The immediacy effect

The third of the three characteristics of microblogging is the immediacy effect. What you're doing, thinking or linking to now is what is important in the Twittersphere; not what you did, said or thought yesterday. The archive is largely irrelevant as the regular feeds from your friends becomes liquid modern communication. Distance and separation appear to be conquered by technology, driven along by the impatience to accelerate, to live in the nearly now. This is what can make microblogging compulsive as well as what appears to keep social networks live.

Materiality and microblogging

So this is number two in a list of three. It's the materiality of devices. I’m drawing a bit on Daniel Miller here, who underlines the significance of material objects in cultural life. When we start thinking of web-based communication we very often get seduced by the virtual spaces that are created and forget the very basic nature of the material objects we use. As these become woven into everyday life they become normalised to the extent that they are almost rendered invisible. So today at the British Academy, the audience was connected in a variety of ways. Most notable of these ways seemed to be the presence of i-phones and Blackberrys, used to enter the Twitter backchannel and do other sorts of work, too. Handheld and discreet we are left to our own devices, but yet the devices we have (own) and their affordances are central to mobile microblogging.

Ambient sociability

Well, this is a revision in the light of Twitter feedback on the idea of ambient intimacy (see yesterday). Although one or two liked the idea, others felt that intimacy over-stated the case or over-emphasised the phatic. So, instead I'm going for ambient sociability instead. Ambience seems to catch the sense of lightweight contact that typifies microblogging, and sociability leaves it open to both the level of friendship and the sort of exchanges that are transacted. Ambient sociability can now become the first of the three. On its own its not enough though, because you can achieve this through mobile messaging and even through regular text exchanges. OK, this is theory-building in action and many thanks for the feedback (tweetback?)

Thoughts on microblogging

First reflections nearly always seem to come in threes for me. I wonder what this means? Anyway, these three continue a thread that’s been running through recent posts on microblogging. So I’m suggesting that the key features of microblogging are: ambient intimacy; the materiality of devices and the immediacy effect. First, ambient intimacy, a term borrowed from Leisa Reichelt, who uses it, at least in part, to describe an ongoing lightweight communication between networked friends. Second, the materiality of devices seems important because it is the way in which we carry our connections with us or access them from static interfaces. Basically microblogging has to be dependent on a mediating object, and as these become more available and more portable this kind of social networking gets easier. Finally the immediacy effect is the other ingredient in that equation of remote presence. In microblogging, what seems most important is what is going on now (or nearly now), not what is archived from yesterday. Of course tweeting between timezones or from locations with dodgy signals tends to disrupt this, but the immediacy effect is my attempt to try to grapple with the perceived focus being on the most recent comments.

Ask the youth

I notice that the NFER are just about set to complete work on children and young people's views on Web 2.0 technologies (link). The project aims to gather young people's views about Web 2.0 technologies, particularly how social work educators and practitioners could best engage and support them in the use of such 'new media' technologies. An interesting slant, and another part of the frantic rush to ask kids what they’re up to and what they think about it. We seem to be entering into a new phase of Web 2.0 research, moving beyond the definitions, trends and potentials and approaching the description of practices. But I think there’s still a way to go on this from the methodological and theoretical points of view. Note here, the NFER work is based on focus groups.

Academics and social media

In this report we get a glimpse of the role that social media like Twitter could or perhaps already play in academic life. The THES reports that 'In September, the RIN will publish a paper that it hopes will shed light on how online technologies such as Twitter can be incorporated into academic research.' That will be worth looking out for. In my work, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between technology and social networks, taking the view that social networking is a good way of describing the patterning of our everyday relationships. The older communicative technologies (associated with postal services and telephone networks) allowed us to sustain and thicken existing social ties. But they also ushered in some innovations like the letter of introduction, cold-calling, as well as mailshots and telesales. SNSs seem to follow this trend, building on existing practices and then, by the ways in which we imagine their possibilities, creating new or augmented ones. So academics operating in SNSs seem to be able to find people with similar interests and then start trading the ideas, references, links that capture their attention. So what’s new? Mostly speed and simplicity. Then perhaps there’s some other interesting peripheral phenomena like the blurring of the personal and professional, the seemingly random juxtaposition of threads, and of course the effects of the telegraphese or haiku form that is created in an environment like Twitter. Might some of these forms spill over into face-to-face work? Conference papers that last for two minutes, for example?

Social networks

I've been thinking about SNSs and the way in which boyd and Ellison (2008) anchor their definition to three core characteristics. 1. Individual users or members construct a public or semi-public profile on the site 2. Users/members create and list connections with others (friends, followers or buddies) 3.Users/members traverse the site through their own and others’ friendlists. These characteristics are shared with other environments which may not focus on friendship quite so explicitly (Blogger and similar applications come to mind), but the emphasis on presence, connection and community has got to be central to an understanding of social networking sites. But something's missing and that something is to do with acting upon each other, sharing and building understandings, playfulness and the creative juxtaposition of ideas.

Remixing Mario

I really enjoyed this, a great juxtaposition of a classic platform game and the wistful-sounding Mountain Goats and Kaki King. Remix or mash-up? Maybe it's an artificial distinction but I tend to see this sort of thing as a remix as opposed to a software mash-up, such as the Twitter Fountain featured below. Am I inventing a distinction that doesn't really exist? That's not clear, but I suppose the first is about working and reworking the media, whereas the latter is reworking the code. Not better, just different. Any thoughts?

Cloud cuckoo land?

I read this in the blurb for the latest New Horizon Report and it seemed to explain something I've been writing about for a while in a much clearer way than I've ever done! It goes "Traditionally, a learning environment has been a physical space, but the idea of what constitutes a learning environment is changing. The "spaces" where students learn are becoming more community-driven, interdisciplinary, and supported by technologies that engage virtual communication and collaboration. This changing concept of the learning environment has clear implications for schools, where learning is the key focus of the space." Seeing it succinctly put by someone else offers a bit of reflective distance. So I found myself wondering about the key underlying assumptions. Firstly, that students are all learning in these ways (and who that "all" really is) and secondly, that if its true, education has to take it on board. Like the authors of the report I'm excited by learning through the new literacies of emerging technology, but have to admit that it's an agenda. The New Horzon Report looks at emerging technologies for the K-12 age range, and so it is refreshingly school-focused. The pdf is here. I recommend it; and also it gives a good definition of cloud computing which I've never really understood!

Facebook Strategies For The Classroom

Digging around for educational uses of Facebook, I found this which is quite interesting, particularly in the later slides. I liked the reference to Leisa Reichelt's ambient intimacy (but not sure whether I agree). I also liked the mapping of different kinds of spaces which you can find on Flickr. And, oh dear, I just missed a deadline and that's something I hate doing. But then again I reckon 24 hrs late is more or less OK!

Facebook Strategies For The Classroom

View more presentations from Kevin Lim.

Twitter ye not?

As Twitter makes more inroads into my professional and social networks I've become interested in two different phenomena. The first is about the silences, particularly those periods in the day when those I'm following go quiet. What has distracted them? What is it that they are not tweeting? The second is in part provoked by Rebekkah's idea of the "refuseniks". Those who don't want to. A colleague spoke about this today, referring to it as the invasion of trivia. I don't want to know. What's interesting is that I do! And what informs those choices. Whether you Twitter or not, my own Twitter Fountain should display above (I hope!).

Tweety?

Just before checking out of the hotel in Nijmegen I wanted to archive two of the interesting things I've discovered. One is a mash-up which displays a scrolling Twitter-feed over the top of tagged images in Flickr, and it's called Twitter Fountain (see above). A great way of capturing and making public conference back channeling. The other is a Twitter app which allows you to create a closed community in a business or educational setting. That's called Yammer. Although I'm never to sure about closed systems I'm sure they can be very useful, and important in some contexts.

Social networking/education

I’m starting to write a bit about young people’s use of social networking sites, and working on the idea that there are three kinds of activity that are relevant to educators and educational settings. The first of these is to learn about them and their role in learners’ lives; doing this is an essential part of that crucial work of understanding the worlds that our students inhabit and recognising the knowledge, skills and dispositions that are involved as social and cultural capital. The second is to learn from them, in order to appreciate the kinds of social interaction and informal learning SNSs can support, and as a result to reflect upon and refresh our own pedagogies and designs for learning, whether or not these involve new technologies. The third and final area of activity is to learn with them, and by this I mean to focus in a critical way on the literacy practices that are developing in and around social networking, as well as the identities that are produced and performed through the various acts of multimodal and collaborative textual composition.

Get a copy!

Here a shopper browses for a good read at the bookshop in San Diego. Mmm what about the Web 2.0 book? The music-sharing chapter is interesting. We enjoyed writing that partly, I suspect, because it was an area we hadn’t given much thought to before. All those issues about ownership copyright, and distribution are fascinating. I don’t think we use the word piracy and that’s good because, as this article rightly points out, RL pirates steal by force and acts of violence not just by sneaking a copy. As I’ve observed before, the whole area of copying is interesting in its own right. The social order depends on when, what and how much is appropriate to copy. This is true of fashion, essay-writing, music and speech to name but a few instances. To get by you need to copy in socially approved and regulated ways. Selling fake designer goods, plagiarism and illegal copying can get us into trouble. Style, quotation and cover versions can earn us plenty of approval. And then of course we freely redistribute stuff as part of the circulation of cultural goods. So Emma recommended Jazztronik via this YouTube video. I’ll raise that with Far Too Loud (not so commercial, but also on YouTube!).

It all started with the biro...

At first glance the Steer Report on learning behaviour (and there’s an interesting phrase) seems very worthy. New technology gets a look in: whiteboards are good, mobile phones useful for surveillance, cyberbullying an ongoing concern etc etc. There are also recommendations for more training for teachers. So let’s hope this doesn’t get oversimplified as ways to pacify unruly kids. But all in all it’s not as bad as the media headlines which started off by drawing our attention to ‘disciplinary measures such as forbidding pupils to doodle on books and folders and refusing to mark their work unless it has been written with a fountain pen’. If that’s how to promote learning behaviour then higher education is doomed.

Bandwagon or hearse?

The new Curriculum and Teaching Innovation handbook (pdf) from Futurelab provides a useful overview of some of the changes and debates that are currently circulating. Following on the Department of Innovation Universities and Skills publication Innovation Nation, it seems that there’s now some scope to rethink things, albeit along certain lines. I still have my Harris, Lawn and Prescott (1975) and wonder how the debate has changed in 34 years. The contextual details have obviously shifted but I get the sense that the basic questions are more or less the same. It would make an interesting historical study, but not one I’m likely to embark upon.

Web 2.0 for Schools

Well,the books out. It gets launched at AERA, but I won't really believe it till I'm holding it! That's interesting when so much I do and write is virtual, that there's still something about the book as a material object that holds the weight of significance. I know one friend remarked that a book on Web 2.0 is almost a contradiction in terms. Partly true I suspect. Also there's that strange phenomenon when you write about this sort of stuff that some of it is out of date before it gets out! But I'm confident that most of what is in the book is still current, and that the connections between new literacies and learning through participation remain valid. So alongside this I have a couple of book chapters making their way into print. These will be followed by some work on teens and SNSs which probably won't see the light of day until 2010. And then I have an idea for a solo book venture, so watch this space; and of course in the mean time order a copy of Web 2.0 for Schools: Learning and Social Participation (Davies & Merchant, 2009)!

G20 literacies

Perhaps London’s G20 protest was a little unfocused and, of course, carefully policed but I was struck by the ways in which digital literacy practices were never far away. Some news sites had video footage up soon after the events themselves, mobile technology was much in evidence and there were Twitter feeds to follow the protest. In the TV news of police kettling that I saw, protesters’ cameras were very much in evidence. Why some groups favoured chalk instead of spraypaint to make their point seems curiously anachronistic. The Bishopsgate flash camp stole the headlines: it was well-coordinated and mostly good-natured. Don’t we all feel a little more at home with climate protest?

Pickings

Institutional politics. These games seem to be absorbing ever larger amounts of my time, so I notice my blog posts flagging and my tweets per day slowing down. But I’m pleased to be building up the pace on the social networking research with teens and teachers, and as often is the case, I’m getting up with lots of new stuff. Here’s Anica’s student Ning space, looks really great (particularly now she’s working on Macedonian translations of some of the video material). And here’s Angela Thomas’s work on virtual worlds (as well as a good post on Twitter). And by the way, do you like the man in the tree?

Appetiser

I think the Literacy and Identity Special Issue (of Literacy) is going to be really good. Victoria and I have been working hard, and we've got a good range of papers with a strong international feel to them. When that's done I have to turn full attention to the research on teens and social networking, but that's already shaping up nicely. On the other hand the digital literacies debate I've been blogging about ended up coming to nothing. Well by that I mean nothing for me, because work's firewall prevents me from accessing externally hosted Elluminate sessions. Not very digitally literate. But then I wasn't too upset, because I saw it was to be kicked off by two leading "edtech activists". Now there's a term to juggle with. What springs to mind? Fast-talking men? I don't know, I couldn't connect. But maybe I'll get another bite of the cherry; that or choose some other fruit.

Not amused?

We are not amused? The Twitterati were bursting their character walls yesterday reporting about the latest shake-up of the primary curriculum. Best of the headlines was the Telegraph with their Primary School Children Must Learn Twitter But Not Victorians, with a worthy and wordy reaction from readers. It must be a good thing that Rose is reporting on the importance of new technology in general, and digital literacies in particular. The detail, and the question of how it gets interpreted will be an interesting site for research, particularly since some of us involved in these debates often find it hard to agree! Having said that, I have a sneaking suspicion that just as long as something remains contentious it has a certain dynamism. Perhaps questioning what we think, and turning our assumptions into questions is the most useful thing we can do. Meanwhile will the educational publishers be asking people to write guides on how to do Twitter in Year 4? Well, as a matter of fact they have already been asking those questions. The commercial foot is certainly well past the door of the classroom whether it carries exercise books and handwriting pens, IWBs or VLEs.

Transnational

This is a wonderful photograph of one of our administrators on the Masters programme here in Sheffield. She was born in Beijing, and here she is trying on a sombrero in Mexico! For me its an image of the upside of the transnational. But having recently spent some time in Cambodia, the Channel 4 documentary on forced evictions in Phnom Penh brought home the downside. We saw the poverty of Dey Krahorm when we were there, but we didn’t see the background. Foreign investors cashing in on the growth of tourism seem to be in league with officials in moving the poor out of view. Violent struggle is not uncommon. Welcome to the cruel world as Ben Harper used to say.

Digital literacies

Watching an interesting debate on digital literacies taking place here. As you can see it’s in wet paint and I think I’ve already stepped in a can and left my footprints all over it! I sense some frustration about definitions. Several positions emerge. One we all agree what we mean, so let’s move on. Two we’ll never agree, so let’s move on and do something anyway. Three if we don’t know what we mean how can we move on. I suppose the other option is to ditch the term altogether and actually I think that’s been suggested, but if it’s called digital literacy/ digital literacies in the first place that presents a bit of a challenge. Interestingly, the proofs of Vic and Muriel’s book arrived today. I thought it was called Contentious Literacies, but now I see its titled Digital Literacies. So there’s something to look out for!

Who is Billy Nomates?

Identity preoccupies me again! And this expression Billy Nomates is intriguing because it suggests social isolation, or social exclusion, or even the negation of the self. I felt like Billy Nomates sounds as if I was unfriended, defriended or even unfriendable. I suggest that something like I didn’t know anyone or I was the only person there might be a kinder description. OK so I’ve fallen under the spell of Holstein and Gubrium. I am not what I thought I was. I am obliged to ‘suspend belief in the real in order to bring into view the everyday practices by which events, objects, and subjects come to have a sense of being real’ (p 97). Gulp! I am Billy.

It's nearly now again

I know over the last few weeks I’ve become a bit preoccupied with Twitter and when someone last Thursday reminded me of Heppel’s idea that the nearly now provides a space for reflection, my interest was rekindled. Reflection in action needs a space. A fleeting moment to capture the thought as it occurs; a space in which to take the backward step; to render the familiar strange. This space isn’t exactly provided by Twitter, a blog, a post-it, or any other kind of technology but the technology certainly comes in handy. So although some commentators are keen to split hairs, and muddy the water with other ideas, we already know that space and time look different in virtual environments, and those who are really interested in learning need to be creative in their engagement with new spaces for learning. Is it now again, yet?

What's on your mind?

The Facebook makeover successfully manages to keep social networking in the news and even in the papers! I’ve recently been thinking about the Twitter prompt, what are you doing, and the particular challenges of working in the 140 character economy. Some people do take the what are you doing prompt seriously, but most of those I’m following make no concession at all to this, unless you count some of the weird things they say, their twitpics, and the urls as kinds of doing. On the other hand the 140 characters is standard, and I’ve been intrigued by the reflective subtleties than can be shoehorned into that form. So maybe the prompt is irrelevant. Facebook, amongst other changes, have altered their prompt so it now asks what’s on your mind. A bit like a counsellor, who’s always there each day, or how often you go to the site, with the same persistent curiosity. What’s on your mind? Does this change the Facebook environment from being an action-orientated account of people’s lives and parties into a more introspective or even reflective space? Somehow I don’t think so. But then it all depends on what you have in mind.

Machines/ technologies?

If books really are machines for thinking and learning, as Umberto Eco once wrote, then the success of the Amazon Kindle suggests the possibility of something rather like mobile learning. And now that you can get a Kindle reader on your iPhone, eReading could become much more widespread. That opens up some new possibilities. My first reaction to reading this news was to wonder about the separation of reading and writing (not ever having used a Kindle I am imagining that there is no writing function). A great deal of my reading, particularly my reading for learning is done with a word processor or pen at hand. I suppose my ideal mobile gadget would be light, with a size somewhere in between a smartphone and small laptop, and have all the possibilities that a good laptop holds.

Break-in tweets

For some unknown reason I was quite excited to find Twitter over capacity this morning. It was almost as if my small tweet was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Probably not true at all. And then this afternoon I came across this story of someone tweeting a burglary! It could be the start of a media avalanche, as new moral panics break out: obese tweeters, criminal rings on Twitter, sex tweets, Twitter predators and suicide tweets. I hope not. But as groups of us experiment in using this service for our own purposes (narrow concerns?) the idea of inline tagging, the so-called hashtags, becomes an increasingly attractive option for filtering out and filtering in to your timeline. I’ve already removed one or two people, just because their tweets don’t interest me, and I’m open to finding new people whose tweets might be music to my ears.

Attention seeking?

Howard Rheingold, an old hippy? I found myself distracted by the trees blowing in the wind outside his porch. And then I checked my Blackberry for Twitter updates. So I guess that all constitutes absent presence or maybe multitasking, which being male I’m supposed to be rather bad at. His musings reminded me of Lanham’s notions of the attention economy which Colin and Michele have used so effectively in their work. But somehow in this whole area there’s something really fundamental about learners and learning. If learning is an act of communication (see yesterday’s post), then interest and some sort of selective attention is a precondition. In my work I use the term attentive noticing to try to capture this. Gunther Kress has also started talking about this and makes the interesting observation that the learner’s interest doesn’t always (or hardly ever does) coincide with pedagogical intentions. So are learning and teaching really loose-coupled? And is assessment, the recognition of learning, the tie that institutions use in attempts to bind together learning and teaching as if to jealously preserve the illusion that unruly subjects are harmoniously working towards a common shared goal?

Learn mobile, learn!

I’ve been reading John Traxler’s piece on mobile learning. Becta describes these articles on emerging technologies as research reports, but they are not. Should we leave them to their own devices is really a thought-provoking essay that recycles some ideas and develops others. A strong feature of Traxler’s paper is the wristwatch analogy. But the comparison of the wristwatch with newer portable digital devices also highlights a weakness in the argument. A watch is essentially a portable information device which is of course very useful in co-ordinating our social interactions; on the other hand a mobile phone develops this by adding one-to-one communication, and now many-to-many communication, again very useful in co-ordinating and enacting social interactions. But is the mobile a learning device? Is the watch a learning device? I think Traxler confuses information and communication with learning. Of course learning arises out of communication; but it is not the same thing as communication. Similarly knowledge cannot simply be described as content. So, the real issue continues to be one of how digital communication can be utilised to develop learning. Mobile or static, we need a pedagogy that includes the digital or else we are just grasping at straws

Bereavement

My mother died on Friday after a two week battle with pneumonia. I was with her at the time and am feeling relieved that any suffering or discomfort is now over. I think she lived a good life, and she gave me an enormous amount that has served me well. Amongst those gifts are a sense of mischief with a good-humoured enjoyment of life; an intense intellectual curiosity; a love of the arts; and an enduring suspicion of social institutions and conventions. There's a lot more too, that will live on. Funnily enough there is a whole lexicon to describe the feelings, processes and events that surround death and being that sort, like my mother, my first port of call was the etymological dictionary! I found bereavement along with all those other lovely-sounding words that have the be- prefix. The Germanic origins of 'reave' seem to be about robbing, which implies a hidden (secret?) agent that neither I nor the deceased (another technical term) would be comfortable with. All this terminology seems to distance us from the actual events. A familiar story?

OK - text

It’s always encouraging to see researchers from different disciplines engaging with similar issues. My own work (2001) suggested that the emerging conventions of text-messaging indicated a high level of facility with written language and a particular sensitivity to grapho-phonemic elements. Plester’s research in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology (here) suggests a strong relationship between texting and literacy development. It begs the question of whether texting improves literacy or whether texters just happen to be better at literacy. Elsewhere it is being suggested that phonologically-based abbreviations are processed quickly, but that the more creative textings, such as gr8 slow you down. Is that a bit like reading car number plates?

Identity online

I was at this seminar series yesterday at the fabulous New Academic Building on Kingsway, London. I must say that I found the papers on identity mostly uninspiring. I wanted more on the fluidity of online identity performance; more critique of agency and more complexity! Rebekah’s paper was the exception, and I do hope all those methodological questions about who’s representing who in teen SNS research continue to be debated. I’ve been thinking that trying to decide whether technology influences youth or youth influences technology has become a bit pointless. What does interest me is how SNSs seem to be troubling traditional generational divisions. Some things change; but others stay the same as this site, myparentsjoinedfacebook, underlines.

Recency

My blog-posting seems to have suffered with the rise of microblogging. Interesting because Twitter makes you do rather different things, as you are caught in the act of reflecting, engaged in trivia, or ending up in strange places (Robin Hood Airport in my case). So it is lightweight in several senses of the word. Portable, and often more ephemeral, the tweets are less polished and often (but not always) less weighty. This could be a good thing! At the same time the increased interactivity makes it rather more compulsive as you do a quick check to see who's doing what, who's replied to your quip and so on. I've also just discovered that there's a whole host of Twitter-related stuff around. Such as the endlessly diverting whosetweet, to twisten.fm amd of course everythingtwitter. Anyway, must dash off and tweet!

Social ties

I've been investigating what it's like to keep up with my friends in what Mimi Ito describes as lightweight contact. Using mobile messaging and microblogging you end up with some rather portable friends who are doing their own thing in ways which interweave with your own everyday activities. As in more traditional forms of networking there seems to be an fluidity and an aggregation of communication, and something more substantial may emerge from that. I guess that's the sense in this post about the social web. Twitter's microblogging service, like Facebook prompts you to talk about the everyday in terms of what you are doing, giving you a semantic frame. But this is easy to subvert as friends tweet about the sites they're looking at, the projects they have in mind, and their more abstract musings. In a way, I suppose, these too are kinds of doing; kinds of doing, or ways of knowing, that form social ties in the particular kinds of networks we are anchored to.

Participation and active consumption

Today this wonderful visual ethnography book arrived from Hong Kong, along with a beautiful card (thank you so much, Alice). It all played in so well with the James Farrer article that I mentioned in Friday's post, because the bar staff in Eric Ma and Ducky's work are using a public space to perform versions of a modern Chinese identity that recontextualise a global practice. The same happens in Farrer's account of the disco culture of Shanghai and elsehwere. Farrer's account is subtle in that it shows the stratification and differential participation that arises in the marketisation of China. There's also an interesting critique of Appadurai's notion of flows. Farrer argues that the metaphor implies that there are no obstacles or boundaries, whereas the disco work shows there are. What an interesting diversion!

It's not about anything really

Roots Manuva returns to school to rewrite his identity as someone who might just be described as an exponent of British conscious rap. There’s an intriguing bit at the end where Roots says 'That school gave me so much really. It’s not about.' And then the fade out, but you can just hear 'It’s not about anything really'. So after a whole day on Wednesday re-examining the resistance through rituals material (John Clarke was excellent), this could just be the postmodern response. Anoop Nayak however has a more sophisticated stance on youth, and an interest in the reworking of global narratives in local contexts. I must have been inspired because I went right off and looked up Farrer’s paper, Disco Super-Culture: Consuming Sex in the Chinese Disco, but I won’t be reading it till Saturday evening! Is that the kind of thing that professors do?

Anticipated identities

Reading Karen Wohlwend's wonderfully-titled Damsels in Discourse in RRQ, I remain uneasy with the idea that identity positions are inscribed in material objects (such as toys). Yes, identity is born out of expressive practices such as play. We perform identity through play and the narratives of play are at least partially produced for us by wider discourses. But these narratives are not inscribed in the objects themselves.

Eyebrow meme

Parody, meme or both? I’m not quite sure which, but this is RinaKristia’s eyebrow dancing. The sisters’ version is arguably better than the original Cadbury’s chocolate version (here). Consumers of popular culture become producers of popular culture; but then making your own chocolate is a lot harder to pull off. So maybe that’s the deeper message that lies behind Colin and Michele’s coffee producing videos. Think about it!

Dr Sheng

Jing Sheng's fascinating study of the literacy practices of Chinese migrants in the North of England adds to our understanding of how identity and literacy intersect in glocalised contexts. These telling stories show, for me, how identity is performed as well as called into being. Her research participants show and tell us how they use an array of cultural artefacts in multiple social networks to provide an account of themselves. To say much more would be to steal Jing's thunder, as I'm sure she is already making plans to publish. Jing is now working at Capital Normal University in Beijing. I hope her employers recognise her strengths. Can this, I wonder be read in China?

E-luminated

Inclement weather held me captive in my own home last week and scheduled teaching was rerouted as we hurriedly decamped into cyberspace. And that was my first experience of Elluminate which kept me engaged for a good three hours. Apart from showing a screen that looks a bit like a primitive softsynth, I was impressed by the way that it integrates a number of modes of communication. Having said that I think I prefer the illusion of embodiment that virtual worlds can provide. You also get loads of that Eurovision Song Contest stuff: I can hear you, can you hear me? No we can see you but we can't hear you, how about everyone else? No, I've just lost you. And so the medium ends up blanking out the message. But, if and when that's all sorted, and you're in a shared communicative space, it must be possible, at least possible, to learn ,assuming the design is reasonably all right. What excites me is that the participants are distributed and the immediate presence of the institution is erased. The learning is not location specific and the communication is person to person and sometimes many to many. Sounds OK. Let's see how it goes.

Developing your apps

With the wildfire spread of Facebook, the idea of getting or running new apps has entered into everyday discourse. Developers have for a while realized that allowing people to create their own material can enrich the core product. Harnessing the creativity that has driven the open source movement has been important to the evolution of services like Flickr and Blogger. Although I've never met anybody who has devised a successful app, there must be plenty of them judging by the rapid innovation and dissemination of their hard work. So Apple made a smart move by allowing this kind of devlopment with the iphone. The very cheap ocarina app by smule is a classic example. It turns your phone into a musical instrument. If that was all, you might say 'so what'; but by harnessing the phone's GPRS, you can listen to other ocarina playing on a global scale. I think that's both frivolous and deeply significant. Whatever will they come up with next?

Digital Provenance

In Spook Country, William Gibson talks about the connections being more important than the content. I don’t really pretend to understand what he’s getting at although I am struck by the resonance with social rather than informational technology. But it did occur to me that digital artefacts do make some interesting crossings. Take the picture of Ruth I posted before. It’s a self-shot taken on her Blackberry and sent to me through messenger. I bluetoothed it from my phone on to my laptop, and uploaded it to Flickr. Next day I posted it in my blog and there it is, each time re-contextualised and there, ready to be changed again. Replay and remix are not, as we know, particularly new but they are certainly more commonplace in new technology.

Hospital

Ruth patient

I quite often get people saying that they appreciate the way in which I post daily. Thanks, if you are amongst that number! The only trouble with that is that I feel that I might need to apologise when I don’t. Actually I often miss and I never apologise. But this week seems different. On Tuesday my mother was taken ill and subsequently hospitalised and on Wednesday evening my daughter was knocked over in a hit and run in East London. Mother’s still not well, but Ruth (see picture) is on the mend. Not surprisingly then, there’s little else to report. OK, so I did see in Reading Today that they have some material on Web 2.0. I looked at the site, but I could only see this about wikis on protest songs .The times they are a changing: slowly.

Zeitgeist

From time to time I really enjoy reading William Gibson. He always seems to capture the zeitgeist. In Spook Country, Bobby Chombo says ‘That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery’, and then ‘there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction.’ So true, so true. And then back in the real world you can read danah boyd’s doctoral study here not that I have been, but it’s nice to know I can - and that her ethnographic study of teenagers’ social networking also captures the zeitgeist.

Media storm

It’s been snowing for about four hours now, and the road outside is a slushy mess. For once the forecasters were right. They’ve been telling us since Friday that we’re in for Big Snow. We were so well warned that it changed our experience of Saturday and Sunday until it became a weekend of waiting for the snow. Still there’s something quite special about being snowbound in a place when it so rarely happens. I hope you get the picture, it’s Amy Winehouse (courtesy of Emma and Ruth).

Where's Hill at?

Children's literature isn't normally something that gets a look in on this blog. You could probably guess why. But in the process of looking around for Web2.0 material that is related in some way to formal education, I found this little gem. It's Eric Hill's contagious ebullience that really bowls me over. That, and the fact that he is decidedly unteacherly about the whole thing as he describes how he experimented with interactivity and modality in those famous Spot books. But where is Spot in the digital age, or has he gone virtual - that's what I want to know.

Flash mob futures

Rush hour Phnom Penh 1
Back in November I wrote a critique of Rheingold’s flash mobs and the whole idea of direct action mediated by new technology. I argued that it is hard to see how impromptu i-pod parties at Paddington Station or smart mob swarms in sofa shops fit into this vision. I suggested that they might constitute performance art or collective play, and certainly heralded a new kind of social participation, but weren’t so likely to transform society in any radical way. The French activist movement L’Appel et Le Pioche has just proved me wrong. You can read about spontaneous picnic parties in supermarkets here (their French blog) and the English press commentary here. Sounds great, but are things about change?

KTV as new literacy

Mr Leang
Just for distraction, on those long bumpy coach journeys in Cambodia, you get plenty of Karaoke TV. This is mostly Khmer or SE Asian pop with subtitled words. The words, in true KTV style, are highlighted more or less in synch with the vocals, so you can sing along if you want to. But nobody does; at least, not on a public bus. But it just struck me that this is a powerful new technologically-mediated literacy practice, and not just a distraction.

Kawaii!

Kawai
Hey, I'm the proud owner of 284 of these personalised Snoopy stickers! This all started when I expressed interest in a sort of Kawaii thing that was going on with the Taiwanese students I was teaching a few years back.... and then I just received this delightful seasonal message along with the stickers. Lungshing is the company that does them (along with all sorts of Sanrio stuff). Maybe someone should look at the use of stickers and stationery in literacy practices, after all there's identity performance, multimodality, popular culture and stuff, what more could you want?

New Literacies

Many thanks to Martin for pointing me to this video on YouTube which puts across familiar messages but makes more specific reference to younger children. These videos really pick up the heartbeat of new literacies. From another point of view here's Colin and Michele writing in a really interesting way about the writing of New Literacies. It's like a hall of mirrors, sometimes!

Back to work

Feather duster man
So it's back to the old routines again, and things are rolling along as usual. The Web 2.0 book is one stage nearer to publication and my piece Literacy in Virtual Worlds is now available here. Things are looking good for an exciting Special Edition co-edited by me and Vic Carrington (in this journal) and there are a couple of other exciting ventures in the pipeline. Watch this space!

Phnom Penh

After a long boat journey from Chau Doc we made it back to Phnom Penh, where it's hot and muggy. Spent the afternoon hanging out with the monkeys at Phnom Wat - that's about the quietest place out of the continual noise of the motorbikes! Tomorrow we'll be on the road again, heading down to the sea at Sihanoukville by air-conditioned coach. This is a four hour journey, although judging by how things run here it could be anything up to six hours. You always have to be on time at the start of the journey but it never quite works out to plan by the time you reach your destination. Still I'm not complaining, at least it beats the day job. May post from Sihanoukville, hope to have some original pics by then!

Sorry I forgot!

In the rush to get away just after Christmas, I forgot to announce a short break in my posting activity! So this is stolen picture of where I am at the moment, a shot over the rooftops of Chau Doc in Vietnam. It's great to be able to have a break and get a taste of what it is like on the Mekong delta, and I have to say it's rather different to Sheffield. For a start it's pretty warm; there's more motorbikes and bicycles than cars; and the standard of living is pretty low. Having said that you can still buy flat screen TVs and mobile phones! Yesterday I saw European tourists photographing Vitenamese kids on their digital cameras. The kids were fascinated to see their own images, pulling faces, making v signs and so on. This morning, outside the hotel in Chau Doc the situation was reversed as a Vietnamese teenager came up to a young German family and took pics on their mobile phones! Tomorrow we'll get the boat up to Phnom Penh and from their down to Sihanoukville. No promises about regular postings, but a normal service will be resumed mid January!

Virtual bowling

We've been having a bowling competition on Robbie's Wii. Spending a little time making our Mii avatars makes all the difference as the screen gets populated by our alter-egos. It actually begins to create a bit of a virtual space and certainly increases the level of identification with what's happening out there/ in the screen or wherever. I also discovered that you can download software to enhance your Mii design or (less adventurously, really) you can practice your design-craft. Interesting how working through options on multiple templates can begin to create an impression of personalisation. It's the sort of effect that must be explained by a mathematical formula.

Multiples

Lower Level 2

If you've ever had anything to do with literacies, you can't fail to be struck by the dense textual environment of Hong Kong. It's a sort of junction of so many linguistic crossings. When I hear the term multiliteracies it always brings to mind that order of richness of different practices, in different media and in different places. A kind of multidimensional diversity. This diversity seems to me to be shape of the future (or is it the present?). So it's very good to see Martin Waller launching his Multiliteracies Learning Initiative with a well designed space here. I hope this work continues to thrive!

Take five

Don't think just work

Well, it's time for a nostalgic sort of post. Time because this old blog is now five years old. And in that time it's become a part of my life as I construct this fluid and rhizomic text that weaves in and out of other spaces. Sometimes I surprise myself; sometimes I'm embarrassed. And when there's time I blog about the process over here. More than anything though it provides me with a space to give voice to some of the things that interest me, and some of those things become themes that I pick up in my published work. Other things are more transient. Dead ends leading nowhere. As bloggers come and go, vary in their posting habits, become intermittent or give up all together, I seem to carry on regardless. I must be a born blogger!

Lost in translation

So, after yesterday’s post and in the interest of balance, here’s the Hong Kong duo Fama. Now is that indie, or canto-indie? I’m no longer certain, but I suppose the danger of reporting on cultural hybridity is the danger that in translation you create the exotic. Now to me Fama seem more MOR, but maybe their message is more authentic, or is it just matters of taste that give Alice bad dreams? The more I wonder, the less I know.

Hong Kong rap

One of the most fascinating papers at Hong Kong Pop was Angel Lin’s sociolinguistic study of local hip-hop artist MC Yan. Fascinating because of the ways in which local artists work with (or appropriate) global trends and genres to fashion new cultural forms. MC Yan uses chou hau the unofficial language of the street to make strong statements, remixing familiar rhythms in his conscious rap. Watch the video!

Participation (again)

weight

I finally made it to Hong Kong after getting stranded in Paris with bad weather. If I get a good night's sleep then I should be OK tomorrow for the paper (with Julia) on Web 2.0 and social participation. At the moment I'm holed up on the 13th floor of a modern hotel with a slow internet connection. And this is the conference!

Internet safety

Yale (turquoise band)

There's a great little story here in the Guardian about how easy it is to cut keys from images on your Flickr photostream. This adds a new dimension to debates about internet safety. Local authorities and other administrative bodies may now have to change their policies. I'm taking a different view and hoping that someone can cut a key to unlock the padlocks that keep us out.

Bad games

Skysigns

We often hear stories about the evils of gaming. Earlier in the week I reported about the Italian boy who was diagnosed with PlaySation addiction. Apparently it all ended well when he told his father to throw it away. But the really bad games are played out in the Nevada desert, where miltary operatives dispatch unmanned drones to wipe out settlements of Islamic extremists in Northern Pakistan (news story here). Now what kind of terror is that? I'm still having a personal moral panic attack about this one.

Pirate Macros

This video is interesting in a number of ways. It plays on the amateur feel of a lot of language instruction material to feed that obsession with talking like a pirate. The American attempt at that 50s English voiceover is also a nice touch. But why talk like a pirate in the first place? Who knows? Interesting, at a time when real pirates are very much in the news. Then to entertain us all, along comes the latest mash-up as the lolcats phenomenon meets pirate-talk head on with Pirate Macros – argh Jim Lad, that be photoshopped!