Time to post

Coach stop

I’ve been too busy to post for a few days, so this one’s a bit of a random collection of things I’ve noticed. Jackie has a good update on virtual world for children, keeping the discussion going (well done Jackie). Meanwhile here’s a rather strange thing: submit your neurosis to this site! And then there’s the filter, funded by Peter Gabriel. You see it all on laminate flooring (strange) and it does a sort of taste-matching thing with music, movies and web videos. It looks a bit like a sexed-up All Consuming to me.

Flickr and voyeurism

Roses

Yesterday I wrote that photosharing sites like Flickr have contributed to new ways of looking at the role of the visual image in our lives. It is as if our albums of photographs can now be released from the shelves and cupboards of our domestic life and thrown open for public viewing. But as a friend pointed out, this means that complete strangers can be leafing through shots of our family, our children and so on. Can this be an unsettling experience - peering like a voyeur into the lives of others...exposing one's own life to public scrutiny? I suppose it's all part of the blurring of private and public. But we'd be wrong to say that it is risk-free. We take intelligent decisions to remain safe and, I suppose, that is part of a Web 2.0 education, to ensure that our students make informed decisions about what is placed in public spaces, too.

Evaluating Web 2.0

at SP

Finishing off my writing about Flickr has made me think of how you might evaluate a Web 2.0 app from a user perpective. So I've come up with this list and realted questions. They draw on, adapt and extend Lisa Harper's work, which you can see here.
• attractiveness: what attracts users to this site? Once it has been ‘found’, how does it encourage you to become more engaged?
• use value: how clear are the benefits of this site? Can you see how it could be used for enjoyment, learning, or in conjunction with other on-line or off-line activity?
• signing up: how easy is the sign-up process? Are there any hidden catches? Does it feel safe?
• clarity: is the on-screen design helpful. Are the navigation tools intuitive? How is exploration facilitated?
• trust: how can you gauge the trustworthiness of the provider and the community? How are you and your material protected? How easy is it avoid or block inappropriate material or behaviour? Does it seem fairly easy to leave the community?
• invitation and participation: does the site encourage participation and uploading of your own material? Is this relatively easy to do?
• interactivity: how is interaction and communication encouraged and controlled?
• customisation: does the site allow you to personalise your own page? Is this easy to do? How can you manage and update your own profile?
• updating: what sorts of updates are provided and to what extent do users have control over updates?
• user feedback: what are the different kinds of user feedback? What sorts of feedback from other users or the site operators can be expected?
• interoperability: how might the site, your profile identity, or material from the site be incorporated into other online spaces?

Social networking?

relaxing soldiers

I’ve always thought of Childnet as a rather conservative organisation, and one that is pre-occupied with internet safety, but as this article shows its latest report argues that the popularity of social networking websites should be exploited by teachers to develop children's ability to communicate and improve their technological skills. That’s an encouraging message (see the full report here). Ofcom, the UK’s independent regulator for the communications industry, also has an interesting report out on social networking, but this is more of an attempt to chart current patterns of use, but following their line on media literacy we would predict that they might encourage an approach that helps learners to access, understand and create in these environments.

Writing/not writing

Black

PewInternet have made a headline out of an observation that I've been making on and off for the last seven years: Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. The comment is drawn from work with 8 focus groups in 4 US cities and a telephone survey of 700 parent/child pairs. You can download the whole report here or look at the IRA blog headlines here. The bottom line is that teenagers' lives are text-rich, but because their writing is embedded in their social interactions, and because the technology is therefore rendered invisible, they don't think they're writing - just communicating. The survey headlines show that 85% of the 12-17 year olds were using e-communication, but that 60% of them didn't consider it to be writing. There's an obvious gap, then, between literacy in their everyday lives and schooled literacy, and the survey does suggest that: educational institutions know they must review what constitutes effective institutional practice (2008:3) in writing. But do they? I would argue that the dominant view, at least in the UK, is that e-communication is undermining or even contaminating standards of academic writing. Could it be, though, that social uses of e-communication are simply more compelling than school literacy practices? In the light of this, I was interested to learn what the teenagers in the survey said would improve their writing. Over three quarters felt that if schools used more computer-based writing tools, their work would improve. That's not surprising, but still good to hear. Similarly, in overviewing everday writing in out-of-school contexts, there's nothing new: Effective communication, self-expression and self-presentation, and social connection are among the prime motivations behind the writing teens do in blogs, social network posts, emails and instant and text messages (2008:62).

Bringing back Bakhtin

I’ve been going on about the power of dialogic reflection for some time now, without really thinking it through properly. In my university teaching I’ve been trying to develop learning spaces that promote reflection. There’s this work on connected learning spaces that attempts to make sense of how dialogue in virtual spaces can help (I like the idea of learning ecosystems), and this article is quite helpful in this respect. But Rupert Wegerif’s piece in the current edition of BERJ is very helpful, both in reminding me of what has influenced my own thinking, and also in doing a really good job of separating out the ideas of Vygotsky from those of Bakhtin.... and in so doing bringing back Bakhtin.

Virtually the same question

With the virtual world phenomenon I keep on coming back to the same question: how does online avatar-based interaction change our sense of who we are and how we relate to others? And that’s essentially a question about identity. The more I think about this, the less comfortable I feel with both the Giddens idea of the ongoing narrative of the self and the Goffman thing about identity performance. Both imply an essential self and neither really account for how identity is differently structured and formed (re-formed) in contextualised interactions. In this passage, from Issue 100 of Granta, Salman Rushdie seems to capture how identity as a discursive practice is subject to social and historical forces: As Popeye the Sailor Man so succinctly put it, I yam what I yam and that’s all I yam. These days, however, we have a slipperier, more fragmented sense of what character actually is. We argue a good deal about how much of our behaviour is externally determined and how much comes from within. We are by no means certain of the existence of a soul, and we know that we are very different people in different circumstances: we are one way with our families and another way in the workplace. We are more fluid and metamorphic than our forefathers believed they were; we know that within the ‘I’ there is a bustling crowd of different ‘I’s jostling for space, coming to the fore, being pushed back again, growing, shrinking, even disappearing entirely, while new ‘I’s grow. We can change, in the course of a life, so profoundly that we no longer recognise our younger selves [...]the nature of the self and the extent to which it determines our actions are more problematic subjects than they used to be. (Heraclitus - Rushdie in: Granta Winter 2007)

Cue music

Brown Eyes 1
Technology has a key role to play in the history of music performance, recording and distribution. Within our own lifetime we have seen a massive expansion of radio-based music broadcasting (including the rather troubled emergence of the DAB format), rapid changes in music storage (from vinyl and reel-to-reel tape and on to eight-track, audio cassettes, mini disks, CDs and MP3 files) and changes in how live music is produced. All these changes have contributed to new ways of hearing music, and have transformed the role that music plays in our lives. Listening to our favourite tunes on an MP3 player or mobile phone allows us to take our music with us and this compares rather unfavourably to the idea of lugging a carrier-bag full of vinyl LPs around with us to share with our friends! It's an aspect of networked individualism - our music is delivered to us regardless of place, it has become highly portable. And so I think the way we use music in our everyday lives has had a sort of backwash effect on how we view live performance.

Worlds apart

at SP 4
I’ve been trying to compile a useful list of virtual worlds for children. I hear a total of 150 mentioned, but I’ve found it tricky to get past 10. This blog gives a listing(for youth, boomers, retired and beyond (that’s probably the dwellers in the great virtual world in the sky!). So in no particular order here is stardoll, and then moshimonsters, and then goaudition, and then nicktropolis, and clubpenguin (of course!). Then there’s buildabear, and mytinyplanet (ah!), not to mention chamberofchat, and whyville. Of course we won’t forget webkinz or weeworld or the rather different gaiaonline. And if you’re thinking that I’ve just done this to make up for not linking in my last two posts, you’re wrong. I guess the really useful thing would be to include a commentary on each virtual world. Well, I hope to do that later, with a little help from my friends!

Refreshing

refreshments
It was great to get some fan mail from Islamabad, today! But more seriously it illustrates the power and potential of blogging. I quote, i have had great fun reading your vedana site on a weekly basis - as not much educational talk happens in staffrooms! and being overseas we dont have as much exposure to courses and training, so people plod on doing their own work and not discussing or scrutinising the education they provide....and so on. Thank you!

Flickr writing

Roses
In writing about Flickr, I have become more aware of its sophisticated design. Decisions about levels of participation are placed firmly in the hands of the user. At the most basic entry level, you can simply use Flickr as a private online archive of photographs. There is no pressure or obligation to do any more than this. However, images that are public on a photostream soon begin to attract some interest, particularly if they are seen as interesting by others and even more so if they are carefully titled and tagged. Others in the Flickr community may leave a comment or invite you to be a contact. But again you are free to accept or decline as you build up your list of contacts. There is no pushing or poking. You are in control of your level of particpation from the very onset. That's what distinguishes Flickr as a quality social networking site.

YouTomb

Yes it is (I think)
Copyright laws are supposed to protect property and income. But with the increasing number of ways that you can copy and disseminate material in new media they’re becoming harder and harder to enforce. Is the media future unregulated, or should it be regulated by users rather than owners? Project YouTomb monitors alleged copyright infringement on YouTube by looking at the videos that get taken down. I think it's interesting that YouTube owners are not as concerned about appropriacy and ethics as they are about getting sued (see this post). Not surprising, really. If you want to read more about YouTomb read the Henry Jenkins commentary.

Timely?

five and twenty two
I was pleased to see that all the presentations from the Children in Virtual Worlds conference at the University of Westminster are now up – that’s a useful resource that I'll be referring to I'm sure. I’ve also been looking for a good virtual world review site, but since the demise of this one , not updated since 2006, there’s nothing. However, I did come across this site that provides a useful overview of references to virtual worlds in the Byron Report. And, of course, as one does I also found a report that I missed this from last August’s Guardian!

Research Day

clematis again
At the faculty research day we did an interdisciplinary symposium on 'Identity and personal development: the place of electronically-mediated relationships in academic and social life' . Four key themes came out of our various studies of SNS and professional dialogue. They were the salience of identity - particularly the idea of performativity and the person in dialogue; the interweaving of different kinds of online and online space; issues of trust and emotional closeness in the development of social networks; and the different kinds of learning (learning about oneself, each other, about stuff and about academic/ professional knowledge) that can take place.

Flickr reflections

ukulele renaissance
Writing about photosharing is helping me to think more clearly about the Flickr experience. One thing that I realise is that I've built up a lot of knowledge about how Flickr works over a period of time. It has been an incremental approach in which I've learnt just what I need to know when I need to know it. Another thing I've realised is that the intelligent way in which it is structured leaves you in control of your own level of use. It's a very different experience to entering the somewhat anarchic world of YouTube. And finally, when you compare Flickr photosharing with blogging, you realise the difference in social interaction. Flickr allows for comments, notes, tagging and mail - so there are multiple options. By way of contrast, blogs will only display comments (and these are often hidden away). In Flickr they're right up there next to your picture. Blogging is much more about having your place on the net, personalising your page and performing your identity. Although you have your own portal in Flickr it looks more or less the same as someone else's. That seems to create the feel of a more continuous shared space.

Image as social object

more rain
I'm currently writing about Flickr, and just wanted an excuse to rehearse Engestrom's idea about social objects. In the case of Flickr, the social object is the digital photograph; for Amazon it is the book, and for YouTube, the video. The social object is the focus of user generated content and the resultant interaction that takes place. As objects become of particular interest to individuals, then a social network can develop around them. This is not particularly different to the formation of traditional interest groups - apart from in two aspects. Firstly, because the interaction is online, social networks are often dispersed (time and location are no obstacles to communication), and secondly, because social networking sites allow for varying degrees of engagement, they lend themselves to lightweight engagement and multiple group membership. The idea of the social object not only allows us to predict the likely success of a Web 2.0 app, but also helps us to provide an account for how networking gets organised. Interestingly, though, when pre-existing networks exist, such as friends and family on Flickr, the social tie is primary and the social object secondary.

Interval

I’ve now discovered that Voicethread takes text well, allowing voice comments (that’s a very useful feature). It also does a reasonable job with video, too and similarly you can comment by voice or in writing. This looks like quite an idyllic scene, but actually it’s just off the main road. The brass band is a legacy of the Victorian industrial era – seen as a wholesome pursuit for the working classes of pit, mill and factory workers. Here, the Holymoorside Brass Band plays in front of the Revolution House (built sometime in the 1600s). So we have all sorts of layers of meaning in a single event.

Interest

I was quite impressed by the sort of techniques that David Gauntlet’s been using to model identity. He sounds a bit like the Jools Holland of academia - but the video does more than simply advertise his book Creative Explorations. He shows some examples of his work and talks about its possible applications. I guess I’m linking this up with the sort of reflections I’ve been writing about with respect to the Pandorama and Theatro del Oprimido.

Interpellation

badge
There is something a little too simplistic about Goffman’s dramaturgical account of identity (in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life). Although I like the notion of performance, the influence of the other is somewhat problematic. “…when the individual presents himself before others, his performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of society.” (1969:45); but also in here there is the notion of an essential self that does the performance, and this is unconvincing. Better is Butler’s notion of interpellation in which others call us into being. Moreover Butler does not suggest that we perform a script or enact a discursive practice, but rather that the individual, or the self, is a result of discursive practices. There is no prior entity. Herein lies the distinction between performativity and performance. What we refer to as our identity, then, is the story supplied by the manipulation and re-combination of available resources, mediated through text, called into being through our interaction with others.

Interactivity

Dotmasters
I was at the Children in Virtual Worlds conference on Thursday (here). It was a bit of a mixed bag. Each time a really interesting topic came up, it tended to get left unexplored. A constant theme was the issue of interactivity and the regulation and surveillance of interaction. I realized, not for the first time, that the concept of interaction has quite range of interpretations. You could perhaps identify five possibilities. 1.o nline content encourages you to make a reponse (you think, learn, go and get something, phone in); 2. you perform an action and it is logged (you vote; rate or rank); 3. you communicate verbally or otherwise with others (comment; chat; tag etc.); 4. your actions change the screen environment (you post or personalize your page or portal, or adapt your pov); 5. Your collaborative endeavours result in a transformation of the environment you’re in (you co-construct). From this you arrive at some nuances of interactivity. They are: not all interactivity directly involves other human subjects; not all interactivity promotes social interaction; not all interactivity involves collaboration. Web 2.0 apps and SNS allow for different kinds of interactivity.

Classroom 2.0

With only one slide and 156 comments this voicethread illustrates the wisdom of crowds effect of Web 2.0. I suppose we need to ask about the benefits here, and whether or not this fulfills a useful purpose. It's great to have all those voices, but frankly I got bored. Maybe it would be different if I'd initiated it, because there's something much more attractive about the comments I get as opposed to the comments others get! When I'm reading blogs, I usually tend to skip the comments unless, of course, I've left a comment and go to check to see if there's a reply. There's a sort of self-presentation thing going on here. I wonder if that's why learning blogs tend to work better than bulletin boards, the sense of ownership, of it being my space in which I perform my identity, and then later, check to see how it went down?

Image and voicethreads

It feels a bit like arriving late at the party, but I’m just looking at the learning potential of voicethreads. This is because I'm getting interested in how visual images can help us to reflect, help us to see things differently, to make the familiar strange and to capture or frame our experience in new ways. On Saturday we had a ball, taking still images and recording and writing comments. I got the sense that you begin to move beyond your own particular idea by building on the perspectives of others. OK, I suppose we were just messing about with the affordances of the technology, but there’s more here than meets the eye!

Electronic blurrings

blurrings
In a tantalizingly brief post, Torill Mortensen comments that in the late modern world, time and space are the only real values. I wished there had been more. I was reminded of Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place (1985) in which he argues that with new media: what is happening almost anywhere can be happening wherever we are (p.125). Recently Meyrowitz has turned his attention to the blurrings of time and space that come with mobile technologies. In this essay (pdf) he describes how: electronic information seeps through walls and leaps across vast distances. While we still often think of electronic media as simply connecting one place to another more quickly, our forms of communication have been subtly but significantly altering the environments we live in, transforming them into social places in which we are becoming new people. (p.97) This comes from the essay Global Nomads in this book. This reminds us of Ito and Okabe’s technosocial spaces. But Meyrowitz makes some other useful observations, too. For instance literacy he suggests: encourages the splintering of identities based on levels of reading ability and sets and subsets of literatures (p.93). And later he approaches that idea of linear development from a different perspective: the old, year-by-year, staggered access to information, where children of each age and reading level were exposed to entirely different sets of information, is largely bypassed (p.95). What a massive challenge for models of education!

It is time

It is time
Is there such a term as hypermodification? If not then linguists should coin it, because I reckon I've noted a trend in the use of additional modifying prefixes. I first spotted it on a news bulletin in which one politician was accusing another of over-hyping a new initiative. Now I thought hyping already suggested a sort of inflation of claims, an exageration, so where does that leave hyping? As a normal state? Anyway here I found that it is defined as: To promote or publicize to excess. So the second example is from Hannah who pre-warned me about the heat in London. I loved this idea of being pre-warned, implying, as it does, that you've been given notice that you will be warned. However, on checking, this has more of a provenance - to warn beforehand faetures in Webster's 1913 dictionary. You could say that pre-warn is alternative to forewarn. Pre-warn reminded me of pre-hear which is becoming quite popular too. Logic is always a difficult thing to apply to language, but my initial thought was that pre-hear made no sense at all - you either heard something or you didn't. You couldn't hear it before you've heard it. But then I've recently seen it compared to previewing, in other words it's about listening to a something (eg music) before it's actually released. That makes sense. OK, well if there are other examples of hypermodification, let's hear them.

GTA4 v 1688

Revolution House
The urban environment has been saturated by images from Grand Theft Auto 4, to coincide with jubilant reports about the games media conquest and record-breaking sales. Video-gaming challenges Hollywood, or so the stories go. It’s interesting to think how non-gamers could hardly fail to notice the invasion of GTA 4. So where does 1688 come in? Well I just wanted to point out some similarities against the more obvious differences. In 1688, in the lead up to the Glorious Revolution, William of Orange exploited the potential of what was then the new media, by having thousands of copies of his pamphlets stashed away in secret locations, embargoed until the precise time of the invasion. Here’s the link. First the technology of mass production for creating billboard posters, handbills and so on. Second the strategic release and distribution to key sites and third, appealing and available content. They work together. So that’s the recipe for a fairly painless invasion. Now do you want to play the game?

Business

near you
Carphone’s Andrew Harrison has pledged to transform the UK broadband market, just as he did with mobile phones. His move to give a laptop free (to keep - as the ad says) with every broadband connection could well have a significant impact on home wireless connectivity in this country. The promotion has already started on TV (perhaps it’s too early to see the take-up) but we've heard no comment about the laptops themselves, but one presumes they’re at least good enough, or else Carphone will end up with egg on their corporate faces.

The information

Hearts of the broken
Good YouTube stats are hard to come by, so I’ve been talking to those I meet. It strikes me that there are far more consumers than producers, and most people don’t even bother to comment. Looking for humour, parody and music seem pretty high on the casual vistors list. The users I talk to often refer to word-of-mouth recommendation. There’s some garden path surfing through related videos but not a lot. Here’s some (old) information on patterns of use and here’s the buzz on site meter type stats on your own uploads, that's just been made available.

YouTube (again)

Anarchy in the UK
The ephemeral texts produced in that nexus of popular culture, new technology and literacy are of enduring interest. Web 2.0 voices tend to be un-edited and un-censored, and as a result the texts that are produced are often, in one way or another, contentious. Looking at a YouTube video that has attracted a massive number of views, and an impressive list of comments, I was struck by the passions ignited by a low-grade mash-up of a football pitch incident. The un-regulated stream of comment was perhaps predictable. A public display of taunting, trading insults, and of taking sides - and much of the writing peppered with expletives and derogatory references . Much of it is in the demotic of grafitti - not the chic high-end street art stuff - I mean the raw edged stuff, crude and rude as it is, the material we choose not to photograph and put up on Flickr. I must say I don't find it offensive, but I was troubled, but perhaps not surprised, by the shades of racism and sexism that run through the banter. That made me wonder how we stand as educators in relation to this. I realised that I couldn't subscribe to a total Web 2.0 is wonderful view any more than I could to a ban this rubbish stance. I'm convinced that we need to engage with it, we can't turn our backs on it, pretending it isn't there, or naively accept that everything in the world of popular technoculture has a rosey glow. It's just as it is - a galaxy of practices - but we need to find ways of engaging with it, critiquing it, and harnessing the tools. It's out there, laid bare!

Learning from YouTube

Janet ponders
Today, DrJ and I were thinking through some of the issues around YouTube and formal education. We concluded that there’s plenty of potential for textual study and critical reading (the media studies bit), but there are difficulties when it comes to using it as a learning tool. One of the difficult issues is the rather chaotic nature of YouTube -for instance, there seems to be absolutely no logic governing the related videos section. It might as well be random. You’re as likely to stumble on dodgy humour, soft porn or parody - it encourages garden-path connections. Here’s a report on a YouTube course. I liked the six binaries (bottom of the page) but was uncertain about how these are construed as limitations. This is another report on the same course and here’s Henry Jenkins interviewing Alex Juhasz (who taught the course). Part One and then Part Two.

The text

The posse
May Bank Holiday. I've been taking a bit of a break. There have been some rather dismall local election results and a worrying rise in BNP voting. I can't see much hope for a London with Boris, but we'll see. Meanwhile I'm just on the look out for some good academic work on video-sharing...and, as promised here's a direct link to Jackie's inaugural (to go with the picture). Oh so multimodal...which reminds me , Sigrid has this link to the king of multimodality, click here, it's a corker!

School 2.0

Down under
Jackie’s inaugral lecture was a real celebration of her achievements. I look forward to picking up the paper: Emergent Literacy 2.0, and will link to it from here. I was left wondering when digital or new literacy gets rehabilitated with mainstream literacy. If we accept that there is diachronic and synchronic variation in literacy/ies then we should be able to accommodate the full range of mark making procedures from scratches, to pen strokes, spraycan graffiti and onscreen writing. We might also be able to account for the affordances of these different writing media, their power and status, their legitimacy as well as their intertexts. And then we could describe them all as literacy practices etc etc. So far, so good. But, like the original emergent literacy concept, the emergent literacy 2.0 concept must be partly defined in opposition to ideas of 1.0. So, until dominant perceptions of literacy, and particularly schooled literacy, including of course early literacy, begin to broaden out new literacies, digital literacy and Emergent Literacy 2.0 are necessary ideas to hold. Maybe it’s also possible, as some have begun to suggest, that there is a bigger picture, that could be sketched out under the heading of School 2.0 .

On the same page

Church door
Teaching a group who are all on wireless laptops is a strange affair. Yesterday I was trying to explain some ideas on a powerpoint which my group all had access too. Of course they could control the rate of their own progress through the slideshow, and I had a somewhat slippery control over the process of my commentary. I confess that I really wanted everyone on the same page (yes I know I’m a control freak) and that brought the didactic urge to the fore, even though it was embedded in a sequence of teaching that included exploratory group discussion, reflection, paired work as well as online activity. Coming home I was reflecting on the power of that idea of being on the same page, a phrase from the age and perhaps the pedagogy of print. I imagined that it derived from an era of scriptural authority or what deCerteau refers to as the scriptual economy of written language, and indeed this source refers to a hymnal. What would be a more contemporary reference point for the digital age? Starting from the same link, working in the same affinity space - or, do we in fact need to spend more time on the same page?

Doing different things

Strange house...
I examined a thesis the other week in which the candidate (who was looking at innovations in e-learning) made the distinction between doing things differently and doing different things. I find this a very helpful way of looking at new technology. In a sense it’s value free. As I see it, that means that sometimes we do the same (old) thing, but we end up using new kit, new software or whatever. Like phoning my mum on my mobile rather than on the landline. It doesn’t change much, she still can’t hear what I’m saying, and I for my part need to be extremely patient! But then blogging really means doing different things - and as I’m still learning, using blogs educationally is another thing altogether.

Pandorama

Boal
I was talking to Richard about the Kris Gutierrez paper in RRQ that describes teatro do oprimido (Boal’s theatre of the oppressed). He made a connection with Tressell’s fictional account of the pandorama in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Of course, the workers' cinema that Bert White’s Pandorama envisaged is a fictional account, but I suppose new media could provide a platform for popular mobilisation. Here’s a description from the book: The `Pandorama' consisted of a stage-front made of painted cardboardand fixed on the front of a wooden box about three feet long by two feet six inches high, and about one foot deep from back to front. The`Show' was a lot of pictures cut out of illustrated weekly papers and pasted together, end to end, so as to form a long strip or ribbon. The show itself, illustrated exploitation, unemployment and police violence. More reflections on this topic can be found over on Blogtrax.

Glogging

we electric
At last week’s NAAE conference I introduced the Glogster’s glogs as an example of a new Web 2.0 development. Now the term glog is rather misleading, because it can actually be used to refer either to a games blog or a geo blog (a sort of mobile video blog). But that aside, I asked whether a Glogster glog was most like a poster, an online shrine, a scrapbook or a new textual form? But also because we were exposed to the three Cs (cultural, critical and creative), not to be out done, I thought I’d have me some Ps, five of them: personalisation, publication, presentation, peer-to-peer and popular - these being characteristics of Web 2.0 apps. I must say I rather like these, and may develop the idea. After all, there’s nothing like a list to get you started!

Books

Moroccana104
I read an interesting review by Doug Black on Coolhunting of a book called "Letter by Letter", by designer/calligrapher/artist Laurent Pflughaupt. The book looks at alphabetic letters as standalone objects, and sounded from the review like a more interesting read than David Sacks’ book “The Alphabet”. After an inspiring radio interview with Raymond Tallis, I think I’m going to order a copy of “The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head” which deals with topics like kissing and spitting and why thoughts can’t really be said to be in your head…. And on the related topic of kingdoms (segue) I’m putting in an order for Lisa Jardine’s “Going Dutch” which looks at that erased link of the forgotten invasion, or Glorious Revolution, and why we’re more Dutch than we think we are!

Technologic

drinks tray graffito
The Daft Punk song Technologic captures the spirit of what Colin and Michele call the new ethos stuff in digital production: plug it, play it, burn it, rip it (full lyrics here) and the rest, seems to describe these new practices. Today I was in Manchester doing a keynote at the NAAE conference and it occurred to me to restate that, whilst I stick to my definition of digital literacy as primarily being about writing, I see that it only plays a part in larger texts; texts in which meaning is dependent upon the orchestration of multimedia semiotics. Anyway, in the end, I forgot to say that, so this acts rather like a postscript.

Space and time (again)

space city
A short while back I promised Sarah I'd do a favourite three list of sources on time, space and new technology. So here’s how it goes. First I have to have Giddens, because he writes so lucidly about the changing nature of place, space and time in late modernity. For me he sets out the broad context in which specific technoliteracy practices are played out. Secondly, I really enjoy Jay Lemke on this topic - probably Across the Scales of Time: Artifacts, Activities, and Meanings in Ecosocial Systems is what I’d go for (there’s a version here). Third is Kevin Leander – I don’t enjoy the theoretical stuff as much as the case study commentary (so, I’d nominate ‘You won’t be needing your laptops today’ which is in Knobel and Lankshear’s New Literacy Sampler). I’d have Lefebvre in, but although I like some of it I can’t make it all work for me. And then, out of the one’s that didn’t make it, there is Barry Wellman. His idea of the movement from the glocal to the networked individual is really based upon changing spaces and time, but I don’t think the theme is really foregounded in his work. Well anyway that’s how I’m thinking about things at this moment in time!

Vertical space

stairwell
I scaled these stairs yesterday afternoon to put the finishing touches to a book chapter on blogging. Somehow, whilst doing this, I realised how much more there is to explore in this particular territory. It’s that familiar tension between taking in the broad sweep of things (the Web 2.0 book will do that) and focusing in on specific new literacy practices. From now on my attention will be on working up the virtual world material for publication…and on that note I’m looking forward to this day conference on virtual worlds in May which looks very interesting. Meanwhile, back at home, renovation work carries on apace with work on all the sash windows and dust everywhere!

Your place from space

bright
I’ve been getting pretty addicted to using Google Maps on my handheld just to see where I am in satellite view (kind of sad, but kind of true). When I’m at home I can zoom in and see a couple of cars parked up outside, but they’re always the same two cars and neither of them is mine. I reckon the satellite data must be a couple of years old at least. Google Street View gives a more detailed view and there are concerns about the level of intrusion (surveillance) that results as this article reports. Meanwhile Jackie draws our attention to the concept of geo-schooling. Here’s Adam Greenfield’s piece on location-based and context-aware education that she refers to.

Nested spaces

new lits (side view)

I borrowed the idea of nested social/communicative spaces from David Barton who talks about nested and chained literacy events. It seemed to me that the idea captured the sense of being simultaneously here and elsewhere, occupying two different interactive spaces at the same time. It strikes me that this is rather different from liminal activity in that the latter is often seen as a disorientating, indeterminate sort of space. Nested spaces are pretty much mainstream, and I suggest that although they are a good way of describing technological-mediated communication they also provide a reasonable account for more traditional forms of partial immersion (book-reading; movie-viewing and so on) where one isn’t exactly in the zone but accessing an alternative reality. Sarah points to Ito and Okabe’s study of Japanese Youth and mobile messaging (here) and the new technosocial spaces that are documented. Some of these seem to me to be examples of nested events. I’m not sure that they are necessarily new - just more pervasive and more persistent.

Virtual bimbo

disk
Well there are virtual spaces and there are virtual spaces. Some are exciting, others rather trivial and then there’s the noxious Miss Bimbo. So, first you Find your own cool place to live; then you Find a fun job to pay for your needs and all the clothes a Bimbo could possibly want. It gets worse...... as you Shop for the latest fashions and become the trendsetting bimbo in town. You can then become a socialite and skyrocket to the top of fame and popularity, and date that famous hottie you've had your eye on and show the Bimbo world the social starlet you are. But wait....... you can (and I quote) Even resort to meds or plastic surgery. Stop at nothing to become the reigning bimbo. Needless to say, this has created a bit of furore. Here’s a report on the watchdog investigation.

Back to Bauman

Black
Thinking about nested spaces and the networked individual made me go back to Bauman's observations about mobiles (in Liquid Love): cell phones signal materially and symbolically, the ultimate liberation from place....the advent of virtual proximity renders human connections simultaneously more frequent and more shallow....telling someone what station they had just left and what station would be next. ..Bauman uses the ideas of being always connected and virtual proximity to argue for the loss of intimacy. I reckon he misses the point. The networked individual has a more fluid sense of location and maybe this is why the communicative space requires updates on geolocation. So participants can imagine where they are. We often see the same behaviour in conversations across time zones. Having already calculated when the best time to call is we'll invariably catch ourselves saying: What time is it there?

Inhabiting the interstitial

bathroom wall
Are we learning to live in the interstices, between here and nearly hear, between now and soon? Thinking in this post about how email appears to insist on a quick response made me recall Stephen Heppell’s piece about inbetweenies. He talks here about time that is nearly now, soon but not later, using the example of txting. I think that email is also in this category. But the inbetween is also about space. As Bauman has observed, with our use of mobile technology we take others with us and we share their space whilst inhabiting a different one. In a way, then, we are here and not here. Virtual world gameplay is a bit like this too. We are here, at our keyboard, embodied; but also, at the same time, we are someone else, somewhere else. Heppell stretches the inbetween concept into other areas looking first at the ownership of the social space, the online spaces that exist inbetween social interaction, and then at the inbetween space between consumption and production. Both of the latter are useful observations, but they have been articulated elsewhere. I found the inbetween time idea more stimulating and that lead to thinking about spaces within spaces (nested spaces).

Byron Review!

floater

The Byron Review’s Final Report has just been released (27th March) and the full text can be downloaded here. The report recognizes the experience and curiosity of children and young people around new media and yet still avoids demonizing the technology. But at the same time it acknowledges the widespread concerns about appropriate material and draws attention to the role of education. In the Executive Summary, the public swimming pool metaphor is used to good effect. It goes like this: Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe – this isn’t just about a top-down approach. Children will be children – pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim.

More tube

Deep cut
We know that Web 2.0 sites are partly defined by their dependence on user content. In this respect YouTube is no different. But as I observed here, it doesn’t really promote participation through linking, indexing and commenting. In fact the connections that YouTube make are more outward facing, ending up in other sites, personal blogs and word of mouth recommendations. If you’re looking for the Flickr of moving image then Vimeo is the answer. You can upload video to share with people and friends via a contacts list…in short it’s more of a networking site, but will it challenge YouTube domination?

Email stress

tow path
Usually I take a positive stance on new communications technology. I think of new channels of communication as being inherently neutral in character, offering different opportunities and choices to users. Reflecting on email, particularly in the way that it is so intensively used in academic and institutional settings, I’ve come to wonder why it contributes to so much work-related stress. Now, of course, it’s not email itself – it’s the way we use email, and the working practices that it supports. I’ve talked to a number of colleagues about this, and watched how they sigh when referring to their inbox, and I’ve watched how people will flick across to their email when working on something else, just to delete irrelevant messages in a desperate bid to keep on top of things. And then there are those of us who obsessively check our mail – before going to bed, on waking up and so on. Here’s a wonderful piece on email apnea that reflects the phenomenon of email stress and even meanders into medical territory. The theme is not new. This article in the Guardian summarized some recent research. I’ve been unable to track down any more from Karen Renaud, but this is a useful introduction. As we approach a bank holiday and the possibility of a few days leave, how many of us will worry about the state of our mailbox on our return? Well, I’m not going to worry about it until I do! In the mean time here are my mail management strategies: try to keep the inbox as empty as possible; delete the obvious junk and reply-to-alls; read it, respond or delete; if it calls for a detailed response, send a holding message; limit the number of times you check your mail each day….And if you’re reading this and wondering what happened to your reply – well, they’re just strategies. Sometimes I forget to use them!

Comic Poetry

I listened to a celebration of comic poet, Hovis Presley over lunch and my first thought was to reach for a YouTube clip which is exactly what I’ve served up today. I’m getting gradually more interested in the YouTube phenomenon as it enters more and more into public discourse and everyday conversation. This blog contrasts the anarchic nature of its archive with the popularity of the entertainment that it provides. Although it doesn’t quite deliver on developing community it certainly gets around – it’s so easy to embed the clips, so quotable and so unlike traditional media.

Focusing on text

sorry
I was here yesterday for the first seminar Theorising the benefits of new technology for youth: Controversies of learning and develop. There was some interesting debate, but I realized that I begin from a different starting point. My interest is in textual production and consumption and I draw theory from that, and apply new perspectives to it…perhaps that is characteristic of a digital literacy approach. I focus on resources, practices and processes of meaning making….So, when Rebekah, as discussant, used text to illustrate some points about framing and performing identity I began to see more clearly what I thought was missing from an otherwise engaging conversation.

Visuals

This was sent by a friend who said I liked the unusual...well, it's an old Sesame Street thing but it's a very visual representation, with animals unaware of the human meanings they're making. Well, the same thing's going on here (don't you just love that lounge music!) trivial, but visually quite interesting.

Voices

RuTube
I was interviewed by Kate Spicer for the Sunday Times on Friday about the feminization of the internet through social networking. OK, so I didn’t get a mention (I’m all right about that), but I still think that the article does a good job of capturing current trends. The main message for me is that although girls and young women seem to be the most prolific producers and consumers this doesn’t translate into financial gain or industry success. This is an interesting aspect of Web 2.0 – it provides a platform for publishing, but the hidden publishers are the one’s who really profit. The rest of us just produce and consume the content.

Views

thirst
It was interesting introducing blogs and wikis to a new group of masters students today. I think Richard and I are getting better at it as it becomes a part of our pedagogy. In the morning people were blogging their reflections in a very natural way. There are clearly a range of views about the value of thinking-through-writing, but I'm really keen on it! At one point the room went very quiet as people started making comments on each other's blogs. I found myself replying to one with a link to this Marshall McLuhan site. The afternoon had a different flavour, with an introduction to wiki building. I was interested in the way the peer-to-peer technical support was mixed in with the content stuff. So often we teach skills and then expect learners to apply them. This seems a much better model, in which one kind of learning is folded in with another.

Vernacular

no entry #2
I gave a seminar here today called Logged on: doing literacy in a virtual world, in which I talked about the Barnsborough project. I’ve noticed that when I do this it’s the unconventional nature of synchronous chat that usually captures most attention. Spelling and punctuation are sensitive issues with educators. I suppose we’re all caught in a double bind here, recognising that language and literacy change but also that policing the language, holding notions of correctness, and maintaining standards go with the job. Digital literacy brings this to the fore. I have one extract where children are playing hide and seek and one writes - gis sum clus wire yu ar – quite unselfconciously written as it would be spoken in South Yorkshire. There’s not only the issue of non-standard spelling here, but also all the issues around accent and dialect. I’m reminded of this (from 2006), which suggested that text-language might actually be helpful, but also all the argument for allowing vernacular language in school where it is appropriate. Where would it be more appropriate than in informal chat?

Changing mediascape

awareness
Today’s report on the 2008 Digital Entertainment Survey makes interesting reading. To say that: Homework is threatened by social networking, as the Guardian does, is bound to attract a bit of interest and a bit of complaint. But hidden beneath the headlines is some interesting information on media trends. For instance, over 60% of the under 25s regularly use social networking sites; most youngsters tend to fast forward through adverts; and the interest in on-demand programming is potentially huge. Social networking sites for content delivery are attractive with over 1 in 4 seeing the benefit of being able to chat with others or interact with the content as it is being streamed. Not so surprising is the age factor in online behaviour - 55% of males aged 15 to 19 regularly browse social-networking sites, only 13% of 45-to-54-year-old – are you surprised? The full report should be here, but I can’t find it.

Autism in Second Life

This video presents some of the key issues for autism activists, showing the tensions between the medical model and the social model in everyday terms. But it also highlights how new technology – specifically the internet can be a powerful tool for such groups. Amanda Baggs has taken the Autism Liberation Front into Second Life, representing her everyday behaviours in virtual space….this is fascinating: why choose to be other than you are?