2
This made me laugh – feng shui for your website. It’s funny though, despite all the rhetoric about design there’s some appalling stuff around. OK – I best be careful – I’ve messed around with this blog to the extent that it does need a bit of smartening up, but then it feels quite homely to me. I like the minimal look of the Critical Literacies blog, too and also the richness of this website (which I know J.H. would love).

I’m published, here (thanks to Angela’s subtle persuasion) in an article which aims to set an agenda for future research that enables us to capture how identities are played out across social networks in both online and offline interactions – and I’m pleased to see this extract comes in Chinese as well. This handbook looks great, but since it runs to 63 chapters in 2 volumes I probably won’t be buying it. I’ll just have to make do with journalism on virtual worlds (like this).

Words and music

Sharrow Street Piano
I’ve nearly finished Gathering Light - and in reading it I slowly realized that I’ve read the same sort of thing so many times before. But I also realized that I’m never tired of the tale of dirt-poor migrant families (usually in Canada or maybe the US) with talented children who fight against the odds to get an education. I can’t say that the narrative pattern matches my life – it just doesn’t. Maybe it’s just that I identify with aspiration in the face of hardship or victory over inequity – who know – but I’ll recommend the book anyway!

I got an email from Monica Whitty the other day and I’ve been checking out her research, which comes from a completely different tradition from mine, but is nevertheless worth looking at. Her study of online activity, loneliness and self-efficacy explodes some popular myths and raises some interesting issues that relate to changing social networks and new media.

And in the picture, there’s The Sharrow Street Piano (open 9.00 am – 9.00pm), just as it says - out there on the street for “the people”. No, seriously, what a great idea this is. And then there’s paper and post-its for people to react to the street piano. You can see some of the comments here and here. It’s creative, it’s art, it’s music, it’s fun and it’s even starting to become literacy. The people of the street piano must be careful, soon they’ll be eligible for a government grant!!

Goodbye!

farewell 2
It’s always sad to say goodbye. This year’s international masters students have been such good company and such fun it’s even worse to say goodbye! This is our farewell lunch at Aunt Sally’s – Whitney and Penny fly back to Taipei on Thursday and Vera follows on Saturday. Perhaps they’ll keep their blogs up to date, who knows? That leaves me puzzling over how to make the most of virtual worlds in the classroom, looking at stuff like this that compares AWEDU with other providers…

Puzzling

floor
Sad though it may sound I’m totally hooked on playing this – described as the hardest riddle on the internet (I bet!). Anyway, I got to Level 5 in 5 minutes, thought I was dead clever ...and then got completely stuck! Apart from that I’ve been enjoying the company of Emma and Sammy and thinking again about folksonomies, reading this which deals with the ambiguity of 'cool' as a tag.

Yes but, no but

purple park
It’s official – we don’t have time to explore everything that’s out there, so my approach to software/freeware is to stumble on it and use it when it’s needed. So I’m not announcing anything earth-shatteringly new here but sharing what I’m up to - which is using free discussion tools from Runboard.com in working on the Barnsley virtual world project (easy to sign-up, easy to use and seems quite secure); I’ve also been experimenting with Visual-Mind as a mind-mapping tool (again dead straightforward and you can download free trials); and Jotlive as a free online notetaking site (simple to sign-up, and has loads of potential). That's it, after all it's Friday!!

Signs, rants and concealed garments

Newt-exclusion
Educating the eye with Flickr is an interesting phenomenon that Dr Joolz has commented on before on her blog. I like the way that tags, themes and sets seem to emerge through the process of collecting and reflecting on the images that are captured in everyday digital photography. So it’s gone this way for me with signs and notices, which have interested me from several points of view – as a form of everyday literacy, as a source of humour and as a way in which we mark the social landscape leaving meanings for others. That’s led me to start up a new set on my photostream called Signs and Notices.

I have on several earlier occasions gone on a rant about the way each new technological product seems to require its own charger and cable (for example my December post here). Now someone’s come up with a sensible solution, called the SynCh. I quote: “The SynCh is compatible with thousands of different personal electronics, including cellphones, music players, wireless headsets, PDAs, cameras, flash drives, USB accessories and more. Replace all of your cables, cords and adapters with just one SynCh Universal Sync Charger.” It draws power from your car cigarette-lighter, wall socket or computer USB. The ideal solution – unfortunately it’s only available in the US at the moment.

And finally, I’m intrigued by the whole concept of deliberately concealed garments after catching part of a discussion on the radio in transit from somewhere to somewhere else. This is an explanation of the tradition of hiding clothing and other objects in the fabric of buildings usually near entrances and exits. Like Easter eggs on CDs there’s something magical about this practice. I’m sure it has parallels on the web, but I’m not quite sure right now what they are.

Word play/number play

DSC01448
If I was delivering a parcel to the Broomgrove Snooker Club, I'd be confused. Suppose the gate is locked and I ring the bell but there's no answer, how can I get past the gate to use the house door? Life's so confusing....thank goodness I'm not delivering a parcel. Anyway, Hannah sent me this, which is one of those tried and tested tricks with numbers. Two things interest me here - one is the way that it is visually presented and engaging to do (that's from someone who usually switches off when number problems are suggested), but the second thing is the subtle net-based viral marketing strategy. Here's 7-Up fully cognisant of the way in which people use work emails with links to entertain one another, subvert work routines and distract screen-workers from the tedium of data input and so on, branding their own product through these kinds of practices. (Ooops, I've done it myself, pointing you to this link!)

Virtually Barnsley

PictureA
This is a screenshot of the 3D virtual world we’re developing in Barnsley. Today the planning group met as dalek avatars and we explored the grids of the city streets with Rich from Virtually Learning as our guide. The idea is to pilot in the autumn and roll out to 10 schools in the coming year. We’ll be starting with 9 year olds who’ll navigate their way around a 3D world like Active Worlds (and here), creating narratives around the clues left in the world. But perhaps more exciting is the realtime synchronous chat interwoven with one-to-one telegrams which will make it highly interactive and collaborative across sites. At the moment we’re thinking that they’ll explore this abandoned city whose inhabitants have mysteriously disappeared – evacuated, abducted or escaped from an invasion, a biohazard or such like. An ongoing debate amongst planners is the general state of the VL – is it golden age rural England, the mean streets, or a safe modern environment? Will there be grafitti like this? Will there be danger? Maybe. Will there be bodies? No. Monsters….ghosts? We’ll have to wait and see. Then there’s the down to earth reality. How will teachers build this into classroom life? Maybe even that’s the wrong question - perhaps we should asking, how will this change classroom life? I’ll be posting on this as we approach launch time, but unfortunately folks, it has to be a closed world. Expect regular updates through your roving reporter, as usual.

Pink flamingoes

Running for mum & Auntie Jane
Here’s Hannah and and the other Pink Flamingo (Izzie). They raised £500 in the Race for Life. Yay!!!!That’s what I call social participation. Photo-sharing is another matter – yesterday’s stenciling excursion was fun, but then Infocult’s story of macabre photo-sharing is downright disturbing. On a slightly more cheerful note, I reckon it was probably good to keep clear of this event on social software, particularly since the open space session (scroll down the blog) was so obviously 60s retro!

Crude black millions

crude black millions
I captured the Crude Black Millions stencil on my way to the Critical Literacies Project meeting at the University of Sheffield (I’m a critical friend to the project – here’s the blog). I like photographing wall art and have snapped up a few stencils in the past couple of weeks, but often – like this one – they’re meaning is ambiguous. At first it seemed to me like a rather oblique commentary on war over oil and American imperialism, but I wasn’t sure whether I was imposing this reading. Crude Black Millions is somewhat condensed, so I wondered what would happen if I googled it. That’s how I came to this picture on Olivia Leigh’s photostream. If you scroll down the comments you’ll read this: “Hello I like your pictures. . . I did the Crude Black Millions stencil, and was chuffed when someone told me there was a picture on the interweb. Doing some stuff with pictures of wind turbines at the moment, coming to a wall in Sheffo near you soon. . . come see my band play Crude Black Millions the song soon! We’re called Corleone.” Well that seems rather weak viral marketing, particularly since none of Olivia’s tags make obvious reference to Crude Black Millions. But then, searching Flickr tags for Crude Black Millions I found this and then this from Evissa, and felt in good company with local stencil collectors. Funny though, what about Corleone and do I care?....well, just enough to find the Sheffield band’s website (and stuff on myspace) , listen to the track Crude Black Millions and find little trace of anti-war agit-prop. Now I don’t intend to set off on a similar trail for their other song, titled BMS (Manhattan: Fuck) for obvious reasons.

New gadget, sir?

halfplanet
From time to time I get thinking that a new gadget would improve my life, increase my happiness etc etc. So today I thought that if I had the money, I’d be in the market for a decent handheld. Sony’s UX50 handheld PC might well fit the bill, and it looks really cool. It has a 4.5in LCD touchscreen so you can operate it as a tablet PC or slide up the display to reveal a full qwerty keyboard underneath. On the other hand I better just get back to reviewing this paper for CJE (why me, I wonder?) and worrying about tomorrow’s validation event.

Friends

Friends Euston
I was in London at the Friends Meeting House, Euston today for the UKLA. It was hot, but I always enjoy that venue for our meetings. Anyway, the International Conference (July 7-9th) is shaping up well, so if you haven’t booked yet you should!! And on a totally unrelated theme, Ruth was up in Sheffield this weekend and she left this link on my desktop which is worth looking at for a laugh.

Sunshine!

Stevie
Yesterday, Manchester had a carnival atmosphere as football supporters prepared for the first World Cup game. Anyone would have thought that this was the final! Football is certainly the grand narrative of the current era. Meanwhile, I was at MMU doing a workshop for PRIE – I met some interesting researchers and then wandered the empty city streets while what seemed like the rest of the population watched the game. Today I sat in the garden with Stevie (and Jean), soaking up the long-awaited summer sunshine.

This links

more phlegm
I’m going to be reviewing this book (but I want to make it clear right now that I’m not prepared to accept any bribes at all). I’ve also spent some time catching up on one of my favourite blogs - Infocult - there's some great stuff here. This post on memorial and postmortem photography is weird but really interesting. And then I must say that this journal looks good – but I’ve had no time to check it out yet, though. Mind you, having said that, this is a really good journal, too. I hope this links 'cause I had trouble with Blogger yesterday.

Short post

phone cards
What I like about the blogosphere is its amazing diversity. It’s great to read about Vic in Japan (I think she’s recently reskinned her blog, too); I like reading about Mary Plain’s work on students’ digital photography and then there’s Phillip who boldly publishes his rejection note. Of course, there are many other things as well!

Dispute over?

trainspotter1
So our dispute is over. Good! I also think it’s very good that the hidden workers in Higher Education are being recognized for their contribution…but I’m not sure how public perceptions of academics may have been influenced by our action. We’ve lived through a status erosion and our working conditions (group sizes, accommodation and so on) have generally followed a downward trend. I’m pleased students will now get their marks, their degrees and so on, but worry about the future….particularly now Prince Charles is into teacher training!

Shipless

greenplanet
Some days seem to have a soundtrack. I don’t really know why, but today’s was:

“On the floating, shapeless oceans
I did all my best to smile..”

and then

“I'm as puzzled as a newborn child.
I'm as riddled as the tide.”

Trivial, I know, but what amazes me, is how easy it is to locate this sort of ephemera on the net. These words together with the floaty tune go to make up Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren”…and it seems that it’s a shipless ocean which is, of course, a whole lot different to a shapeless ocean. Anyway my ocean today appears to have been shapeless!

[mmm lovely Zongzi rice dumplings here!]

Burning stuff

hub
I enjoyed watching the Philip Roth interview last night. He delivered a blistering attack on George Bush. It seemed to me that “disillusionment with the Bush administration” (here) is a bit of an understatement. Mark Lawson’s rather a downbeat interviewer but that seemed just right for Roth, who helped him out. The only trouble with Roth is that he doesn't really offer any hope. We're left feeling that there's no alternative; no voice of critique apart from his own.

I’m interested in our growing obsession with erasing the past and particularly with shredding documents. Burning stuff strikes me as the best solution, but if you really want to turn destruction into labour there’s these wonderful Shredding Scissors – so good, they’re featured on both BoingBoing and ShinyShiny!

Hive mood

dance stencil
Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar have designed this tool for searching blogs and plotting the frequency and location of certain words or phrases. They’re sponsored by a manufacturer of breath-freshening mints which seems to sum it all up - so they search for words that express emotion. Well this is love-lines which they say “illuminates the topography of the emotional landscape between love and hate, as experienced by countless normal humans keeping personal online journals.” In a way what comes up is completely trivial but yet also quite enticing. But it would be so much better if you could hyperlink to the source – that would satisfy our prying minds – particularly, I reckon, with the image view function. Wefeelfine is more sophisticated by all accounts and aims to capture hive mood swings, displaying them in different ways. This evening the application isn’t working. I hope they freshen up soon!

Hive mind

resist
At their best, wikis can be a tool for the collaborative construction of knowledge, but they are also open to sabotage and misinformation. In this article Jaron Lanier outlines the shortcomings of online collectivism. It’s called Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism and is well worth a read. Here’s his conclusion:

“Some wikitopians explicitly hope to see education subsumed by wikis. It is at least possible that in the fairly near future enough communication and education will take place through anonymous Internet aggregation that we could become vulnerable to a sudden dangerous empowering of the hive mind. History has shown us again and again that a hive mind is a cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot. Nasty hive mind outbursts have been flavored Maoist, Fascist, and religious, and these are only a small sampling. I don't see why there couldn't be future social disasters that appear suddenly under the cover of technological utopianism. If wikis are to gain any more influence they ought to be improved by mechanisms like the ones that have worked tolerably well in the pre-Internet world.

The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.”

Social affordances ( please click here for details)

door peace
….demonstrating the social affordances of the door discarded in the street – which here becomes a poster for Peace in the Park – an event that in the end will probably be more social than political. And....I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that most blogs have quite limited social affordances. OK, we can signal networks, links, namecheck other bloggers and so on; but that just leaves us with a linear chain of comments. Jennifer’s “unblog” has confounded expectations though, so despite adding a new comment her audience speaks more than she does (a ratio of 33:2 at the moment).

Keri Facer and her colleagues at Futurelab are organizing an interesting looking event next month in London on social software – unfortunately I’m too busy to attend – but it will help launch their publication “Social software and learning” which is great - highly recommended - and makes some important links. These crystallized for me on p.28 where the authors suggest that “…social software is enabling people to do things with internet technology that they clearly want to do themselves – and as they discover more things they want to do the software develops. Social software is therefore satisfying needs that map closely onto educational needs and current agendas. Social software is about personal services on the web, and consequently it is about personalization. It is inherently social, and the gains of using social software are gains that come from collaboration.” Couldn't have put it better!

Last of May

shopwindow doll
Today is Duan Wu Jie - the Dragon Boat Festival (Penny explains). In the general absence of celebration in Nether Edge we went to see Down in the Valley at the Showroom. A strangely arresting film in which American myth confronts American reality (at least that’s how I read it). The upshot is predictably violent, but the film is not without merit. Perhaps the high points are the skilful jump cut edits and, of course the music (Mazzy Star, particularly). Also showing is Flavela Rising, but this will have to wait till next time.

Exotic

In the bush

This is Lesley’s photograph of the beautiful Bird of Paradise flower – apparently South African in origin. Anyway, this is a brilliant photograph with a “Where’s Wally” dimension to it. This is probably best viewed by clicking on the photograph itself and viewing it large on my Flickr photostream! Please give it a go and let me know what you see.

Kawaii?

Ruthandtwin
As an outsider to Japanese popular culture I’m wondering how visual-kei is positioned in relationship to kawaii culture. Kawaii (sometimes kawairashii), or “cute culture” is well-documented. In 1995, Sharon Kinsella showed how kawaii crossed many domains including handwriting, fancy goods, clothes and food. More recently there’s Hjorth’s paper on the intersection of kawaii and mobile phone culture “Textperts and other Thumbomena: Mobile phones and Japanese cute culture.” - this traces the origins of kawaii culture and shows, in a similar way to Ito’s work, what happens when new technologies adapt to local socio-cultural practices. Visual-kei seems to be drawing from a different set of influences including anglo-american popular music and traditional kabuki. It seems comparatively hard-edged - so I’m curious to know if it defines itself in opposition to kawaii?

Visual Kei

lanterns2
The wonderful hybrid world of Visual Kei is a paradise for commentators on popular culture. This Japanese glam-rock phenomenon is marked by lots of cross-dressing, hair dye and lurid make-up and broad range of musical styles. The visual impact, and tie-in merchandising is every bit as important as the music itself. Here’s some stuff on the influential band Kagrra and this is their official website. Dir en Grey look pretty cool too. This is Tattered Cloth – a shrine to the group. Clicking on “Soup of sexual desire” takes you to pictures of the group which show their visual look. Cross-dressed glam-punk – what do you reckon? “Sweet curry with kidney” takes you to lyrics. They’re great fun. I liked “Deity” from the album “Macabre”.

Naughty men

lantern
Delving further into the archive of English radicalism, I came across the wonderful words of the sermon that John Ball preached to the rebels on Blackheath. This was in the summer of the the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. I quote:

“From the beginning all men by nature were created alike,
and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of
naughty men”

The full text is here.

Thousands of More

lanterns
I had a wonderful time singing on Sunday evening, and particularly liked doing “Thousands of More” - the lyrics are here. This is one of those great traditional songs collected by the Copper family. I was attracted to the idea of happiness that isn’t dependent upon wealth, but this set me thinking about a particular strand in British culture that adopts a stoical, or even generous, acceptance of material inequality, poverty and wealth. Despite the easy appeal of David Cameron’s emphasis on general well-being, I am left feeling uneasy on two counts. One is precisely that: the complexity of the relationship between well-being and cultural capital (or cultural amnesia); the other is that Cameron is, after all, a Tory. So what of the spirit of English radicalism? Was it snuffed out in 1649 by Fairfax? Goodbye Diggers, now consigned to youthful protest (the Levellers), latter day strummers (Billy Bragg) and dewy-eyed romantics (Dick Gaughan). Writing this, I wonder about our own struggle as academics, as we attempt to claw back our status through union action. Wealth is always relative…so Thousands of More? Are we radical or just backing the wrong cause?

And finally, what about Sir Andrew Steer – outraged by gangsta rap, he wants schools to ban it. After all, he argues, teenagers are understandably drawn to the “delights of the forbidden”. So would it really be a good idea to forbid gangsta rap? Assuming that were at all possible, doesn’t it rather undermine his argument? Perhaps it would be better on the curriculum, accompanied by a regular regime of testing.

Post where you are

casastraight
Street-life in Morocco. It’s not raining in Casablanca but, despite the drought here in the UK, the rain has been insistent for at least a fortnight. As in Sheffield so in Cleethorpes. Anyway, I was thinking about storing meeting notes online, discovered this (which is really just for personal use) and this which has collaborative potential. Dr Joolz who’s a digital native picked it up straight away! It's possible here to construct notes that are joint-authored. And if you're trapped in doors and that's not your bag, what better than to think about food – that’s where Hsinwei’s other blog comes in.

Citizen doll

citizen doll
OK, so it’s true, the way in which you can quickly update your webspace and publish offers all sorts of new possibilities for participatory or ‘citizen’ journalism. Instances of this have been well-documented in the blogging literature. But let’s face it, most of the time it’s more likely to be about social networking, impression formation and maintaining a narrative self. We know there are journalist blogs and that’s good, but a far greater proportion operate in a niche, serve a specific affinity, network or recycle information or opinion. The big media-players do, however, seem edgy about how new developments in the digital world could de-stabilise them and mostly this is about the threat of narrowcasting and consumer power. The rush to add new media content isn’t always such a great idea. For example, The Observer’s idea of making the video evidence of the “sex-for-asylum” available doesn’t seem to add much to the story. Do they think it is more credible as a result of this, or what? Wouldn’t it be better to provide add-on information or, where appropriate alternative voices…or interaction?

Back online

Mogie
I'm back online! It was so strange to have no connection at home - I literally felt cut off (does that suggest some sort of dependency?). I called in the computer shop this morning and the guy said "Do you want the good news or the bad news?". "Well I'd like the bad news first." I replied. "There's nothing wrong with it." he said. "The good news is that we charge you £15 for checking it over." I was OK about that. He suggests my blue screen may have been caused by a device conflict. Anyway, it seemed at that point that there was no alternative but to buy a new monitor - illogical, I know, but there you go. Anyway, everything's fine and dandy now.

So my good friend, my chauffeur took me to Mr Straw’s house this afternoon. In an unlikely location on a back street in Worksop, middle class Edwardian life is perfectly preserved. The house is like a time capsule, full of the everyday life of the era from its furniture and fireplaces to its newspapers and novels. The cupboards are stuffed full of abandoned products: Cerebos Salt, Bovril in jars, tincture of iodine, Oxo tins, Lux powder and jars of preserves, goose grease and so on. Visiting the house is to fall into a vortex of abandoned ephemera through a portal of cultural archaeology headlong into starched middle class morality and petit-bourgeois aspiration. That’s before you stumble unexpectedly in the back-story that seems to hang like fog in the atmosphere of the place. William Shaw who abandoned a teaching career in London to return to that small town of his birth to keep house, to become a substitute mother, whilst his elder brother grimly maintained the family business - his brother Walter, grocer, seed merchant, blender of high quality tea. The National Trust has preserved the Straw’s house as it was found – or to be strictly accurate not quite as it was found – offering up as a result a manicured social history. An archive haunted by an uncomfortable, restless presence. To me it felt like an empty context, as if the subjects of this life drama, the Shaws had been torn away from it. Like a photographic negative of these digital spaces which are so powerfully alive and populated by the ghost-like force of their dispersed subjects.

Aargh!!!

I was posting the other night and my machine kept on crashing each time I got to the Flickr site. Nightmare! But even worse was to follow...I re-booted and got the blue screen full of error messages. I've had to take my computer in for 'them' to look at, so I'm offline at home which is a really strange experience. Anyway, I'm pleased to report the appearance of new blogs in the mean time. We have Whitney's, Penny's, Kostas's and Shirley's! Yay! What about Foster, I wonder? Anyway, I hope they all continue to post. This made me think again about blog statistics. Having already started up a few myself that didn't take off but didn't get killed off either, I wondered if the blog ranks were rather artificially swollen by those that aren't exactly active?

Blogs blossom

apple blossom
...and here's another blog. This is for the Critical Literacies project, supported by ALEA and UKLA (I must say I rather like the minimal look of the design!). The project is investigating the dynamic pedagogical interactions and curriculum designs underpinning critical literacy in selected school classrooms in Australia, Britain, South Africa and the United States of America. The central research question is: "What do teachers working in different social, political and cultural contexts understand by critical literacy and how do they design and enact their curriculum and pedagogies in actual classroom situations?" Case study and collaborative practitioner inquiry methods will provide detailed close-up accounts of critical literacy as it is constructed in elementary and secondary schools in different nations. The project particularly focuses on critical literacy practices in communities in poverty, as these children are over-represented in the groups who are failed by standard approaches to school literacy. Promise to keep you posted!!

New student blogs

Hsinwei's enthusiasm for her blog (vlog) has led her into a project which involves peer-tutoring other students on our international Masters programme. So this has resulted in new blogs from Leanne, Geraldine (who?), Yuan He and Maria - with the wonderfully-titled "A Greek in England". I wish them well and look forward to lots of new posts!

On shoes

Ruth's shoe

This is one of my favourite photographs because I’m fascinated by the appeal of shoes. Perhaps predictably, Ruth has a wardrobe full of different styles. Whilst I’m not indifferent to the aesthetic of shoes myself, I must confess to being completely boring - not to say typically male - in my preference for functionality over style when it comes to my own footwear. Comfort and fitness for purpose are more important than the look. My Meindl Borneo boots could be classed as anti-style footwear - but they’re all-terrain and oh-so comfortable! It’s not just a simple gender thing though, men’s footwear from brothel-creepers to winkle-pickers and on to various styles and brands of trainers are important identity markers. In today’s big sporting event (the FA Cup), Liverpool’s Djibril Cisse began the match with odd-coloured boots, changing at half-time into a bright yellow pair. Wonderful! By all accounts it was a good game, but the boots and the zig-zag razor-cut hairstyle certainly do add to the spectacle.

Did you say Hasidic reggae?

talk

1. Identity mash-up
Hasidic reggae from Matisyahu – an orthodox Jew - is a bit of a culture mash-up. The reggae rhythms are sharp, the lyrics have that authentic Old Testament ring favoured by Rastafarians, and American-born Matisyahu has a passable Jamaican accent, but does it all add up? Does it have to? The identity is full-on Orthodox Judaism, but I’m not clear after listening to the track “Jerusalem” how this aligns with Zionism (if at all).

2. Identity and Henry James
Madame Merle says “There’s no such thing as an isolated man or woman: we’re each of us made of a cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our ‘self’? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us – and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I’ve a great respect for things ! One’s self – for other people – is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the book one reads, the company one keeps – these things are all expressive.” (The Portrait of a Lady, p.253) Well, that could almost be Ricouer!

3. YASNS database
I came across this database which provides a useful listing of social software, but was rather disappointed to find out how little useful information it can actually generate. Maybe if you log in and participate you get more out of it....(?)!

Competing for attention

wallspace

Central to the attention economy is the idea that multiple media are competing for our (scarce) attention. Web 2.0 and micromedia are accelerating this trend. Bubblegen suggests : “By networking digital media, the incentives for prosumers to produce a huge plethora of forms of micromedia pop into existence; blogs, podcasts, vlogs, machinima, fan films, and cosplay are just a few examples. The relationship between technology and media relationship has undergone a phase shift: from one to one, to many to one.” Well, yes, I’m OK with this - and the sentence that concludes. But as well as this, I’m interested in juxtaposing these ideas with what it’s actually like to consume/produce in different environments. My attention rests most easily with web-based materials that hold relevance or interest - and they’re not necessarily the visually exciting or densely linked ones. But, my inability to read screen text in a sustained or detailed way continues to surprise me (I’ve posted about this before). So I’m taking an experiential approach – regularly reading (and writing) around the blogosphere, alongside reading Henry James (why James, because I recall that the entry-cost attention was pretty high) and interspersing with Helen Simpson - who has a writing style that’s really immediate. I suppose if everything’s competing for my attention, I want to understand something about the characteristics of that attention.

Metaphor shift

moonlike2

The idea of digital natives and immigrants evokes a world of nationhood defined by a territory to which you either belong or don’t. Similarly the notion of insiders and outsiders draws a geo-spatial map of our lifeworlds, suggesting a boundary that separates or divides. In contrast Web1.0/Web2.0 evokes the creation of a different environment or the development of new services. All these ideas seem like rather simple models of digital practice if we think instead in terms of repertoire across multiple domains of use. If we shift from a socio-political metaphor to a linguistic one perhaps we can more clearly identify how confidence, competence and fluency in a variety of digital contexts relates to emerging structures of power and status and where, and how they are contested. Questions that then arise are: What are the high status practices and who defines them? What explicit and implicit messages are communicated in education curricula and pedagogic routines? Whose practices are valued? Who are the winners …and so on. This view also helps us to show how certain practices function as identity markers, and how our digital accents are an index of our personal and social history, and how what we do digitally relates in more complex ways to other meaning-making practices in our lives.

Framework?

Picture_0461

The man from the Strategy came to talk to our UKLA meeting in London, today. He talked about literacy teaching (a bit) - but mostly he talked about "frameworks", things being "built in", "steps", "structures" and "paths", what it was like "in the field" and so on, and it made me wonder what he thought he was constructing. Clearly he was excited about the idea of an electronic framework, yet it was difficult to see the real difference between that and a ring-binder (apart from the obvious economies of distribution) - old wine in new bottles as Colin and Michele would say. When he spoke about the renewed framework (an interesting turn of phrase) - that's the electronic one - he talked about "teachers going into it", "just clicking on", "downloading", "scrolling down now", "seeing years" and "having links". ICT, of course will be central - but what kind of technology will be used to develop what kind of literacy? That wasn't quite so clear. Will the medium be the message? It seemed to me that teachers would be subject-ed to one particular version of technoliteracy in which they would be required to passively click and download a lot (and maybe even cut and paste) but that genuine participation would be limited. What would an alternative version look like? What would a wiki literacy curriculum be, I wondered as I fought back the urge to yawn loudly?

Hot and sunny

sunshine

“Begin with the weather, and then write about something interesting you’ve done.” Mrs Charlton, our infant school teacher, used to say. That’s how we were taught to begin in our half-size school diaries with their dark greeny-blue covers. A picture of the weather. A neat stylized picture, almost spoilt by colourful embellishment with crayon. The date followed by a caption (that was the easy bit). Now working out what was interesting, or worse still trying to figure out what Mrs. Charlton thought was interesting, was a different matter altogether. But still, I liked the slow passage of time in my diary – the “news book” I think it was called. The gradual accumulation of words, each pressed on to the page with my own hand. I enjoyed writing myself into existence. That like this, a slow building up of things. So in some ways this is very similar, and of course in other ways very different. I peer across the room. Kate’s started doing story. Jennifer’s testing out the ratio of comments to posts. And Dr Joolz has got real news…and here I am, writing about the weather.

Dead wood

dead wood

Politics. It’s Polling Day tomorrow and the whole thing’s hotting up. Bernard Little is after my vote – I saw the posters. I thought they were promoting the Little Green Party (a small local branch?), but I read it wrong. Tony wants my vote, of course. He wrote to me this morning. The Lib Dems think they’re the only reasonable alternative. I feel it’s important to use my vote, but we don’t have a candidate for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Loony Party. What should I do?

First quarter

sunmoon

I bought the Guardian today, which is a thing I rarely do these days. It’s useful for such things as finding out that the moon is in its first quarter on Friday – but as for the news, well its usually already happened - so that just leaves comment and opinion. Today William Davies is interviewed. He’s new to me. He’s a sort of neo-digital-conservative, interesting when he asks why technology…and slightly less so when he suggests “There’s greater convenience for the public at large, but not necessarily greater efficiency for society as a whole.” Then I found his moan about individualization rather tedious. We already know about the trend to networked individualism, and at the same time we know that technological determinism doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but still he tries to persuade us that new technologies “enforce a quite radical individualization.” Where’s the evidence? Is listening to an iPod really radical individualization? Still at least the Guardian is pretty blog-friendly – you can hardly turn a page without some cross-media reference. Today there’s a feature on green blogging which cityhippy describes as a sort affinity space with a hierarchy (Treehugger = top blog)….or maybe it's a foodchain.

Movie stars

Last year I posted about going to see a really awful movie - "The Life Aquatic", which we thought was a complete waste time. It was written by Noah Baumbach. Standing in the queue for "The Squid and the Whale" we noticed that we were about to see another offering from the very same Baumbach. We nearly changed our mind as we bought the tickets…but were pleasantly surprised at the sensitive telling of a domestic breakdown. The gentle humour was a good counterpoint to the more emotional moments. The father figure was rather two-dimensional for my liking and there was a bit of a so-what factor to the narrative. The movie worked - not as well as Capote - but it worked. Baumbach is redeemed. Not so Roger Ebert. I checked his appalling review of the movie. Who is this airhead who writes: “I would have loved to have two writers as parents, and grow up in a bohemian family in Brooklyn, and hear dinner-table conversation about Dickens. These kids have it great. Their traumas will inspire them someday.”and then concludes that the movie is really about “how we grow up by absorbing what is useful in our parents and forgiving what is not”? Did he fall asleep during the movie - or what?