The Digital Migrant

'Don't affect the share price': social media policy in higher education as reputation management

2011-10-26T16:38:00.007+01:00

I'm doing a bit of work on social media policy in universities in the UK.

I'm particularly interested in the ways in which UK HEIs are responding to both the positive potential of social media as well as to its perceived threats.

My hunch - and it's just a hunch at the moment based on some quick reading of sample policy documents and discussions with colleagues at Kingston University - is that the development of social media policies has been taken in response to both the promise of social media in promoting university brands as well as the threat to institutional reputation. The creation and implementation of social media policies are, therefore, playing a role in helping universities manage both the risks and benefits of social media at a time when reputation or brand management is key.

Social media has greatly lowered the threshold technological barriers to creating online spaces, facilitating dialogue and sharing resources. With this ease comes potential threats: could online spaces and digital communication tools allow academic staff to stray 'off message' and publish statements or post media at variance with institutional policy or in some way detrimental to its reputation? There have certainly been cases in the UK of academics doing just this (Corbyn 2008).

What are the drivers behind the development of such policies? I think it's all to do with the context of the marketisation of higher education (Molesworth et al. 2010) and the need for universities to both create a differentiated brand for themselves and protect that brand at a time when they're competing for students. Legal or liability issues are prominent too but there's a lot in many policy documents about protecting the university against defamation.

And the levers? Well, in some policy documents it's more carrot than stick with disciplinary sanctions and management controls in place to ensure compliance.

I'm at an early stage in my thoughts about this so all comments, quibbles and corrections very welcome.

Sample of social media policy documents from UK HEIs

University of Bristol
http://www.bris.ac.uk/social-media/

University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN)
http://www.uclan.ac.uk/information/services/hr/hr_guidance_employees/social_networking.php

UCL
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-media/

Durham University
http://www.dur.ac.uk/hr/policies/social/

University of Glamorgan
http://msr.glam.ac.uk/documents/download/52/

Heriot Watt University
http://www.hw.ac.uk/webteam/about/service/social-media.htm

University of Huddersfield
http://www2.hud.ac.uk/shared/shared_vcowg/docs/policies/Social_Networking_Policy.pdf

University of Leicester
http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/marketing/marcomms/communications/social

Oxford Brooks University
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/staff/marketing/web/socialmedia/policy

University of Surrey
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/about/corporate/policies/social_network_policy.pdf

References

Corbyn, Z. (9 October 2008). By the blog: academics tread carefully. Times Higher Education Supplement. Accessed 26 October 2011 from: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=403827

Molesworth, M., Nixon, E. and Scullion, R. (eds) (2010). The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer. London: Routledge.

First attempt at a quick guide to Prezi

2011-04-01T10:41:00.004+01:00

The stand-out success of the 2010-11 staff development season has been, without doubt, Prezi. We've had double-figure attendance at the workshops we've run and have had to re-book rooms to accommodate colleagues wanting to learn how to use it.

I've also used it on our PgCert L&T in HE and at a recent session of student group presentations 3/5 groups used Prezi in lieu of PowerPoint or Keynote.

It's clearly striking a chord with some colleagues and I wonder why. There's some interesting research to be done here I think. My hunch is that it's partly discipline-specific with those in visual-rich areas (e.g. healthcare, art and design) most to gain from the ability to zoom into uploaded images.

I read an interesting comment on a Kingston University Elgg blog post from a colleague who was drawn to its non-linear potential that fitted well with the theme of her lecture:

I used Prezi (in place of PowerPoint) in a seminar last semester. It was relevant to the content of the lecture since we were discussing the digital future of 'books'. One of the key differences between physical and digital books (aside from the feel and smell!) is that physical books are linear. You tend to read one page after another, one chapter after another. Of course you can dip in and out and use the contents or index pages to find the material you want. But most people read an old-fashioned book more or less sequentially. Digital books, however, provide opportunities for presenting information or stories in a non-linear fashion. Prezi, therefore, was the perfect tool to not just talk about, but demonstrate, the non-linear nature of new technologies.

Kimberly Scheideman, in her blog post A Beautiful Sunrise - PowerPoint or Prezi - What's the Difference? makes a similar point. She claims that Prezi suited her thematic presentation of Eoin Colfer's novel Artemis Fowl better than PowerPoint ('I felt the Prezi captured a concept that a PowerPoint couldn't'). So, in other cases, it looks like the lecture topic or structure is informing lecturer preferences.

More thoughts on this later but for now here's the handout we distribute in our sessions - comments and corrections welcome.

Prezi Guide

Learning technology review: the student perspective

2011-03-30T15:23:00.004+01:00

This is my presentation for the next M25 Group session (31.03.2011):

Learning Technologies Review: student perspectives on Prezi

Graphic elicitation references

2011-03-29T12:44:00.002+01:00

Bagnoli, A. (2009). Beyond the standard interview: the use of graphic elicitation and arts-based methods. Qualitative Research, 9(5): 547–570

Crilly, N. et al. (2006). Graphic elicitation: using research diagrams as interview stimuli. Qualitative Research, 6(3): 341-366

Prosser, J. and Loxley. A. (2008). Introducing Visual Methods. ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Review Paper. http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/420/1/MethodsReviewPaperNCRM-010.pdf (accessed February 14 2011)

Törrönen, T. (2002). Semiotic theory on qualitative interviewing using stimulus texts. Qualitative Research, 2(3): 343-362

Umoquit, M.J. et al. (2008). The efficiency and effectiveness of utilizing diagrams in interviews: an assessment of participatory diagramming and graphic elicitation. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 8(53): 1-12

Varga-Atkins, T. and O'Brien, M. (2009). From drawings to diagrams: maintaining researcher control during graphic elicitation in qualitative interviews. International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 32(1): 53-67

Blogging workshop

2011-02-16T13:25:00.003Z

I thought I'd park the Prezi I'll be using for this semester's blogging workshops here.

Blogging @KU on Prezi

Jonathan Franzen on Apple

2010-10-08T12:04:00.004+01:00

I've been reading, and quite enjoying, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (I've the first edition with the typos).

A section that made me laugh out loud was when one of the main characters, a not-quite-failed rock star called Richard Katz launches into an attack on Apple - "I think the iPod is the true face of Republican politics" (Franzen: 2010: 201) - as part of a bigger tirade against the fake subversive edge of popular music culture in response to a question about the "MP3 revolution".

Here's a short extract:

I've been given the opportunity to participate in the pop-music mainstream, and manufacture Chiclets, and to try to persuade fourteen-year-olds that the look and feel of Apple computer products is an indication of Apple computer's commitment to making the world a better place. Because making the world a better place is cool, right? And Apple computer must be way more committed to a better world, because iPods are so much cooler-looking than other MP3 players, which is why they're more expensive and incompatible with other companies' software, because - well, actually it's a little unclear why, in a better world, the very coolest products have to bring the most obscene profits to a tiny number of residents of the better world. [...] We're about the relentless enforcement and exploitation of our intellectual-property rights. We're about persuading ten-year-old children to spend twenty-five dollars on a cool little silicone iPod case that it costs a licensed Apple computer subsidiary thirty-nine cents to manufacture.

Strangely, as someone in thrall to the unhealthy consumerist fetishism of all things Apple, it struck a bit of a chord. I love the design of their products but, partly as a result of recent experiences with the iPad, am increasingly irritated by Apple's closedness, control freakery and ruthless pursuit of profit.

References

Franzen, J. (2010). Freedom. London: Fourth Estate.

Those 'not digital natives' references

2010-10-06T12:03:00.007+01:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/antmcneill/3076992286/

This is me using my blog again as a dumping ground for my references. This time it's for all those lovely papers debunking the myth of the 'digital native':

Bayne, S. and Ross, J. (2007). The ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’: a dangerous opposition. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) December 2007. PDF format. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/natives_final.pdf

Bennett, S., Maton, K. and Kervin, L. (2008). The ‘digital natives’ debate. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(5): 775-786

Bennett, S. and Maton, K. (2010). Beyond the ‘digital natives’ debate: Towards a more nuanced understanding of students' technology experiences. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(5): 321–331

Brown, C. and Czerniewicz, L. (2010). Debunking the ‘digital native’: beyond digital apartheid, towards digital democracy. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(5): 357–369

Burhanna, K.J. et al. (2009). No Natives Here: A Focus Group Study of Student Perceptions of Web 2.0 and the Academic Library. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 35(6): 523-532

Hargittai, E. (2010). Digital Na(t)ives? Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the “Net Generation”. Sociological Inquiry. 80(1):92-113

Helsper, E. J. and Eynon, R. (2010). Digital natives: where is the evidence? British Educational Research Journal, 36(3): 503-520

Jones, C. and Czerniewicz , L. (2010).Describing or debunking? The net generation and digital natives. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(5): 317–320

Jones, C. and Healing, G. (2010). Net generation students: agency and choice and the new technologies. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(5): 344–356

G. Kennedy, T. Judd, B. Dalgarno and J. Waycott (2010). Beyond natives and immigrants: exploring types of net generation students. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(5): 332–343

Margaryan, A., Littlejohn, A. and Vojt, G. (2010). Are digital natives a myth or reality? University students’ use of digital technologies. Computers & Education. Article in press

Selwyn, N. (2009). The digital native - myth and reality. Invited presentation to CLIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals). London Seminar Series. London 10th March 2009. http://www.scribd.com/doc/9775892/Digital-Native

If you have any more please pass them on.

Delicious links.

Seconds thoughts on the iPad

2010-06-12T12:22:00.001+01:00

I guess I continue to be delighted and frustrated by the iPad in equal measure.

The frustration is largely due to my expectation - probably misplaced - that the iPad would be more Macbook Pro XS than iPod Touch XL.

The fantastic web browsing experience it offers lures you into thinking that it can do everything a regular computer can do. For example, when web browsing, it's the full-sized pages you view not the mobile version of them. However, log into, say, Blogger to write a post and you'll find you can't edit unless you select the HTML option. There's also no uploading local files to your most-used sites (Facebook, Flickr, Blackboard, Moodle). Eh?

I really wanted the iPad to be the core portable device we use in the staff development workshops we run on various aspects of e-learning. However, its limitations mean this ain't gonna happen and I'll have to think about a more conventional netbook instead.

IS colleagues try out the iPad at a recent staff development event

A few colleagues have rightly commented that you can upload content from the iPad via apps (e.g. the Flickr app, BlogPress etc.). I know that apps are the way mobile technology is going but I don't necessarily think it's the best way to go. A recent Guardian article has highlighted the negatives of this trend - adding $s to the coffers of Apple's iTunes Store and others by making users pay for apps that restore functionality and access to content they once had for free via a browser. Is reading Wired through the iPad app really a better experience than reading it online through Safari?

Why can't I do the stuff I need to do through the iPad's browser? The paradox is that the iPad offers the best mobile web experience of any mobile device via a browser I know and yet it also forces users to find alternatives to the browser to do many things.

Is it a genuine technical limitation of the device or is it informed by a commercial strategy? I don't know the answer but I do know that I'm becoming less, and not more of an Apple fanboy by the day.

Blogging from iPad (iBlogger)

2010-06-11T13:24:00.001+01:00

I'm using iBlogger to write this post on the iPad.

It's not a nice experience: portrait mode only and iPhone/iPod Touch screen size which becomes horribly pixelated - inc. keyboard - when enlarged.

The WordPress app offered a much nicer writing experience (see my Twitter blog for an example). I could also insert pictures with the WordPress app - I can't with iBlogger.

So, the app works fine on the smaller Apple devices but is much less satisfactory on the iPad. It needs an upgrade desperately - the TweetDeck iPad app leads the way in this respect I think. iBlogger 2 is due for release soon - here's hoping it's more iPad-friendly.

Mobile Blogging from here.

Blogging on the iPad (BlogPress)

2010-06-11T12:40:00.001+01:00

I've just downloaded the BlogPress app for the iPad (£1.79).

Hurrah - we've got landscape mode which makes writing much easier.

I can also add location and tags really quickly. Just as important, I can insert images from my photo library:

It lets you add multiple blogs from all the usual suspects (WordPress, TypePad etc.).

It's my app of the week.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Eden St,Kingston upon Thames,United Kingdom

First reaction to the iPad

2010-06-09T21:23:00.010+01:00

I've mixed feelings about the two iPads we've recently purchased.

As a Mac, iPod Mini, Nano, Touch and iPhone owner/user (and Apple fanboy) I obviously think it's a great addition: great-looking and really fast access to the web, email, Twitter etc..

However, my optimistic belief that we could order 6 + and use them in ed tech staff development workshops is beginning to waiver. Although in a workshop I ran yesterday it was well received - "Many thanks for a very interesting session and we all enjoyed it. We are also greatly in love with the I-Pad" - how long can the wow factor last?

Kingston University staff check out the iPad at recent Facebook session

I've argued elsewhere that it feels too limited in what it can do in spite of multiple apps which extend its capabilities. It offers more than an iPod Touch but much less than a cheaper netbook (Asus, Acer etc.) occupying a niche for which I hadn't realised there was any demand.

For example, the iPad doesn't allow me to upload local files to sites I use regularly from what I can see (notice the greyed-out choose file to upload buttons on Flickr screen shot below).

It's the same story with Facebook and with Blackboard and, I expect, other sites too.

Am I being naive and technologically inept in expecting it to be able to do this sort of stuff? After all, it is just a bigger iPod Touch. But I can take pictures on my iPhone and use apps to post them to Flickr or Twitter. Compared to the iPhone, the iPad feels like a massive step backwards into a world of content produced by others for us users to consume.

I'm not at all sure Apple's lean-back media consumption device is much good in education and I don't think I'll be ordering any more for work. However, I may well be unable to resist the temptation to buy one myself for personal couch computing.

Embedding tweets in a web page

2010-05-05T10:34:00.000+01:00

Here’s a tool that enables you to embed tweets into a website or blog post:

http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/

This is what is looks like:

Finding Creative Commons Images on Flickr http://screenr.com/XnWless than a minute ago via ScreenrJames Clay
jamesclay

It woz social media wot won it?

2010-04-23T10:10:00.022+01:00

I've no idea what the impact of social media will be to the outcome of the general election (6 May 2010). However, it's played a big role in making it one of the more enjoyable elections I can remember.

http://www.moneymad.org/david_cameron_poster_queen.jpg

Traditional broadcast media have played some role in the higher levels of entertainment on offer and the US-style televised debates stand out here. However, it's on Twitter, Facebook and various ad-busting-style blogs and sites where the real fun's to be had.

Leah Earl

What are the high points for me so far? Well, it's got to be the Tories' inept poster campaign (hey, thanks Michael Ashcroft) and the extraordinary speed, creativity and wit of the DIY digital image manipulators who've responded to it. Is England, in fact, a nation of PhotoShopkeepers?

So, in response to the cheesy and heavily airbrushed poster boy image of Cameron, we have the Mydavidcameron web site and dozens of user-generated spoofs. Flickr has a fair few images of more old-skool spray-can tactics (see Fuck off back to Eton) which also raise a smile. Cameron as posh, Toryboy (see the Common People spoof) is a common trope.

Every slogan - e.g. 'I've never voted Conservative before but ...' - becomes the set up for hundreds of gags like those found on the I've never voted Tory blog. It's a big, distributed parlour game with thousands joining in the fun.

Bonnie Holligan

There's a delightful escalation of the conflict going on: the more the Tories attempt to make their posters unspoofable, the more desirable a target they become to the "big society" (lol!) of DIY satirists (see Internet spoofs unspoofable Conservative poster). And the more the spoofs take off on Twitter and in the blogosphere, the more likely the phenomenon is to be reported in mainstream broadcast media. Yesterday, both Channel 4 news and The Guardian, for example, covered the reaction on Twitter - thousands of tweets using the #nickcleggsfault hashtag - to attacks against Clegg by the Murdoch press.

http://twitpic.com/1he6lp

What's going on is really interesting; it feels like political satire is no longer the preserve of a few - the writers of Have I got news for you, Private Eye, In the Loop etc. - but the many. Is the best political satire now digital, distributed and user-generated? And will it make a difference?

Twitter is dead; Twitter is surprising alive

2010-04-12T12:15:00.003+01:00

My Twitter is dead presentation for #pelc10 has had thousands of hits already. I'm guessing it's down to word of Twitter and the amazing snowball effects of RTs from network to network.

All this surely contradicts my argument that Twitter, if not actually dead, is limping awkwardly towards an uncertain future in HE?

I can't help but contrast its extraordinary vibrancy in some spheres - think Trafigura or, closer to home, the success of Twitter enabled backchannels at conferences - with its relative flatness in HE for undergraduate teaching and learning.

Can technologies - and the extra they bring users in one sphere - transfer from one context to another? I used to think so but am now not so sure. Twitter is a great technology - my personal favourite - but it struggles against what I think is a technology cultures of undergraduates who see it as a broadcast tool to subscribe to celebrities.

Twitter Is Dead

View more presentations from Tony McNeill.

Defining online (learning) communities

2010-04-12T11:49:00.003+01:00

A long post of definitions of 'community', especially online learning communities.

1. Discourse community

According to John Swales (1987: 5-7) there are six defining characteristics of a discourse community:

a broadly agreed set of common public goals.
mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.
participatory mechanisms used primarily to provide information and feedback.
the use of one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.
some specific lexis.
a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.

2. Communities of Practice

Another influential definition of community derives from the work of Lave and Wenger who have articulated the concept of a ‘community of practice’ (CoP) with its:

specific community (social fabric)
domain (the common ground or topic)
practice (the repertoire)

CoPs is a really influential concept in many professional domains (e.g. academic staff development). I’m not wholly sure why this term has triumphed over other similar concepts (e.g. ‘discourse communities’ and ‘epistemic communities’) though. Perhaps it’s the emphasis on ‘practice’ (doing, making, acting) and the idea of a dynamic movement from periphery to centre.

Central to CoPs is the notion of identity transformation: starting to acquire the knowledge practices and particular identities/ways of being needed to enter that CoP and participate fully. I don’t fully sign up to the concept though; it still feels like a description of apprenticeship, observing master craftsmen/women before becoming one yourself.

3. Affinity spaces

An alternative to the CoP is the concept of ‘affinity spaces’. This comes from James Paul Gee (2004) who argues that the more familiar notion of ‘communities of practice‘ doesn’t capture emerging forms of technology-enabled sociability. Affinity spaces are spaces in which people from a variety of backgrounds come together to pursue a common endeavour or goal. One of Gee’s examples of an affinity space is the strategy game Age of Mythology in which the common endeavour of playing and transforming the game takes precedence over questions of racial, class or gender identity. Gee makes a strong case that educationalists have much to learn from affinity spaces. Here are Gee’s defining characteristics of an affinity space:

there is a common endeavour (interests, goals or practices);
the space has content;
the content is organized;
individuals can choose to interact with content and/or each other;
individuals share the same space- even if fulfilling different roles;
there are many ways (portals) of entering the space;
new content can be generated;
many types of knowledge (individual, distributed, dispersed and tacit) are valued;
group endeavour is valued and encouraged;
interactivity is required to sustain the affinity space;
newbies and masters occupy the same domain – there is no segregation;
there are many ways of participating and these can change temporally;
leadership is ‘porous’;
there are many ways of gaining status;
the organisation of the space can change through interaction;
learning is social and enjoyable.

4. Community -v- audience

Finally, it's not a concept as such but I like the distinction Clay Shirky makes between audiences and communities. A community, he argues, is defined by what he calls a ’social density’; an audience, on the other hand, has ‘fewer ties’. Here’s the Shirky extract in full:

… dozens of weblogs have an audience of a million or more, and millions have an audience of a dozen or less. [...] And it’s easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing – why would anyone put such drivel out in public? It’s simple. They’re not talking to you. [...] We misread these seemingly inane posts because we’re so unused to seeing written material in public that isn’t intended for us. The people posting messages to one another in small groups are doing a different kind of communicating than people posting messages for hundreds or thousands of people to read. More is different, but less is different too. An audience isn’t just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn’t just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack [emphasis mine]. The bloggers and social network users operating in small groups are part of a community, and they are enjoying something analogous to the privacy of the mall. On any given day you could go to the food court and find a group of teenagers hanging out and talking to one another. They are in public, and you could certainly sit at the next table over and listen in on them if you wanted to. And what would they be saying to one another? They’d be saying, “I can’t believe I missed you last night!!! Trac talked to you and said you were TRASHED off your ASS!” They’d be doing something similar to what they are doing on LiveJournal or Xanga, in other words, but if you were listening in on their conversation at the mall, as opposed to reading their post, it would be clear that you were the weird one. (Shirky 2008: 84-5)

Am I a member of any virtual communities? Several possibly. But because communities are not necessarily formally constituted and don’t always name themselves as such, you don’t always recognise that you’re in one.

On Twitter, for example, could the people I follow – and who follow me – be termed a community? Perhaps, although I think there are multiple interests tweeted about. Perhaps ‘affinity space’ is a better term here?

I’m a member of the M25 group of learning technologists; we all work at London-based unis in the area of ed tech and meet at workshops, participate in discussion board forums etc.. This feels much more like a community. There are no masters and no apprentices so it’s not really a CoP I guess. Is this more of a 'discourse community'?

Head hurts - time for tea.

References

Gee, J.P. (2004) Situated Language and Learning: a critique of traditional schooling. London: Routledge

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning. Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press

Swales, J. (1987). Approaching the Concept of Discourse Community. Paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/1b/e4/d7.pdf

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

Twitter for reflective activities

2010-01-11T19:35:00.001Z

Twitter presentation for the University of Staffordshire online Twitter workshop:

Twitter For Reflection Jan 2020

View more presentations from Tony McNeill.

Digital literacy definition

2010-01-02T10:49:00.004Z

'Digital literacies' are the constantly changing practices through which people make traceable meanings using digital technologies. (Gillen & Barton 2009 :1)

...there is no deterministic relationship between technological innovations and people's practices and hence how digital literacies unfold. Many mistakes - at the design, commercial and indeed theoretical levels - are made through assuming that there is a straightforward relationship between what a new technology can do and how – or even whether – it will then be used. (Gillen & Barton 2009 :1)

References

Gillen, J. & Barton, D. (2009). Digital Literacies. A discussion document for TLRP-TEL (Teaching and Learning Research Programme - Technology Enhanced Learning) workshop on digital literacies. Lancaster University 12-13 March 2009. Retrieved 29 December 2009, from http://www.tlrp.org/tel/files/2009/02/digital-literacies-gillen-barton-2009.pdf

Making sense of images

2009-11-24T15:02:00.002Z

JD on Flickr

2009-11-24T14:30:00.006Z

JD asks us to read 'Display, Identity and the Everyday' and consider the following questions:

what aspects of this work make this an autoethnography.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach?
How else could Flickr have been researched and what other methods would have been useful?
This work was not specifically about literacy. How could a piece of research on Flickr look specifically at literacy?

Here are some quick answers:

1. Well, the author claims it's auto-ethnographic:

Drawing on Markham’s work (1998, 2004), I have thought of my work as partly ‘‘auto-ethnographic’’ (2007: 552)

It's auto-ethnographic insofar as the author positions herself as a participant in the culture and practices under investigation. The author claims it's 'insider research':

This paper is informed by my own experiences with Flickr, my observations of others in that space. (2007: 551).

There’s a history and a density of engagement:

I have been active on the site since it was launched in 2004. I am ‘‘embedded’’ in the culture of the site; I have uploaded several thousand images to Flickr; I belong to more than 100 groups and have around 150 ‘‘contacts’’ whom I only know from that space. (2007: 551)

2. Advantages? Well, the author claims that:

Insider knowledge is required in order to move beyond a fascination with the exotic, or the alienation sometimes experienced by ‘‘outsiders’’ to digital cultures. That is, the practices need to be researched by those who see beyond the charisma or alienating potential of technologies.(2007: 552)

So, auto-ethnographic approaches may avoid particular forms of misrepresentations that are produced by outsiders (Otherisation, the lure of the exotic etc.). Being deeply embedded in a micro-community of Flickr users (they're not a monolithic single community of amateur photographers), means a richness (or "thickness") of description.

Disadvantages? I'd better be careful what I write here as JD may get cross. I think JD's interest in the aestheticization of the everyday and the ordinary (street art, abandoned objects) leads her to neglect ways in which Flickr is used to display images of the exceptional or special too (weddings, birthdays, holidays etc.). So, being so much a part of one small community of users gives a great sense of detail but perhaps not the bigger picture.

For example, here's an image of popular Flickr tags from today:

What can we learn about the kinds of images uploaded to the site? Place names are popular suggesting that Flickr is used to upload holiday pictures. 'Wedding', 'party' and 'family' are prominent tags too suggesting that the staples of personal photography (weddings, birthday parties, family reunions) feature prominently.

3. How else could Flickr have been researched and what other methods would have been useful? I don't know.Could quantitative methods be used (e.g. frequency of use of particular tags as above)? However, I like JD's quasi-case study approach (looking at particular users, particular groups). Perhaps a case study analysis of a particular tag?

4. How could a piece of research on Flickr look specifically at literacy? Flickr is extraordinarily textual: titles, descriptions, tags, notes, comments, sets etc.. Literacy - in the 'lettered representation' (Kress) sense, is very much a feature of the site.

References

Davies, J. (2007). Display, Identity and the Everyday: Self-presentation through online image sharing. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 28(4): 549 - 564

Kress-fallen or too soon to inter textuality

2009-11-10T08:30:00.003Z

A few years ago, Gunther Kress argued that the textual was being eclipsed by the visual as we move from printed pages to digital content viewed on screens (the ‘new Media Age’):

Two distinct yet related factors deserve to be particularly highlighted. These are, on the one hand, the broad move from the now centuries-long dominance of writing to the new dominance of the image and, on the other hand, the move from the dominance of the medium of the book to the dominance of the medium of the screen. [...] language-as-writing will increasingly be displaced by image in many domains of public communication [emphasis mine]. (Kress 2003: 1)

I think a problem with Literacy in the New Media Age is that, published in 2003 and therefore pre-dating the extraordinary developments in Web 2.0 and social media, it hasn’t the chance to absorb the array of new textual practices (tweets, status updates, tags etc.) associated with or enabled by those technologies. Kress views writing, as what he calls “lettered representation”, as on the way out for all bar political and cultural elites. However, from the vantage point of late 2009, text looks in rude good health (how many txt msgs, tweets, status updates per day from ordinary folks?).

It’s way too soon to inter textuality.

Prezi, PowerPoint, multimodality and the 'logic of the image'

2009-11-10T08:04:00.005Z

I can't think of a piece of software with such consistently bad press as PowerPoint (especially in higher education). Here are some examples:

PowerPoint, the favoured tool of presentation for the unimaginative. All right, perhaps that is unfair, but I am suffering the after-effects of a surfeit of lifeless, list-full PowerPoint presentations that frequently served as a barrier to meaningful engagement between tutor, student and learning [...] It all became so routine, so anodyne, so dull. (Ward 2003 n.p.)

… the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. (Tufte 2003: 7)

… foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, an intensely hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organising every type of content, breaking up narratives and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous chartjunk and PP Phluff, branding of slides with logotypes, a preoccupation with format not content, incompetent designs for data graphics and tables, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch and presenters into marketeers. (Tufte 2006: 4)

Such discourse reeks of technological determinism: lectures are tedious because of a piece of software; human agency is denied. PowerPoint in constructed as a malevolent presence reducing its users to helpless zombies, banging out bullet point after bullet point, slide after slide.

Personally, my take on PowerPoint is closer to Ian Kinchin:

… what PowerPoint is actually doing is to make explicit the taken-for-granted assumptions and implicit epistemological leanings of lecturers who are using it. The stereotypic teacher-centred, noninteractive mode of lecturing … is simply clarified and amplified by the use of PowerPoint. (Kinchin 2006 : 647)

Ok, perhaps this reeks a little of crude instrumentalism (it ain’t the tool but how you use it) but it has the merit of acknowledging agency and the often unacknowledged beliefs and habits we bring with us in our encounters with technology. We shape the technology as much as it shapes us.

And what of Prezi? Is it credible alternative to PowerPoint and the tyranny of linearity and sequentiality (one damn bullet point, one damn slide after another) that PowerPoint embodies?

The jury’s out but my initial thoughts are that it repackages linearity and sequentiality, dressing it up as something different through the admittedly neat visual trope of a canvas whose sections one clicks on to zoom into a detailed view. But users can – and do – create ‘paths’ or lines that connect one piece of content – some text or an image – with another piece of content placed on the canvas. Is this so very different to a PowerPoint slide? Could we see the text or media we place on the Prezi canvas as akin to the text or media we add to each individual PowerPoint slide?

A more positive take on Prezi is that allows us to think through the possibilities creating texts informed by what Gunther Kress calls the 'logic of the image'. Here is Kress on the 'logic of the text' and the 'logic of the image':

The two modes of writing and of image are each governed by distinct logics, and have distinctly different affordances. The organisation of writing – still leaning on the logics of speech is governed by the logic of time, and by the logic of sequence of its elements in time, in temporally governed arrangements. The organisation of the image, by contrast, is governed by the logic of space, and by the logic of simultaneity of its visual/depicted elements in spatially organised arrangements. (Kress 2003: 1-2)

With Prezi, one could arrange a space with text and other media types but with no clear 'entry point' and no single, linear 'reading path'. Even if the Prezi screen's content is mainly textual, there are multiple ‘entry points’ and multiple user-defined reading paths. In this more positive interpretation of Prezi, it's a presentation tool about space; PowerPoint is a presentation tool about time.

Prezi might be a cool tool that helps us think about what a presentation is or might be. It might make us more mindful of the possibilities of a more media-rich presentation. But it also might just be a tool that bored PowerPoint users – and hey, aren’t we all bored of it? – use for novelty value and because of the attraction of its much (much) slicker interface.

I think a lot of ed techies – me included – like to deride PowerPoint as part of our professional identity performance as technology connoisseurs. We show our mastery of the chronically mutating technoscape by our embrace of the New (Twitter, Google Wave etc.) and our displays of bored indifference and condescension to mainstream technologies (pretty much anything Microsoft Office). I'm bracing myself for the 2009-10 conference season in which Prezi is going to be the inevitable default software of the technorati in their presentations.

PowerPoint is soooooo last century darlink; Prezi where it’s at today.

But I’m just not so sure …

References

Kinchin, I. (2006). Developing PowerPoint Handouts to support meaningful learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 37(4): 647-650

Tufte, E. (2003). ‘PowerPoint Is Evil’. Wired. Issue 11.09. Accessed 12 March 2007, from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

Tufte, E. (2006 2nd ed.). The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. Cheshire Connecticut: Graphics Press LLC.

Ward, T. (2003, May 20). I watched in dumb horror. The Guardian. Retrieved March 12, 2007, from http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,9828,959242,00.html

Twitter and May '68

2009-06-30T08:50:00.003+01:00

Not really sure why - possibly hot weather making me a bit lethargic and unfocussed - but I've started to mess around with some old May '68 posters.

I guess I'm remixing them for a digital era of cameraphones, Flips and social media. Iran and Twitter is still in the news (just) but I guess I'm still thinking about the G20 demonstrations in London. The violence of the policing was remarkable as was the initial mainstream media reporting that uncritically adopted the line fed them by the Metropolitan Police.

It took media outlets like The Guardian who picked up on user-generated content - especially the assault on Ian Tomlinson - to call into question official accounts.

The revolution will be twitterized (and forgotten)

2009-06-24T13:39:00.005+01:00

This is the headline of an opinion piece in today's Le Monde by Corine Lesnes (La révolution sera twitterisée... et oubliée). It's more of a (sceptical) introduction to a technology that's making the headlines all over the world but which has so far had little impact in France. Not sure why - I've always seen the French as early adopters of this sort of thing (think Minitel in the 1980s).

Here's a variant (in English) from over a week ago (The Revolution Will Be Twittered)

Anyway, the reworking of Gil Scott-Heron's 'The Revolution will not be televised' ("... the Revolution, brother, will be live") raises an interesting question about the role of a new technology in representing political action and social change.

There are a couple of ways to write about Twitter and the Iranian crisis of legitimacy: 1) a study of the use of Iranian twitterers and, 2) western media reaction to the use of this emerging technology.

BTW, Gil Scott-Heron should really have copyrighted the title 'The Revolution will not be (add technology)ized'.

Draft Twitter paper

2009-06-10T11:39:00.002+01:00

More than just passing notes in class? The Twitter-enabled backchannel

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Internet & Technolog Research twitter social networking

Memes, de Certeau and la perruque

2009-06-09T10:37:00.002+01:00

I think that memes are a manifestation of popular culture as well as about popular culture which they remake and remix.

I love Flickr's Song Chart meme for example.

Memers are having a bit of fun with the pop culture around them as well as spoofing crummy business pitch PowerPoint presentations and their cheesy graphic representations of data.

Here's Meatloaf's 'I would do anything for love (but I won't do that)' (really cheesy song) as a very simple example:

Things I would do for love

I wonder of the memers are working at home or at work? I ask as this sort of meme makes me think of de Certeau's concept of 'la perruque' (the wig). 'La perruque' is the worker's own production performed at the workplace under the disguise of legitimate work for the boss. Nothing is stolen other than time. Here's de Certeau:

It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. 'La perruque' may be as simple a matter as a secretary's writing a love letter on 'company time' or as complex as a cabinetmaker's 'borrowing' a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room." (1984: 25)

In this tactic, employees divert time away from producing profit for his/her employer and instead uses it for his/her own enjoyment, for activities that are "free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit" (de Certeau 1984: 25).

I wonder if it would be worth contacting memers - Flickr-based or not - to find out if this hunch can be substantiated?

References

De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

What's behind the popularity of the lolcat meme?

2009-06-09T09:44:00.003+01:00

Yeah, what's behind the popularity of the lolcat meme?

With memes, there's an element of play (see my Variations on a meme blog post from December). So what's being played with in lolcats?

In part, I think it's the cheesy, naff, sentimental stream in popular culture (think Hallmark cards, kittens playing with balls of wool on Xmas calenders etc.). Memers are having a bit of a laugh at the expense of these sorts of texts (and their audiences). The language used - and there are web sites on how to write lolspeak (e.g. The Definitive Lolcats Glossary) - is the deliberately grammatically incorrect 'baby-speak' used when talking to, well, babies and pets.

However, I also think it's possible to read the lolcats pictures and texts unironically: look at the fluffy kittens in adorable funny poses! They're cute, adorable and they make us laugh! The baby-talk we use to speak to them is fun and an integral part of the pleasure we experience.

I don't know how to 'read' lolcats: first- (irony-free) or second- (ironic) degree?

They make me think of Roland Barthes' comments on flaubertian irony:

... in wielding an irony fraught with uncertainty, [Flaubert] brings about a salutary uneasiness in the writing: he refuses to halt the play of codes (or does so badly), with the result that (and this is no doubt the true test of writing as writing) one never knows whether he is responsible for what he writes (whether there is an individual subject behind his language); for the essence of writing (the goal and meaning of the activity which makes up writing) is to prevent any reply to the question, who is speaking? (Quoted in Culler 2006: 204)

Who is speaking in lolcats? The ironist or the cat-lover?

References

Culler, J.(2006 2nd ed.). Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty. Aurora CO: The Davies Group.

Appadurai on technoscapes

2009-05-20T13:28:00.000+01:00

‘by technoscape, I mean the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology and the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries’(Appadurai, 1996: 34).

References

Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Henry Jenkins on moral panics

2009-05-15T12:49:00.001+01:00

'Moral panic' is a phrase I overuse and usually collocate with 'new technolgies' - e.g. "new moral panic over social networking sites; top psychologist claims Facebook and Twitter cause harm to small puppies". Here's an old blog post with a real example.

I did 'A' level sociology too long ago to remember full definition of moral panic - something about new behaviours being perceived as threat to existing ways of doing things.

There's a really good Henry Jenkins video on young people, violence and new media which has the following (brilliant) definition:

"moral panic is where you stop asking questions and start assuming you know the answers"

Skinheads, fashion, gay men, Twitter and reappropration

2009-05-01T06:57:00.004+01:00

Just got up and haven't had a cup of tea yet. I'm getting my excuses in early about the confused nature of today's post.

One of the tweeps I'm following looks to be doing some interesting research on skinhead subculture. It made me think back to my teen years (late 70s/early 80s - 2nd generation skinheads) and my fear of them back then. Also of Shane Meadows' This is England (what a great film!) and its take on skinhead subculture (one DM in a benign w/c subculture into black music; another DM in belligerent far right politics).

It also got me thinking about a scene in a Jake Arnott novel (was it The Long Firm?) where a first generation skinhead character, who's just got out of prison after a long sentence, thinks another skinhead on the tube is trying to pick a fight with him. It turns out to be a gay skin checking him out and after a different kind of physical interaction.

The problem for our ex-con is that the signs of male 'hardness' (Levis, Ben Sherman shirts, DMs, bomber jacket etc.) have been reappropriated by another subculture. Signs and symbols are in perpetual motion and 10-15 years behind bars have left Arnott's old skinhead unable to read their meanings with any degree of accuracy.

Anyway, this long digression to say I think that's sort of what happens with technology. A technology like Twitter, first envisaged as a notification service ("What are you doing?"), a lightweight Facebook status update-type tool (thoough with all the clutter removed, gets reappropriated, reinterpreted, remade in diverse ways by different groups: for marketing, broadcasting, professional development, learning, constructing new discursive spaces etc..

That's all for now ... enjoy Prince Buster:

Are "dinner tweets" really trivial?

2009-04-29T20:02:00.005+01:00

Are 'dinner tweets' - you know those tweets describing what the twitterer is about to tuck into (e.g. "I'm preparing pan-fried seabass on a coulis of ...") - really as trivial as Twitter's detractors claim?

I'm tempted to argue that they play a part in the 'taste performances' (Liu 2008) that are integral to most social networking sites. It's one of the ways I project or perform my identity online.

By describing to followers what I'm preparing and/or eating I'm also performing a particular identity. For example, if I tweet that I'm cooking a dish with locally-sourced ingredients that keeps the food miles down, I'm projecting an identity that's discerning and environmentally aware; if, on the other hand, I tell you I'm serving up a dessert of frozen Creme Eggs, the identity I'm performing is offbeat and fun-loving.

Far from being part of the anti-Twitter camp's imagined stream of trivia, the 'dinner tweet' is, in fact, an integral part of the repetoire through which twitterers perform the 'ongoing narrative of the self' (Merchant 2006: 238).

So, next time someone moans about 'twitterhea' and the banality of the 'dinner tweet', tell them it's all about identity performance and refer them to Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens.

References

Liu, H. (2008). Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1): 252-275.
Retrieved April 29, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/liu.html

Merchant, G. (2006). Identity, Social Networks and Online Communication. E-Learning, 3(2): 235-244

Twitter profile field as minimal - but laminated - identity performance

2009-04-28T06:47:00.003+01:00

Here are some example bios:

e-learning, read/write web, participation, user-centred, activism, agency, democracy, curry, beer, cycling, cricket, football, indie music, indie film
lecturer, researcher, poet, new-ish father
Researcher (e-Learning, m-Learning and technology enhanced learning), vather, techgeek and i am a mac-user ;-)
Library geek, datamonger and allotmenteer
librarian, mom, social media, information literacy, punk rock, 60s reggae, edupunk, educational technology, author, subcultures, chronic overtweeter
Librarian and repository manager for a X university by day; blogger, video maker, writer, gamer. Lord of all weasels, llamas and gooses by night
Community building and general change management for online distance learning. Running. Cider. Electric bicycles.
Learning Technologist wondering why the one line bio is 160 characters??
Married with 2 boys who have now flown the nest. Work in education, teach ICT and love gadgets
dad, senior learning technologist at University of X, educational technology consultant, moodle guru and uncompromising bike commuter

What identities are performed here? Professional certainly (learning technologist, librarian, teach IT). Personal too - as mothers or fathers (mom, dad, newish father). As fans (indie music, indei film). As politically committed to particular causes (democracy, user-centred activism). Affiliated to a a myriad causes, interests, affinity spaces ...

More to follow.

Twitter, the backchannel and 'laminated discursive spaces'

2009-04-26T06:57:00.012+01:00

Initial random thoughts on a Sunday morning (woken by children and unable to get back to sleep) on Twitter, the backchannel and 'laminated discursive spaces'.

What do I mean by 'laminated discursive spaces'? Um ... I don't stop being a father, husband, francophile, daydreaming timewaster, rebellious teenager (in his mid-40s!) etc. just because I enter a lecture theatre. Although a singular aspect - or one layer of a laminated identity - may be more in play in one particular context (e.g. my academic identity when I'm at a conference) , other identities may also enter the foreground too. So, there's always some element of identity lamination on our social interactions and I think the Twitter backchannel exemplifies this really well.

Here's a great quote from an article I've been reading:

Because social practice is dialogic, heterogeneous and distributed in functional systems, activity should be understood as laminated or layered in Goffman’s sense, and, following Goodwin and Duranti, as mutable, dynamic frames that are relatively foregrounded or relatively backgrounded. Thus, there are no spaces where the social histories of people, practices, artifacts, and institutions disappear, no pure monologic activity systems, no places where identities can be figured simply in terms offered by a dominant institution’s map (where a person is just an engineer, just a student, just a teacher). Lamination is not simply a notion of the multiple identities of the person, but also applies to mediational means, with heterogeneous histories embedded as affordances in the words, texts, tools, and institutions that mediate activity.
Prior, P. (2003). 'Are communities of practice really an alternative to discourse communities?'
Paper presented at the 2003 American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference
Accessed from: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/pprior/Prior/PriorAAAL03.pdf

I think the Twitter-enabled conference backchannel is an example of a 'laminated discursive space' . What I've observed in the #pelc09, #shock09 and #beyond09Twitter backchannels are different socioliterate practices - some academic, others less so - woven into a stream of hashtag-specific conference tweets:

posting links
brief summaries
expression of appreciation/thanks to individual presenters/conference organisers
side conversations between participants (remote and proximate)
banter (participants also have a shared social history of nights out, common interests and projects, past conferences, shared contacts)
bitching ("salespitch suckfest" was one comment on an Apple presentation deemed too corporate)
sharing of other resources (mainly photos and URLs)
requests for information or attempts to collaborate (e.g. on a set of Delicious bookmarks)

Digital Literacy definition

2009-04-25T15:53:00.003+01:00

... digital literacies, quite simply, involve the use of digital technologies for encoding and accessing texts by which we generate, communicate and negotiate meanings in socially recognisable ways. (Lankshear & Knobel 2oo8: 258)

References

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2008). Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices. New York: Peter Lang.

Twitter workshop ideas

2009-04-23T11:57:00.011+01:00

These are my rough notes from Matt Lingard's workshop

Section 1: face the front bit with Matt talking

Starts with personal use of Twitter for professional purposes. Also brings in a few strong quotes about the importance of Twitter culturally and economically.

Those who criticise use of Twitter at work haven't seen the tectonic plates moving. Social networks such as these are the way businesses will be run in the future.
Victor Keegan Technology Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/29/twitter

Twitter practicalities

create an account

you'll need a username - this can be anything you like but you should also add your own details as this will help people follow you.

The home page - this displays the tweets of those that you are following. The core of Twitter is to follow people.

Matt has a really good PowerPoint that makes a distinction between the Home and Profile pages.

Matt showed a video (Martin Weller: Twitter Love Song) that explained what it was and how it might be used.

Types of tweet:

@ replies

direct messages

retweets

Other Twitter stuff

embedding links

uploading photos

hashtags
Twitter searches

Next bit is the hands-on.

Section 2: hands on session

Matt gave a useful handout.

Matt got us to write on a postit our usernames then put then up on a PowerPoint slide. We were then asked to follow fellow participants and interact via tweets.

uploading pictures (Mobypicture)
adding feeds (Twitterfeed)
hashtags
Twitter searches

Presentation available online at: http://www.slideshare.net/madrattling

pelc09: Facebook for Film Studies

2009-04-15T08:18:00.008+01:00

Facebook for Film Studies

Facebook For Film Studies April 2009

View more presentations from Tony Mcneill.

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/amcneill
Twitter: anthonymcneill
Delicious: http://delicious.com/edtechglossary/Facebook
Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2587613/Face-work-on-Facebook
Conference hashtag: #pelc09

Twitter and passing notes in class

2009-04-08T11:01:00.006+01:00

One of the things I noticed at the Shock of the Old 2009 conference ('official' and 'unofficial' hashtags) was the largish number of participants sending tweets during presentations. The "backchannel" has found, or so it seems, a new technology.

Idea for paper: More than just passing notes in class?: tweets as new literacy practice. (my online survey)

My initial suspicion was that sending tweets 'remediates' the analogue textual practice of passing notes in class. However, I think there's more to it than that.

My hunch is that it's being used as a space to quibble, query and demur, to have off-stage dialogues with like-minded colleagues or contacts either present in the lecture theatre or elsewhere. So Twitter is a another means, potentially, of breaking the broadcast/monologic format of the conference paper and providing additional opportunities for comment and dialogue.

I think it's also - and some of the comments on the LDHEN JISC mailing list almost confirm this hunch - a space for the performance of identities at odds with those expected of colleages at a conference (e.g. for flippant, dismissive or bitchy commentaries that can't easily be made public via a comment or question to the speaker).

I’m coming from a position that views literacy practices as complex social acts that can be inclusive or exclusive. Web 2.0 doesn’t automatically = inclusive/democratic.

On the one hand I can see how the use of Twitter exemplifies one form of ‘networked participatory culture’ (Jenkins) by enabling new forms of conversation; on the other hand I can see how the technology provides a platform for opportunistic gossiping which can shut out other participants (e.g. those who are not Twitter users).

First quick thought on digital literacy conference

2009-04-06T13:33:00.005+01:00

At the end of last week's conference on digital literacy, there was some (Prenskyite?) discussion about young people's technology-mediated multi-tasking and the effects on their brains.

It struck me as yet another example of (parental, teacherly etc.) anxieties about the effects of technology on young people's behaviour and intellectual development.

A couple of days later, my nine-year old son spent most of the weekend playing football in the park with other boys. He's at an age where I'm not sure if I should let him play in the park unsupervised (it's only 5-6 doors from our house) or if I should be there. Anyway, I let him play unsupervised, occasionally wandering down to check things were ok. Finally, as afternoon turned to early evening, I had to drag him back home: That's enough fresh air and physical exercise young man, don't you think you should be playing some video games.

My point is, I guess, that those making statements about the harmful effects of technology on children's cognitive development probably need to take a chill pill. Most of the nine-year olds I know are as busy playing football or collecting Match Attax cards as they are glued to the PSPs or XBoxes (i.e. not very different to what I got up to as a nine-year old).

Deprivileging the digital

2009-04-01T18:25:00.001+01:00

Deprivileging The Digital

View more presentations from Tony Mcneill.

Kress on 'communicational landscapes'

2009-03-25T17:15:00.003Z

The communicational landscapes of today, their relation to current forms of work and to current forms of pleasure, demand a recasting of our thinking about representation in the most far-reaching form. The world, now, is no longer a world in which the written language is dominant.
(Kress 1997 :5)
The landscapes of communication are changing, are being changed in the most fundamental ways; and it is happening now. (Kress 1997 :5)

References

Kress, G. (1997). Before Writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. London: Routledge.

Literacy definitions

2009-03-25T15:42:00.004Z

A literacy is a stable coherent, identifiable configuration of practices such as legal literacy, or the literacy of specific workplaces. (Barton 2007:38)

Looking at different literacy events it is clear that literacy is not the same in all contexts: rather, there are different literacies…within a given culture, there are different literacies associated with different domains of life. Contemporary life can be analysed in a simple way into domains of activity such as home, school, work-place. (Barton and Hamilton 1998: 9)

Some of these literacies have become powerful and dominant, while others have been constrained and devalued. The problem is not so much a lack of literacy, but a lack of social justice. Local knowledge is not always appreciated and local literacies are not always recognised. (Taylor 1997: 4)

... the traditional view of literacy as the ability to read and write rips literacy out of its sociocultural contexts and treats it as an asocial cognitive skill with little or nothing to do with human relationships. It cloaks literacy's connections to power, to social identity, and to ideologies, often in the service of privileging certain types of literact and certain types of people (Gee 1996: 46)

Academic writing is one type of literacy. (Ivanic 1998: 75)

References

Barton, D. (2007 2nd ed.). Literacy. Oxford: Blackwell

Barton, D. and Hamilton, M. (1998). Local Literacies. London: Routledge.

Ivanic, R. (1998). Writing and Identity: The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Lankshear, C. (1987). Literacy, Schooling and Revolution. London: Falmer Press

Digital literacy as mission civilisatrice

2009-03-25T10:14:00.002Z

I'm a bit suspicious of attempts to fix digital literacy which I associate - fairly or unfairly - with the colonial concept of the mission civilisatrice, bringing enlightenment to the 'dark continent' of primitive youth practices.

I do think that any definition of digital literacy needs to start with an understanding of and respect for 'vernacular' digital literacies. I'm not always sure I see much understanding and respect about this from academics. I've compiled a sottisier of extracts although I'm sure they will be more.

No respect

2009-03-25T09:32:00.007Z

When the dealers are selling drugs outside the school gates you know things in the educational system have gone bad. However, when the kids start using textspk in their exams and cite wikipedia in their essays it's time to get tough. Thankfully we have a Magnum Force of academics to clean up our hallowed halls. Here are my top three 'Dirty Harrys' targeting their .44 magnums at those punks using blogs, Wikipedia and other filth:

Wikipedians seem an unappealing bunch - computer fanatics, generally male, usually teenagers. They see the world only from a youthful cab driver's perspective. If anyone disagrees with the Wikipedian consensus, their edits are "reverted" and they can be banned - "indefinitely". And now it is these "editors" who are regularly trumping the fuddy-duddy professors in their ivory towers, plodding patiently through dusty books to produce yet more ... dusty books. Books!
Cohen, M. (28 August 2008). 'Encyclopaedia Idiotica'. Times Higher Education
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=403327

As a dialect, text ("textese"?) is thin and - compared, say, with Californian personalised licence plates - unimaginative. It is bleak, bald, sad shorthand. Drab shrinktalk. [...] Texting is penmanship for illiterates.
Sutherland, J. (11 November 2002). 'Cn u txt?'. The Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2002/nov/11/mobilephones2

As blogs continue to fill the Web with bizarre daily rituals and opinions of people who we would never bother speaking to at a party, let alone invite into our own homes, there has never been a greater need to stress the importance of intelligence, education, credentials and credibility.
Brabazon, T. (2006). 'The Google Effect: Googling, Blogging, Wikis and the Flattening of Expertise'. Libri, 56: 157-167

Paradoxically, the above extracts exemplify the very characteristics many tutors discourage in student writing: unsubstantiated generalisations, crude ad hominems, offensive language, a complete lack of understanding, intellectual curiosity and generosity etc. etc..

All extracts reveal the repellent aspects of some academics: a sense of intellectual superiority, for example, or a belief in their own fine wit (how I laughed at Cohen's sarcasm towards those nerds dissing professors and books).

Finally, their sounding off on topics they've very little expertise in embodies the imagined thing they dislike about the web: the no-nothing amateur usurping the expert. Yup, I certainly wouldn't talk to any of them at a party (let alone invite them into my home).

David Crystal on txting

2009-03-24T06:48:00.003Z

I've been looking in on - and sometimes posting to - a wiki on Digital Literacy.

Here's a question that's come out of it: aren't our students already digitally literate?
I'm picking up from some of the pages and posts the idea of digital literacy that's forming is predicated on a deficit model; digital literacy is something that students don't have until we give it to them.

Is this fair? Isn't the question really about understanding students' digital literacies before they come to university and developing it further?

If anyone's in 'deficit' could it be academic staff too quick to dismiss the digital literacy practices of students (I've been reading a truly appalling book by Tara Brabazon called The University of Google which exemplifies this attitude).

Anyway, here are some nice extracts from David Crystal's book on txting:

There is rather curious ambivalence around. Complaints are made about children's poor literacy, and then, when a technology arrives that provides fresh and motivating opportunities to read and write, such as email, chat, blogging, and texting, complaints are made about that. (Crystal 2008: 157)

Children could not be good at texting if they had not already developed considerable literacy awareness. Before you can write abbreviated forms effectively and play with them, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate to the letters. You need to know that there are such things as alternative spellings. You need to have a good visual memory and good motor skills. If you are aware that your texting behaviour is different, you must have already intuited that there is such a thing as a standard. If you are using such abbreviations as lol ('laughing out loud') and brb ('be right back'), you must have developed a sensitivity to the communicative needs of your textees, because these forms show you are responding to them. If you are using imho ('in my humble opinion') or afaik ('as far as I know'), you must be aware of the possible effect your choice of language might have on them, because these forms show you are self-critical. Teenage texters are not stupid nor are they socially inept within their peer group. They know exactly what they are doing. (Crystal 2008: 162-3)

References

Crystal, D. (2008). Txting: the gr8 db8. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Extract from digital youth summary

2009-03-19T08:53:00.001Z

youth use online media to extend friendships and interests. Most youth use online networks to extend the friendships that they navigate in the familiar contexts of school, religious organizations, sports, and other local activities. They can be “always on,” in constant contact with their friends through private communications like instant messaging or mobile phones, as well as in public ways through social network sites such asMySpace and Facebook. With these “friendship-driven”practices, youth are almost always associating with people they already know in their offline lives. The majorityof youth use new media to “hang out” and extend existing friendships in these ways.

http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/report/digitalyouth-TwoPageSummary.pdf

Technology as conservative force

2009-03-18T17:21:00.000Z

Technology has not generally been a revolutionary force; it has been responsible for keeping things the same as much as changing them. (Edgerton 2006: 212)

References

Edgerton, D. (2006). The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. London: Profile Books

Physical and virtual space

2009-03-18T17:16:00.002Z

... we need to treat Internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces (Miller & Slater 2000: 5).

The idea of space having been fractured refers to the emergence of cyberspace as a distinctively new space that co-exists with physical space. Cyberspace has not displaced physical space, of course, and will not displace it. Nor, however, can physical space dismiss cyberspace. For the majority of young people in so-called developed countries who are now in adolescence, cyberspace has been integral to their experience of 'spatiality' since their early years. […] Co-existence is the destiny of these two spaces (Lankshear and Knobel 2006 :31-2).

References

Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. (2006). New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning. Maidenhead: Open University Press

Miller, D. & Slater, D. (2000). The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.

New Literacy Studies, New London Group, New Literacies

2009-03-18T16:54:00.004Z

New Literacy Studies: coming out of work by Gee and Street and Heath and Barton and Hamilton that specifically looked at literacy as a social practice. focusing on domains of practice.

the 'new literacies': comes more from the work of Lankshear and Knobel, identifying ways in which literacy is now something very different when considered in relation to the new communicative landscape. This 'new literacies' draws on theory from new literacy studies, but also draws on theory from other sources, particularly the 'New London Group' (Kress, Cope and Kalantzis and others) that looked at ways of understand meaning making in relation to Design and multimodality.

That dana boyd quote on 'glocalization'

2009-03-18T16:46:00.004Z

The digital era has allowed us to cross space and time, engage with people in a far-off time zone as though they were just next door, do business with people around the world, and develop information systems that potentially network us all closer and closer every day. Yet, people don't live in a global world - they are more concerned with the cultures in which they participate. (boyd: 2006)

Reference

boyd, d. (2006). 'G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide.' O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, CA. March 6.

My definition: RSS feeds

2009-03-18T16:34:00.002Z

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

The basic principle is that if a user decides that a web site such as the BBC News web site or a blog, has regularly updated content worth following, they can ‘subscribe’ to it. This involves finding the RSS feed (a kind of web address) for that site usually represented by an orange icon.

The users then copies the feed into something called an RSS reader (aka RSS aggregator) which displays the titles of new articles or posts as well, generally, as the first few lines. The user can then skim read the list that it produces. Clicking on any item in the list will take them to the full article. RSS readers include Google Reader but I like personal start pages like iGoogle, Netvibes and Pageflakes which also include this functionality.

Here's another great YouTube video definition:

RSS in Plain English
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

For mash get Smash

2009-03-18T16:29:00.003Z

There's an advert I loved as a kid (now, of course, on YouTube, that repository of collective cultural memory).

The ad was for a powdered mash potato mix (mmmm ... yummy) and featured robots from outer space laughing at simple earthlings making do with peeling and cooking actual potatoes.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uKt-KR1TsRg

It's how I think my own (digi)kids will react when I show them my old LPs (maybe even books?).

Gee on essayist literacy

2009-03-18T16:02:00.001Z

A further significant aspect of essayist prose style is the fictionalization of both the audience and the author. The 'reader' of an essayist text is not an ordinary human being but an idealization, a rational mind formed by the rational body of knowledge of which the essay is a part. By the same token the author is a fiction, since the process of writing and editing essayist texts leads to an effacement of individual and idiosyncratic identity. (Gee 1990: 60-61)

References

Gee, J. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses (2nd edition)

Barthes: landscape in a bean

2009-03-18T15:57:00.002Z

Ok, I'm going to use my blog in a really 'bad' way to post quotations and definitions I use/need a lot.

Here's the first:

There are said to be certain Buddhists whose ascetic practices enable them to see a whole landscape in a bean. (Barthes 1974: p.3)

References

Barthes, R. (1974) S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang.

Rough notes on the mobile internet

2009-03-09T08:52:00.005Z

One of the developments we've been looking at a lot recently is the growth of the 'mobile internet/mobile web'.

As an enthusiastic iPhone user I want to attribute this growth to Apple but suspect it's mainly:

mobile phone operators offering reasonably-priced (?) flat rate deals with unlimited internet access;
said mobile phone operators advertising the benefits of being able to access favourite sites ;

the proliferation of handsets and mobile browsers that give users access to a web that looks recognisably web-like (and not a horribly adulterated version). I think the iPhone set a standard that others still have to beat - there's no 'iPhone 'killer' yet although Samsung and LG are gaining ground - unlike Nokia and Blackberry.

Related to this I guess is the growth of the 'mobile app'. Here Apple's influence is again dominant with Microsoft and Nokia opening their own applications store. The apps I use on my iPhone for Facebook and Google are great - I wish we had something like it for our VLE.

Technology scare stories

2009-02-25T10:08:00.004Z

I'm posting belatedly on this non-story only as a convenient space to dump some links.

This article is a cool look at the data and links to some of the more lurid headlines of the tabloids:

Facebook 'cancer risk' http://www.nhs.uk/news/2009/02February/Pages/Facebookhealthstudy.aspx

Here's a quote I like on the 'digital native' question

2009-01-20T14:43:00.001Z

Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us.
Henry Jenkins
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/12/reconsidering_digital_immigran.html

Really rough notes on Lessig

2008-12-15T10:49:00.002Z

I'll add some stuff here later when I can access the blog ...

Lessig Remix

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TFdcPc-4Ris

First thoughts on the essay ...

2008-12-11T16:58:00.002Z

I'd really like the opportunity to do some reading, thinking and writing about blogging although not blogging in a formal educational context. I'm involved in a few educational blogging projects at Kingston University and will have to write something on this later on (perhaps in a dissertation?) but would like use this module to write about blogging as a voluntary activity used for other purposes.

The question I think I'll go for is 'Literacy is not a set of skills it is a social practice’. Discuss although I'd prefer to give it my own title. I'm assuming the titles are like jazz scores that we can improvise around? How about Stories from the blogosphere: reflections on blogging's 'active sociality' ? Essentially, the essay would explore some of the ways in which blogging is an inherently social activity and would look in depth at a couple of representative examples. Informed by analogue/pre-digital practices and enabled by specific technological affordances, blogging constitutes a new literacy practice characterised by what Lankshear and Knobel call an 'active sociality'.

I have a list of readings - let me know if there are any articles/book you know of that might be useful.

In terms of plan or structure for the assignment, I'm not there yet. I had the idea of the representative examples, the 'stories from the blogosphere', being quasi-separate pieces of analysis (perhaps up to 1,000 words each) with a 'core' argument (of 3-3,500 words). The core argument and 'stories' would be connected though.

I've no section subheadings yet but there are some areas that interest me around the ideas of private-sphere, dialogue-driven literacies coming into the public sphere and of the blogosphere as oppositional counter-public sphere.

I am interested in interviewing - probably via email - the blog authors. Is there any specific guidance on this? Is there a consent form or recommended wording about use of text from interviewees for the purposes of an essay?

Finally, I'm keen on producing something digital and would appreciate the team's (sceptical) blessing. I've past form in this area - check out We have never been digital if you've time.

The pedagogic medium is the message?

2008-12-11T09:10:00.009Z

One of the things I've been thinking and posting about recently - and it's created conflict with some of the MA course team - is that in terms of teaching, learning and assessment practices, the medium is the message.

For example, if I wanted to run on module on critical pedagogy, would it make sense to 'deliver' (deposit into student accounts?) that module via a series of weekly lectures, fortnightly seminars and a 3,000- word essay from a selection of titles that I, as the module leader, had developed?

I guess my own answer to that question is no; the types of learning activites and assessment opportunities we construct demonstrate to students what constitutes knowing and acting in an appropriate way in a given area of intellectual inquiry. To run such a module in such a way would surely run counter to the core ideas covered (e.g. the student-teaching power relationship)?

Maybe this is too extreme; maybe it's perfectly coherent intellectually to deliver this module in this way if the learning outcomes require some form of description of, for example, Freire's core ideas or their application to practice. However, it's a missed opportunity for 'deep' rather than 'surface' learning.

Returning to my (their) MA (whose course is it anyway?), the core concepts of Module 1 seem to be:

literacies as plural
literacy practices and events as socially embedded and operating in distinct domains
the growing importance of multiple semiotic modalities in emerging text-making practices.

My grouse is about an assessment that privileges one kind of academic literacy (the essay) and doesn't appear to wish to license exploration to explore other (e.g. digital, possibly multimodal) forms of constructing academic discourse or other ways of being academically literate.

Really rough notes on academic literacies

2008-12-09T16:39:00.006Z

From: Lillis, T. (2001). Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire. London: Routledge.

Student writing is at the centre of teaching and learning in HE in the UK, being seen as the way in which students consolidate their understanding of subject areas, as well as the means by which tutors can come to learn about the extent and nature of individual students' understanding. However, the principal function of student writing is increasingly that of gate keeping. Writing is a key assessment tool, with students passing or failing courses according to the ways in which they respond to, and engage in, academic writing tasks. (Lillis 2001: 20)

However, it would be wrong to think of the 'essay' as a clearly defined genre if by 'genre' we mean something like a text type. For 'essay' (and hence the scare quotes) is really institutionalised shorthand for a particular way of constructing knowledge which has come to be privileged within the academy. In order to signal this broader notion of a particular way of making meaning in texts, it is more useful to talk of a particular academic literacy practice, essaylist literacy, which I explore in more detail in Chapter 2. (Lillis 2001: 20)

Whilst the view prevails that essays/student academic texts are unproblematic forms, the construction of which should be part of students' 'common sense' knowledge, experience from this and other studies indicates that student academic texts are expected to be constructed in and through conventions which are often invisible to both tutors and students. That the student-writers should struggle with the conventions of an institution which is strange to them is not surprising. However, this strangeness is compounded by the fact that such conventions are treated as if they are 'common sense' and are communicate through wordings as if these are transparently meaningful. Tutors may know essayist conventions implicitly, having been socialised into them through years of formal schooling, and in many cases through socio-discursive practices in their homes and communities. But students, particularly those from so-called 'non-traditional' backgrounds, may not, as [75] is reflected in the recurring questions listed in this chapter.[76]

The confusion the student-writers experience is so all pervasive a dimension of their experience in HE that it is useful to name this the 'institutional practice of mystery'. This practice is ideologically inscribed in that it works against those least familiar with the conventions surrounding academic writing - that is, students from social groups historically excluded from higher education. Such a practice works against their participation in HE in the following interrelated ways. Firstly, exclusion occurs becuase what is assumed to be 'common sense' is in fact only one privileged literacy practice; student outsiders cannot know the conventions embedded in such a practice unless these are taught. [...] Secondly, the dominant monologic addressivity within HE does not facilitate access to the privileged/privileging resources of essayist literacy. The writing and reading of students' written texts is consonant with the fictionalisation of participants in essayist literacy. However, whilst student-writers need to become familiar with this aspect of the practice - the denial of actual students and tutors with specific histories and interests - it unnecessarily complicates the students' learning of essayist literacy. [76]

Student-writers' desire fopr greater opportunities for dialogue between tutors and students, as real participants in the construction and interpretation of texts, is repeatedly expressed and seems to hold out for student-writers the promise of learning essayist conventions as a key part of their participation in higher education. (Lillis 2001: 132)

Cope, B. & M. Kalantzis (eds) (1993). The Powers of Literacy: A genre approach to teaching writing. London: Falmer Press.

Creme, P. & M. Lea (1997). Writing at University, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Hyland, K. (2000). Disciplinary Discourses. Harlow: Longman.

Jones, C., Turner, J. & Street, B.V. (eds) 1999 Students Writing in the University, Benjamins, Amsterdam.

Lea, M. & B. Stierer (2000). Student Writing in Higher Education. Buckingham: Open University
Press.

Mitchell, S. (1994). The Teaching and Learning of Argument in Sixth Forms and Higher Education. Hull: The Leverhulme Trust/The University of Hull.
Sharples, M. (1999). How We Write. London: Routledge.Bibliography

Lea, M. & Street, B. V. (1998). Student Writing and Staff Feedback in Higher Education: An Academic Literacies Approach. Studies in Higher Education 23(2):157-72.

Lillis, T. (1999). Whose Common Sense? In C. Jones, J. Turner. & B. V. Street (eds), Students Writing in the University, pp 127-47. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Lillis, T. (2001). Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire. London: Routledge.

Ivanic, R. (1997). Writing and Identity. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Street, B.V. (1999). Academic Literacies. In C. Jones, J. Turner, & B. V. Street (eds), Students Writing in the University, pp 193-227. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Blogging essay references

2008-12-09T16:21:00.003Z

References

Barton, D. (2007 2nd Edition). Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Oxford: Blackwell.

Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Bruns, A. & Jacobs, J. (eds) (2006). Uses of Blogs. New York: Peter Lang.

Cheung, C. (2004 2nd Edition). Identity Construction and Self-Presentation on Personal Homepages: Emancipatory Potentials and Reality Constraints. In D. Gauntlett and R. Horsley (eds) Web.Studies. London: Arnold. 53-68

Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.) (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. London: Routledge.

Davies, J. and Merchant, G. (2006). Looking from the Inside Out: academic blogging as new literacy. In C. Lankshear & M. Knobel (eds) A New Literacies Sampler. New York: Peter Lang 167‐198

Hodkinson, P. & Lincoln, S. (2008). Online journals as virtual bedrooms?: Young people, identity and personal space. Young, 16 (1), 27-46

Huffaker, D. A. & Calvert, S. L. (2005). Gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, . 10(2). Accessed 20 Nov. 2008 <http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html>

Keen, A.(2008). The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the rest of today’s user-generated media are killing our culture and economy. London and Boston: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Lévy, P. (2001). Cyberculture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Lindemann, K. (2005). Lives Online: Narrative Performance, Presence and Community in LiveJournal.com. Text and Performance Quarterly, 25(4), 354–72.

Lovink, G. (2008) Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. New York and London: Routledge.

Reed, A. (2005). "My Blog is Me": Texts and Persons in UK Online Journal Culture (and anthropology). Ethnos, 70(2), 220–42.

Graves, L. (2007). The Affordances of Blogging: A Case Study in Culture and Technological Effects. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 31(4), 331-346

Grusin, R.(1994). What is an Electronic Author? Theory and the Technological Fallacy. Configurations 2.3, The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature and Science, 469-483. Accessed from: <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v002/2.3grusin.html>

Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2007) New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Lankshear, C.& Knobel, M. (eds) (2007). A New Literacies Sampler. New York: Peter Lang.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press.

Ware, I. (2008). Andrew Keen Vs the Emos: Youth, Publishing, and Transliteracy. M/C Journal, 11: 4. Accessed from: <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/41>

Writing style

2008-12-09T14:40:00.002Z

JD asks: When you read a learner’s writing what makes you pleased? What things do you look for?

I don't want to write a long list; instead, let me tell you about a final-year essay I once marked. It was on a French autobiographical text by Claude Duneton called Je suis comme une truie qui doute ('I am a doubting sow') and was story of a working-class kid made good, who becomes a teacher, but later doubts the role of school system in creating a more equal society. The text is sort of 'Bourdieu lite' and was perfect for my module on post-'68 culture.

My student submitted late, after countless redrafts (he felt early versions replicated my lectures) and requests for extensions but eventually produced an assessment. What a read! - initially I was shocked at his slang and pop cultural references - then read on and I understood what he was up to. He'd created a text that mimicked Duneton in its use of slang, invective, polemic and self-disclosure. He even prefaced sections with quotes from songs - e.g. lines from Pulp's Common People - Duneton does this but the cultural references are 60s-based (e.g. Lennon's w-c hero).

He'd got the book completely - understanding key ideas and the meaning of its style. He'd made a connection between the book and his own life. I gave it 85% - although I could have easily failed it. The external approved the mark in spite of me flagging it as a potential 'problem'.

That's all but the things that made me pleased were not the things that I initially looked for.

There's probably a message about assessment here - don't be too explicit in assessment criteria, license challenges to your assessment regime etc..

Recalling the essay ten years later, as I start thinking about an essay for my MA, it made me realise that writing an essay is an act of ventriloquism, fiction or pastiche; the adoption of a voice that is not one's own but belonging to others that is a requirement of the performance of academic discourse.

Variations on a meme

2008-12-01T11:58:00.006Z

What's a meme? Is it the same as a viral? Yes, kind of, but no, not really strictly speaking ...

A meme is something in the air, that goes around, passed on from person to person. Sounds pretty viral-like so far.

However, it's not the same as a viral which is generally content (e.g. video) that self-propagates as it's forwarded from person to person (via email, Facebook etc.). I suppose you could argue that virals are a little passive - I find a funny video, I have a laugh, I pass it on to some friends who have a laugh at it too and pass it on in turn ad infintum (or usually until it comes back to me).

A meme involves more participation in the creation of new - in the sense of remixed, remade, adapted - content.

Here's an example: someone comes up with the idea of expressing song lyrics in the form of a PowerPoint-style pie chart graphic. The chart goes up - on Facebook, Flickr etc. - and in a short space of time there are hundreds - if not thousands - of riffs on the theme. If I meme (I think it's used as a verb) I'm creating my own take on an established convention - in this case re-articulating the lyrics of a song as a user-friendly graphic. There's stylistic play and parody aplenty here as memers (I think it can be used as an agent noun) simultaneously spoof pop lyrics and business-pitch presentation styles.

Where's it come from? Dunno ... but it looks like the thing you'd do if you were a student or bored office worker. Using MS Office and other software to have a laugh and take the piss out of both cheesy pop culture and naff business sales speils. The song chart meme in particular feels like the work of early 20 somethings to mid 30 somethings in its slacker, post The Office (UK and US), smirking, parodic aesthetic. I quite like it too ...

Song Chart Meme
http://flickr.com/photos/boyshapedbox/sets/72157603957925616/

Let's finish on a pretentious note: memes remind me of OULIPO, a group of mainly French writers drawn to the idea of la contrainte, constraint, as a means of generating new text. Meme-ing though is multimodal.

One problem with the term meme is that the Dawkins-derived metaphor doesn't assert the primacy of creativity; it is suggests a natural process of self-propagation without human agency.

Romanticism Redux: blogging as (sometimes) very old literacy practice

2008-11-19T12:30:00.001Z

Just came across a reference in some old notes on blogging from a few years back.

It's from Joe Clark, a Canadian blogger, who writes:

A blog is a form of exteriorized psychology. It’s a part of you, or of your psyche; while a titanium hip joint or a pacemaker might bring technology inside the corporeal you, a Weblog uses technology to bring the psychological you outside of it. [emphasis mine]

Deconstructing “You’ve Got Blog”

Clark is articulating the Romantic view of writing as expression, an exteriorisation of an already fully constituted interiority (my inner self, psyche or the "Real Me").

It's a long way from 'identity performance' and 'distributed selfhood'.

Ian Hutchby on affordances and the text metaphor

2008-11-18T17:08:00.003Z

Really interesting extracts from Hutchby on affordances and the text metaphor:

Grint and Woolgar (1997) suggest the intriguing notion that technologies
should be treated as ‘texts’which are ‘written’ (i.e. configured) in certain ways by their developers, producers and marketers, and have to be ‘read’ (i.e. interpreted) by their users or consumers. The writers of these technology-texts may seek to impose particular meanings on the artefact, and to constrain the range of possible
interpretations open to users.Users, by contrast,may seek to produce readings of the technology-text which best suit the purposes they have in mind for the artefact. It is in the dynamic between these processes that sociologists can begin to locate the
meaningful social reality of technologies. Neither the writing nor the reading of technology-texts is determinate: both are open, negotiated processes. Although there may be ways that technology-texts have ‘preferred’ readings built into them, it is always open to the user to find a way around this attempt at interpretive closure. A good example is the telephone. As Frissen (1995) points out, one of the early ways that the telephone was marketed to a mass audience (‘written’, in Grint and Woolgar’s terms) was as an instrumental tool useful for business negotiations (for men) and the management of household services (for women).However, women in particular began to ‘read’ this technology in quite a different way – as a tool for sociability, for chatting – and after a while the manufacturers, sensitive to this new reading, began to market what was to all intents a ‘different’ technology to the one they had begun with. (Hutchby 201: 445)

... different technologies possess different affordances, and these affordances constrain the ways that they can possibly be ‘written’ or ‘read’. (Hutchby 201: 447)

... the range of possibilities for interpretation and action is nowhere near as open for either ‘writers’ or ‘readers’ as the technology as text metaphor implies. (Hutchby 201: 450)

My aim has been to argue for an acceptance that our interpretations and uses
of technological artefacts, while important, contingent and variable, are constrained
in analysable ways by the ranges of affordances that particular artefacts possess. The
social constructivist consensus has usefully brought to the forefront the recognition
that social processes are involved in all aspects of technology, and not simply in its
effects upon society. But we can become too fixated on the social shaping of technology at the expense of an equally pressing, though differently framed, concern with the technological shaping of social action. (Hutchby 201: 453)

The affordances of an artefact are not things which impose themselves upon humans’ actions with, around, or via that artefact.But they do set limits on what it is possible to do with, around, or via the artefact. By the same token, there is not one but a variety of ways of responding to the range of affordances for action and interaction that a technology presents.We can analyse the development of those responses empirically, but in order to do so we have to accept that technological artefacts do not amount simply to what their users make of them; what is made of them is accomplished in the interface between human aims and the artefact’s affordances.(Hutchby 201: 453)

The Facebook phone - affordances and technological determinism again

2008-11-18T13:16:00.008Z

A bit more on emerging technologies and social practices mutually informing their respective development. This is going to get a bit ragged and random ... I may have to return and edit.

We know how significant usage of both mobile phones and social networking sites are, well lots of the mobile phone manufacturers and networks are plugging phones that offer easy access to SNSs (see UK advertising campaign from 2008):

There's also a forthcoming 'Facebook phone' that will offer much cheaper access:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/nov/13/telecoms-facebook

Finally, the SNSs too have been active developing apps - the best being the Facebook app for the iPhone.

Anyway, all this is to make the point that technology doesn't remain static; it's developing in response to new social trends (e.g. popularity of SNSs, desire for permanent networked connectivity, constant 'intimate co-presence' facilitated by SNSs etc.) - trends which it plays a role in developing in turn.

Existing technologies such as mobile phones received a makeover to support the growing popularity of networked practices - e.g. smart phones developed a capacity for web access, email and other data services, still and video camera for shots that can be uploaded and shared.

So, camera-equipped smart phones which make it easy to upload pictures to sites like Facebook or Flickr might be said to be responding to existing - although still newish - practices but also create new social media behaviours of their own.

Lessig on Wikipedia

2008-11-18T12:37:00.003Z

This is an extract from Lawrence Lessig's blog. It's a defence against some of the claims made in Keen's book. I'm particularly interested in the section on Wikipedia which has a bad press in HE:

The wiki fallacy

Keen spends a great deal of time attacking Wikipedia, and its founder, Jimmy Wales. As Keen writes, "Wikipedia ... is almost single-handedly killing the traditional information business." (p127-8). I take it not even Wales would exaggerate the importance of Wikipedia like this. And again, implicit in Keen's argument is the efficiency fallacy mentioned above.
But the real error here is betrayed in the following:
Since Wikipedia's birth, more than fifteen thousand contributors have created nearly three million entries in over a hundred different languages—none of them edited or vetted for accuracy (p4).
"None of them edited or vetted for accuracy"? On one level, of course, this is absurdly false. Wikipedia is constantly edited, and attributions constantly vetted for accuracy. Indeed, for many of the articles, the level of editing and vetting is vastly greater than any article published in any encyclopedia ever.
But on a different level, what Keen must mean is that it is not "edited" or "vetted" by experts. Or exclusively by experts (for again, experts certainly participate in Wikipedia). This is related to Keen's obsession (indeed, I'm sure if he has one, his shrink must have a field day with this obsession) with "experts" and makers of "taste." So central is this to Keen's argument, it deserves its own heading.

Keen's "The Cult of the Amateur": BRILLIANT!

Lessig on 'true' and 'false' content sharing sites

2008-11-18T10:56:00.001Z

Interesting blog post making a distinction between 'true' and 'false' content sharing.

Unusually, YouTube, a site that's often quoted as empobying the Web 2.0 ethos represents 'false' sharing: there's no way to download, just the option to embed.

http://lessig.org/blog/2006/10/the_ethics_of_web_20_youtube_v.html

Clay Shirky on blogging

2008-11-17T20:06:00.005Z

I like these extracts from Clay Shirky - a good risposte to those who claim blogs are trivial, inconsequential nonsense:

... dozens of weblogs have an audience of a million or more, and millions have an audience of a dozen or less. (Shirky 2008: 84)

And it's easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing - why would anyone put such drivel out in public? It's simple. They're not talking to you.
(Shirky 2008: 85)
We misread these seemingly inane posts because we're so unused to seeing written material in public that isn't intended for us. The people posting messages to one another in small groups are doing a different kind of communicating than people posting messages for hundreds or thousands of people to read. More is different, but less is different too. An audience isn't just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn't just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack. The bloggers and social network users operating in small groups are part of a community, and they are enjoying something analogous to the privacy of the mall. On any given day you could go to the food court and find a group of teenagers hanging out and talking to one another. They are in public, and you could certainly sit at the next table over and listen in on them if you wanted to. And what would they be saying to one another? They'd be saying, "I can't believe I missed you last night!!! Trac talked to you and said you were TRASHED off your ASS!" They'd be doing something similar to what they are doing on LiveJournal or Xanga, in other words, but if you were listening in on their conversation at the mall, as opposed to reading their post, it would be clear that you were the weird one. (Shirky 2008: 85)

References

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press.

Lankshear and Knobel on two divergent mindsets

2008-11-17T15:35:00.004Z

The first mindset [newcomer/outsider] assumed that the contemporary world is essentially the way it has been throughout the modern-industrial period, only now it is more technologized or, alternatively, technologized in a new and very sophisticated way. To all intents and purposes, however, the world on which these new technologies are brought to bear is more or less the same economic, cultural, social world that has evolved throughout the modern era, where things got done by means of routines that were predicated on long-standing assumptions about bodies, materials, property and forms of ownership, industrial techniques and principles, physical texts, face-to-face dealings (and physical proxies for them), and so on. The second mindset [insider] assumes that the contemporary world is different in important ways from the world we have known, and that the difference is growing. This is related to the development of new digital electronic internetworked technologies and new ways of doing things and new ways of being that are enabled by these technologies. (Lankshear and Knobel 2006: 33-4)

References

Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. (2006). New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Defining affordances

2008-11-17T14:26:00.007Z

Lucas Graves has an interesting article on blogging, although blogging is really just the example or case study, as the article is really about the concept of 'affordances'.

He cites the work of both Ian Hutchby (2001) and Brian Rappert (2003) whose concept of affordances attempt to construct a middle ground between technological determinism and social constructivism.

For Hutchby, “[d]ifferent technologies possess different affordances, and these affordances constrain the ways they can possibly be ‘written’ or ‘read’ ” (Hutchby 2001: 447). Rappert takes a similar view that affordances are the perceived properties inherent in an object that suggest - but do not determine- its uses. Rappert views technology as both “configured by and configuring, affected by and affecting” (p. 569) social practices. He argues that “[w]hile objects do exist, the way in which we understand them is always subject to negotiation and interpretation” (p. 571).

Graves argues that the technology of blogging didn't just come along and change people's practices; rather, blogging technologies were designed to "facilitate an activity that was already beginning to take place, in the same way that the development of the telephone and telephone networks conformed to the emerging practices of telephone culture." (Graves 2007: 243). He writes of the transformation of blogs as simple web pages to the sort of software we recognise now which automatically arranges posts in reverse order. He goes on to argue that blogging, as a distinct genre, emerged at the "intersection of technology and society: Technology and sociocultural practice evolve together, each feeding back into the other" (Graves 2007: 343).

Affordances: Quick definitions

"I will argue that affordances are functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object. In this way, technologies can be understood as artefacts which may be both shaped by and shaping of the practices humans use in interaction with, around and through them. This ‘third way’ between the (constructivist) emphasis on the shaping power of human agency and the (realist) emphasis on the constraining power of technical capacities opens the way for new analyses of how technological artefacts become important elements in the patterns of ordinary human conduct. (Hutchby 2001: 444)

“the affordances of the artifact: the possibilities for action that it offers” (Hutchby 2001: 449)

"the features of a technology that make a certain action possible" (Graves 2007 :332).

References

Graves, L. (2007). The Affordances of Blogging: A Case Study in Culture and Technological Effects. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 31(4), 331-346

Hutchby, I. (2001). Technologies, texts and affordances. Sociology: The Journal of the British

Sociological Association, 35(2), 441-456.

Rappert, B. (2003). Technologies, texts and possibilities: A reply to Hutchby. Sociology: The Journal of the British Sociological Association, 37(3), 565-580.

Henry Farrell on academic bloggin

2008-11-17T11:20:00.001Z

Not sure I'll need this link but it came up in JD's presentation.

Academic bloggers differ in their goals. Some are blogging to get personal or professional grievances off their chests or, like Black, to pursue nonacademic interests. Others, perhaps the majority, see blogging as an extension of their academic personas. Their blogs allow them not only to express personal views but also to debate ideas, swap views about their disciplines, and connect to a wider public. For these academics, blogging isn't a hobby; it's an integral part of their scholarly identity. They may very well be the wave of the future.

[...]

Why are so many academics beginning to blog? Academic blogs offer the kind of intellectual excitement and engagement that attracted many scholars to the academic life in the first place, but which often get lost in the hustle to secure positions, grants, and disciplinary recognition. Properly considered, the blogosphere represents the closest equivalent to the Republic of Letters that we have today. Academic blogs, like their 18th-century equivalent, are rife with feuds, displays of spleen, crotchets, fads, and nonsenses. As in the blogosphere more generally, there is a lot of dross. However, academic blogs also provide a carnival of ideas, a lively and exciting interchange of argument and debate that makes many scholarly conversations seem drab and desiccated in comparison. Over the next 10 years, blogs and bloglike forms of exchange are likely to transform how we think of ourselves as scholars. While blogging won't replace academic publishing, it builds a space for serious conversation around and between the more considered articles and monographs that we write.

Henry Farrell on academic blogging

Blogging as new literacy practice (sorry make that practices)

2008-11-17T07:02:00.025Z

In a discussion board forum, Julia asks:

[1] From looking at blogs and perhaps drawing from your experience of blogging, do you consider blogs to exemplify new literacy practices?

[2] Do you think that it is possible to keep a blog and still be of an ‘old’ mindset?

Here's my response:

[1] I think blogs simultaneously exemplify 'new' and 'old' literacy practices.

Blogs are over a decade old now (Happy Blogiversary) and there are now millions of them used for very different purposes.

It's inaccurate to homogenise blogging as a practice that can be ascribed to any one particular mindset. Like the term literacies, blogging probably needs to be conceptualised as a set of contextually defined practices (note the plural).

Some - but not all - uses of blogging might be said to exemplify new literacy practices where the text-making processes incorporate some features of digital textuality as defined by Guy Merchant (linking to other texts, embedding media, blurring of generic boundaries etc.).

[2] In spite of the affordances of blogging software, there is no reason why a user should not use his/her blog as a tool for verbose reflection (i.e. for monologuing, sounding off, one-way traffic) in an 'outsider/newcomer' mindset way without reader comments, links, quotations, blog roll, tags or embedded media content.

The possibilities for social interaction may well be bypassed by some blog users who see the tool as an online word processor - a bit like Word, or, more accurately Google Docs. For example, an undergraduate might use a blog to make reading notes that will be integrated into a essay; a tech-savvy postgrad might make notes of conference papers attended on an iPhone or ultracompact laptop.

My own use of blogging is more 'outsider/newcomer'; I use it to 'bookmark', tag, selectively quote from articles I've read, web sites I've found etc. that I think will be useful in my professional life. These notes could then be cut and paste into emails or discussion board posts, or I could send a link to the post to interested colleagues. For example, I've mentionned the Michael Wesch videos to a couple of people recently. I probably need a blog post with links to them that I can share quickly.

The next bits are more notes to self ...

Blogging characteristics and affordances:

minimal technological barriers to participation
dual structure - primary posts and secondary comments - supports dialogue, feedback, review, sharing (but also clearly demarcates readers and writers in an old skool way)
RSS feeds can be enabled allowing users to subscribe to new content
blog rolls linking to favourite blogs or on shared subject (creation of loosely coupled online learning communities)
tagging allowing ease of searching

Some social consequences ...

gatekeeper' model irrelevant (sorry Andrew Keen) - we're all publishing/broadcasting now (even if it's to nano-audiences)
publicising the private - (see post on Keen and Emo and Clay Shirky)

iPhone and gaming

2008-11-13T10:53:00.003Z

My son is very taken with my iPhone, especially some of the free games I've installed. He now wants an iPod Touch (and just wants cash from family for Xmas to pay for it). Watching him with it, it looks a credible portable gaming device in its own right.

This item from iLounge reinforced this impression:

Speaking in a brief interview as part of a larger article on the iPhone and iPod touch’s role in the industry, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that the devices may become viable options in the mobile gaming market. “I think the iPhone and iPod touch may emerge as really viable devices in the mobile games market this holiday season,” Said Jobs, noting that around a quarter of the 200 million App Store downloads thus far have been games. “Games sold via the App Store are the most profitable in terms of any of the formats we work on,” added Simon Jeffery, the U.S. president of Sega. Interestingly, Nintendo indicated that it already saw Apple as a competitor prior to its move into the mobile gaming space. “Whether you chose to play on your DS or listen to music on your iPod, we’re already in the same competitive space for time,” said Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo’s U.S. division. Meanwhile, John Carmack, founder of Id Software, said that although he doesn’t see the iPhone and iPod touch as direct competitors to Sony and Nintendo’s handhelds, Id is developing at least two iPhone games. “I don’t expect them to displace DSs and PSPs,” he said. “I think they will be a fairly robust market all by themselves.”

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/jobs-iphone-platform-may-become-viable-in-mobile-games-market/15649

Technological determinism/medium theory

2008-11-06T15:41:00.003Z

An article to ponder on some more. Here's a good bit from the conclusion:

A more sophisticated form of analysis must consider both the social forces and agencies responsible for the development and implementation of new technologies, and the properties and potentials inherent in the technologies themselves. [emphasis mine]

Potts, J. (2008) Who’s Afraid of Technological Determinism? Another Look at Medium Theory. Fibreculture Journal . 12. Accessed from: http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue12/issue12_potts.html

Lots of multis

2008-11-03T15:27:00.002Z

So far we've had 'multimodalities', 'multisemiotics' and 'multiliteracies'.

Another multi I've come across is 'multi-platform'. It often pops up in discussions of "360-degree commissioning" (see http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/focus_360degree_commissioning.html).

360-degree commissioning is all about creating content accessible from other platforms - 'multi-platforms' - such as including mobile phones and the internet.

The BBC series Torchwood has been cited as an example of 360 degree programming. However, Doctor Who looks a better example with a web site that includes MP3s to download, video clips, an RSS news feed, make your own video trailer or comic options and a range of online games.

Quick review of The Machine is Us/ing Us

2008-11-03T13:17:00.007Z

This is a rightly famous video about Web 2.0 and the bigger picture of what's new about digital culture.

The synthesized music (old-skool audio shorthand for "the Future") and swift editing of video - including that created by screen capture software like Camtasia or Captivate to grab sequences of key strokes and mouse movements - all evoke a rapidly moving landscape we've yet to fully get to grips with.

M. Wesch: The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

The opening sequence of a pencil writing on paper, annotating, a hand frantically rubbing out recalls a pre-digital era where text was (uni)linear. It switches to a sequence of a word processed text and its fluidity - easier editing, erasure and movement of words from one place on the page to another. At the end of this sequence, the idea of hypertext is introduced- texts are no longer bounded; users can now leap from one page to another with a click of the mouse.

From hypertext we leap to Yahoo and Wayback machine; this section defines html - the code that defines the way web pages look. In html form and content inseparable. Wesch claims that digital text is even better as form and content can be separated. Here, he briefly explains xml and the key idea that content can be reused; data can be exported free from formatting constraints. Another leap to images of blogs and of YouTube - exemplars of new forms of digital text offering users easier ways of participating.

Next, Wesch moves on to key Web 2.0 idea: "the wisdom of crowds"(Tim O'Reilly has pointed out that "users add value"). The web is no longer simply about linking to documents but about linking people. We haven't really begun to reflect on what this all means; we need to rethink copyright, authorship, aesthetics, identity, ourselves ...

This video response is an interesting (in places) counter argument:

Finally, I also enjoyed The Machine is Us/ing Us...for dummies.

literacy events -v- literacy practices

2008-10-24T13:44:00.006+01:00

Here's JD's useful distinction:

'literacy practices' = specific type of text making activity, e.g. writing shopping list
'literacy event'= specific instance of a literacy practice, e.g. child sitting with her Mum writing a list of things to buy (which is an instance of the 'literacy practice' of writing a shopping list)

Here are my thoughts ...shootin' from the hip ... thinking out loud ... not 100% sure I'm on the right track ...

Literacy events must surely precede literacy practices; characteristics from literacy events are abstracted and aggregated to construct an 'ideal' literacy practice (e.g. 'ideally' shopping lists are structured according to the shops or aisles from which products are to be selected so as to facilitate a more efficient shopping experience, they also indicate quantities of produce required etc.).

The idealised literacy practice must be realised - instantiated, exemplified, made text - through an individual communicative act that draws upon both the ideal characteristics of the literacy practice as well as from local resources (e.g. that individual's interests, their context etc.).

So, every literacy event is, potentially, a making new of a pre-existing literacy practice, e.g. a child may add stickers to her mum's shopping list or draw pictures.

I'm drawn to Street's assertion, cited by KP, that "literacy … is always instantiated, its potential realised, through local practices."(Street 2003:8).

I think I understand 'local'; insofar as all literacy events are socially-specific instantiations of literacy practices, they are local (i.e. deploying resources from, are meaningful in the context of, a specific scenario).

I'm guessing that 'local' doesn't just mean 'locale' and refer solely to geography but invokes other factors (class, ethnicity, gender, generation, myriad other individual factors)?What's the 'global' bit about though?

Here's an example to see if I'm the right track ... - south-London boys using lexis of US hip hop and/or elements of Jamaican patios in their text messages to one another? 'Global' here = influence of migration, popularity of black music/dance culture (mainly from US) on what we might think of as 'indigenous' varieties of (southern, metropolitan) English.

Not sure what 'indigenous' might mean now ... (the historicity of a group's association with a region?).

Reply to John

2008-10-24T10:02:00.000+01:00

> students need to be taught and use standard ways of spelling

I agree with you; insofar as there is a 'market' * (e.g. job market) in which particular linguistic performances (e.g. use of standard spelling) have a value, then we'd be doing our students a disservice not to support them develop such competencies (I nearly wrote 'literacies'!).

I guess the thing that bugs me a bit is the 'literacy in the singular' attitude that's intolerant of language forms that deviate from that standard - e.g. txtspk - even when those language forms are creative and rich and absolutely appropriate to context. This article - I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language exemplifies this attitude.

Best,

Tony

* see Bourdieu

The constitution of a linguistic market creates the conditions for an objective competition in and through which the legitimate competence can function as linguistic capital, producing a profit of distinction on the occasion of each social exchange.(Bourdieu 1992: 55)

References

Bourdieu, P. (1992). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

CMD

2008-10-22T17:09:00.002+01:00

The association of literacy with writing/reading, the printed word in general, is interesting in the context of the forms of language emerging from digital environments and new technologies which look like they hover somewhere between speech and writing.

Here's Susan Herring:

Various attempts have been made by linguists to classify CMD [computer-mediated discourse], starting in the 1980s and early 1990s. Accustomed to dealing with two basic modalities of language – speech and writing – these linguists first asked: Is it a type of writing, because it is produced by typing on a keyboard and read as text on a computer screen? Is it “written speech” (Maynor 1994), because it exhibits features of orality, including rapid message exchange, informality, and representations of prosody? Or is it a third type, intermediate between speech and writing, or in any event characterized by unique production and reception constraints (Ferrara, Brunner & Whittemore 1991; Murray 1990)?
Herring, S. (2007). A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. Language@Internet, 4. http://www.languageatinternet.de/articles/2007/761/Faceted_Classification_Scheme_for_CMD.pdf

"Could customers please switch off there mobile phones"

2008-10-22T16:35:00.003+01:00

On a discussion board forum for a module I did last year on language and online learning, there was a lot of agreement that the notice could customers please switch off there mobile phones was irritating. What might this irritation tell about posters' attitudes to language?

What we have is an instance of someone mistakenly using the pronoun ‘there’ instead of the possessive adjective ‘their’. Pierre Bourdieu would argue that ‘their’ being the correct word to use in this context is entirely arbitrary. There’s no reason why it couldn’t be spelt ‘there’. Plenty of other words, after all, have the same spellings but different meanings. Academics and institutions, over time, have formalised and codified language - defining ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ usage, e.g. “could customers please switch off their mobile phones” is correct but “could customers please switch off there mobile phones” is incorrect.

Bourdieu argues that definitions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ use of language (spelling, puncuation, vocabulary etc.) are, in fact, manifestations of the power of those who sustain their social distinction through language. Knowing the difference between ‘there’ and ‘their’ is a form of “linguistic capital”; I can use this in my social exchanges to produce what Bourdieu calls “a profit of distinction” (aka “I am better than you”).

My grammar and I

2008-10-22T15:20:00.004+01:00

Can Bourdieu shed light on the success of Eat, shoots and leaves and My grammar and I?

Let's take some extracts from Language and Symbolic and Power:

The constitution of a linguistic market creates the conditions for an objective competition in and through which the legitimate competance can function as linguistic capital, producing a profit of distinction on the occasion of each social exchange.(Bourdieu 1992: 55)
The dominant competence functions as linguistic capital, securing a profit of distinction in its relation to other competences only in so far as certain conditions (the unification of the market and the uneven distribution of chances of access to the means of production of the legitimate competence, and to the legitimate places of expression) are continuously fulfilled, so that the groups which possess that competence are able to impose it as the only legitimate one in the formal markets (the fashionable, the educational, political and administrative markets) and in most of the linguistic interactions in which they are involved.
It is for this reason that those who seek to defend a threatened linguistic capital, such as knowledge of the classical languages in present-day France, are obliged to wage a total struggle. One cannot save the value of a competence unless one saves a market, in other words, the whole set of political and social conditions of production of the producers/consumers. (Bourdieu 1992: 56-7)

References

Bourdieu, P. (1992). Language and Symbolic and Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Literacy event 4: discussion board post

2008-10-22T12:56:00.005+01:00

I guess this belongs to the domain of university (school for grown-ups)? It's a discussion board post to a thread on online netiquette so I guess the literacy practice is responding to a tutor's question.

Part of me is revelling in the new-found ability to articulate my own opinions (I'm usually using boards as a moderator/facilitator where I have much less freedom to have my say).

However, I can't be too confrontational and I don't want to give offence to the course team. So, even though I criticise the netiquette document, the criticism in enclosed in a 'praise burger' (i.e. two complimentary slices of soft bun-like praise). I'm trying to look at the issue from a couple of angles and understand why the guidelines are included. I close the post with an attempt at humour - cued by manic use of exclamation marks - to defuse any possible offence and to present myself as an approachable team player.

The persona I might be trying to construct in this - but perhaps more so in other posts - is a kind of guy you can knock ideas back and forward with. I'm not suggesting that I'm not like that in 'real life'; simply that in the context of a course where we don't know one another, it's important to present oneself as open to new ideas and respectful of others' opinions.

Literacy event 3: SNS wall post

2008-10-22T12:35:00.010+01:00

Elgg (open source SNS) wall-to-wall exchange with a work colleague. The domain is work but the informality in the exchange and its subject matter relate to the home domain. The literacy practice is asking for recommendations.

It's the early days of the Elgg installation so we're posting things as part of the process of getting to know how it works. The colleague whose wall I'm posting to is not a friend although we get on well and share similar interests. He's a good guy to talk to about techie things and is generous in his advice. There's none of the banter that's found in the txt message though because I don't know him so well and there's less shared history and discovered commonality.

Literacy event 2: a work email

2008-10-22T12:22:00.008+01:00

This is a work-related email to two colleagues, one of whom is my line manager). The literacy practice is answering a question/solving a problem.

I'd say we've a more formal working relationship - formal in an HE, not a armed forces way - and the email is in response to an earlier email articulating some problems with our Elgg (an open source SNS) installation.

Sections of the earlier email are quoted and answers fairly brief. Key issues are explained and a way forward outlined. There's no conversational joking - it's all to-the-point, professional stuff.

I tend to use email in lieu of a phone call, especially when:

multiple recipients are involved
I want to leave an audit trail ("at today's meeting we agreed to ...")
I'm pressed for time and want to avoid the small talk that a phone call entails ("Hi X, how are things etc., etc. ... the reason I'm calling is ...")

Is another reason I use email a lot to do with the culture of the workplace where email is the default medium, even replacing face-to-face conversations with colleagues who are only a few doors down the corridor?

Literacy event 1: a txt exchange

2008-10-22T12:11:00.008+01:00

Right, let's have a go at looking at my own literacy events.

Here's a short exchange of txt messages between a myself and a friend. We're a similar age, work in the same place and have sons the same age. The messages are about arranging for the boys to get together. The literacy practice then is 'agreeing a date/making an apointment. The domain is home, not work.

I have a particular style with this friend: lots of in-joke references to our middle-class lifestyles and privileged children, 'pet' names only used in emails and txts ('Mr T')' some camping it up ('dearest fruit'). Banter (mock offensiveness) is a key aprt of how we communicate textually (less so in spoken English). It's not a style I replicate with other friends - it's part of a particular dynamic between us. I think this shared style evolved over time and involved initiation and uptake. A style got developed and stuck.

My literacy practices

2008-10-22T11:49:00.003+01:00

My literacy practices these days are predominantly technology-mediated.

Typically, in a day, I:

txt/send SMS messages
email
post to blog
post to discussion boards (my own KU courses as well as external ones I'm a student on)
post to walls, comments boxes etc on One Community (our Elgg installation)

Because these literacy practices are technology-mediated and asynchronous, I'm engaging in them at various times and places: home and office, working hours and early mornings or evenings.

It's difficult, given the informality of my working environment and good relationships with colleagues, to differentiate home literacy practices and work-related literacy practices. The domains may be different but I'm not sure the literacy practices are massively different.

I'm with Barton on the porous nature of domains:

The practices leak from one domain to the other and there is much overlap.
(Barton 1994: 40)

References

Barton, D. (1994) Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Oxford: Blackwell.

2008-10-21T14:26:00.006+01:00

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for
their markings -

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek
without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on
the hand.

Craig Raine, A Martian sends a postcard home

Internet quotes

2008-10-21T13:58:00.002+01:00

I have to put my quotes somewhere so why not here?

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog.
Peter Steiner. The New Yorker, page 61 of July 5 (Vol.69
(LXIX) no. 20), 1993. (graphic)
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." John Gilmore (EFF). [source: Gilmore states: "I have never found where I first said this. But everyone believes it was me, as do I. If you find an appearance of this quote from before March '94, please let me know." Also in NYT 1/15/96, quoted in CACM 39(7):13. Later, Russell Nelson comments (and is confirmed by Gilmore) that on December 05 1993 Nelson sent Gilmore an email stating, "Great quote of you in Time magazine: 'The net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it.'"]

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/archived_content/people/reagle/inet-quotations-19990709.html

The digital revolution will not be televised

2008-10-16T12:35:00.009+01:00

I really love digital stuff but I'm kinda sceptical about some of the more grandiose claims made about a 'digital revolution' or a radical 'paradigm shift'.

I've written about this before, but here's a quick 'n' dirty animation (inspired by Terry Gilliam and realised for me by Darrel Manuel - thanks Darrel) articulating this scepticism:

I tend to talk, instead, of a 'digital turn'. Similar metaphor to 'revolution' I guess although I imagine it more like an oil tanker changing course or a flower turning towards the sun.

Print-based texts can be multimodal, multivocal generic hybrids too

2008-10-16T09:44:00.004+01:00

Print-based texts can be multimodal, multivocal generic hybrids too.

This is a picture of me holding my copy of Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project:

The book :

contains text and pictures (some ambiguous ones taken by Hemon's friend, others of the corpse of Lazarus, a real-life Jewish immigrant shot by the head of Chicago's police);

reworks (lifting from contemporary newspapers, some invention) the anti-immigrant discourse of early C20th USA

blurs generic boundaries (fiction/autobiography - main character is a Bosnian immigrant like Hemon)

Is Wikipedia a Bad Thing?

2008-10-15T12:29:00.006+01:00

Some more on Clay Shirky, this time about Wikipedia (the site loathed by thousands of academics - see image below taken from an essay check sheet).

Wikipedia has now transcended the traditional functions of an encyclopedia. Within minutes of the bombs going off in the London transit system, someone created a Wikipedia page called "7 July 2005 London bombings." The article's first incarnation was five sentences long and attributed the explosions to a power surge in the Underground, one of the early theories floated before the bus bombings was linked to the Underground explosions. The Wikipedia page received more than a thousand edits in its first four hours of existence, as additional news came in; users added numerous pointers to traditional news sources (more symbiosis) and a list of contact numbers for people either trying to track loved ones or simply figuring out how to get home. What was conceived as an open encyclopedia in 2001 has become a general-purpose tool for gathering and distributing information quickly, a use that further cemented Wikipedia in people's minds as a useful reference work. (Shirky 2008: 116-7)

References

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press.

Broadcast -v- Communications media (Clay Shirky)

2008-10-15T12:05:00.007+01:00

I've only just got around to reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and was stuck by his interesting take on the blurring of the distinction between broadcast (central, one-way, one-to-many - e.g. TV, radio, newspapers) and communications (dispersed, two-way, initially one-to-one but increasingly now one-to-many - e.g. phone, fax or email) media.

Here's what he has to say:

Now that our communications technology is changing, the distinctions among those patterns of comunication are evaporating; what was once a sharp break between two styles of communicating is becoming a smooth transition. Most user-generated content is created as communication in small groups, but since we're so unused to communications media and broadcast media being mixed together, we think that everyone is now broadcasting. This is a mistake. (Shirky 2008: 87)

References

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press.

Quick postscriptum - a nice new term for UGC is "indigenous content"

What's "new" in New Literacy Studies? - First thoughts

2008-10-15T10:19:00.003+01:00

This article is a really good overview of the New Literacy Studies (NLS) - although I must admit that I found it kind of tough going. I think I'll get more out it it at the end of the course although I understand why it's required reading at the start.

Street summarises the recent scholarship the field of NLS. Literacy is not process of acquiring specific skills but a "social practice". Street adds that:

This entails the recognition of multiple literacies, varying according to time and space, but also contested in relations of power. (Street 2003: 77)

Street makes a distinction between two conceptualisations of literacy:

autonomous (a kind of centralised and top-down conception of reading/writing presumed to have beneficial effects)

ideological ("culturally sensitive" conception of diverse socially embedded practices informed by specific conceptions of knowing and being ) NLS then, embraces the ideological model of literacy.

Some issues raised in the article:

Problem with terminology; 'autonomous' model also deeply ideological although disguised as something neutral and transcultural.

NLS overly concerned with 'local' literacies?

Need to attend more fully to power relations between hegemonic (dominant) literacies and local literacies.

NLS and education - interest in gap between home and school literacies, need to use non-school experience, learning and literacies in school settings.

References

Street, B. (2003). What's "new" in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice. Current Issues in Comparative Education Vol.5(2) pp.77-91

Adding to Merchant's list - Ianto Ware on Keen and Emos

2008-10-13T15:07:00.006+01:00

Another defining characteristic of digital literacy practices might be the publicisation of the private? The family photo album is going online; pictures of nights out are posted to Facebook (minutes later?); details of travel and purchases are twittered or posted to blogs etc..

Here's a bit from an article by Ianto Ware on this:

What the rise of Web 2.0 has done is simply to bring everyday, private sphere dialogue driven literacies into the public sphere in a very obvious way.

Ware, I. (2008). Andrew Keen Vs the Emos: Youth, Publishing, and Transliteracy. M/C Journal, 11: 4. Accessed from: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/41

Lawrence Lessig on Andrew Keen

2008-10-13T15:04:00.004+01:00

Here's Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, on Andrew Keen (the full article is well worth a read though):

I think it is a great thing when amateurs create, even if the thing they create is not as great as what the professional creates. I want my kids to write. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop reading Hemingway and read only what they write. What Keen misses is the value to a culture that comes from developing the capacity to create—independent of the quality created. That doesn’t mean we should not criticize works created badly (such as, for example, Keen’s book…). But it does mean you’re missing the point if you simply compare the average blog to the NY times.
http://www.lessig.org/blog/2007/05/keens_the_cult_of_the_amateur.html

What a great, no-nonsense ripost to all those who claim blogs, YouTube etc. are drivel.

Why I like Michel de Certeau

2008-10-13T12:49:00.006+01:00

I couldn't find my notes in the loft. I did, however, find a battered paperback (in French!) of L'invention du quotidien:

I will post some definitions of strategies and tactics in a few days time but for now here are some thoughts on why I like Michel de Certeau and why he might be useful to this course.

Ok, I like de Certeau because he acknowledges the intelligence, imagination, resourcefulness and creativity of ordinary people. I think this is relevant to New Literacy Studies as it looks to be about acknowledging (valuing?) multiple ways of making and reading texts.

De Certeau maintains that the majority of ordinary people are denied access to the means of cultural production and have little choice but to consume the products of the dominant cultural economy of large corporations and multinationals. However, despite their apparent powerlessness, and in the face of a seemingly all-pervasive institutional control, ordinary people assert their own creativity in multifarious but hidden ways:

To a rationalized, expansionist and at the same time centralized, clamorous, and spectacular production corresponds another production, called "consumption." The latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisible, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order.
(de Certeau 1984, xii-xiii)

In another work called La Culture au pluriel (I'm not sure it's available in English translation), de Certeau writes of feeling awe-struck at the scale of this unacknowleded creativity:

I have to admit that there is no text, nor any institution that can ever take the place of, or compete with, the distant murmur that can be heard coming from machines, tools, kitchens - the thousands of noises of creative activity. Innumerable lexicons, strange vocabularies. They grow silent as soon as the museum or writing seizes fragments from them in order to make them speak their own interests. (quoted in Rigby 1991, 18)

I think one interesting development of the so-called digital age that I'd like to follow up is that this 'other' production is becoming more visible and less silent.

Video and image sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr, social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are providing new spaces for the articulation of "consumption".

References

De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rigby, B. (1991) Popular Culture in Modern France: A Study of Cultural Discourse. London: Routledge.

Digital texts are like the Pompidou Centre

2008-10-13T09:07:00.002+01:00

When I was a teenager, and desperately in love with the idea of living in Paris, I particularly liked le Centre Pompidou (aka Beaubourg).

Following up on my earlier comments on Merchant's definition of digital texts, I think they resemble Beaubourg's exoskeletal architecture - all the internal structural bits visible externally.

What I mean by that is that there's something about digital textuality that makes manifest some of the underlying features of all texts.

Adding to Merchant's list - microcontent

2008-10-10T16:50:00.002+01:00

Here's a possible addition to Guy Merchant's ten defining feaures of digital texts - microcontent.

This is Bryan Alexander's definition:

These sections of the Web break away from the page metaphor. Rather than following the notion of the Web as book, they are predicated on microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis are streams of conversation, revision, amendment, and truncation. Podcasts are shuttled between Web sites, RSS feeds, and diverse players. These content blocks can be saved, summarized, addressed, copied, quoted, and built into new projects.

References

Alexander, B.(2006) Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? Accessed from: http://connect.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0621.asp

Notes on writing the future in the digital age

2008-10-10T15:06:00.014+01:00

Merchant argues that the production and consumption of digital texts is very different to that of print-based texts. He lists the following characteristics:

A move from the fixed to the fluid: the text is no longer contained between the covers or by the limits of the page.
Texts become interwoven in more complex ways through the use of hyperlinks.
Texts can be easily revised, updated, added to and appended.
Genres borrow freely, hybridise and mutate.
Texts can become collaborative and multivocal, with replies, links, posted comments and borrowing - the roles of readers and writers overlap.
Reading and writing paths are often non-linear.
Texts become more densely multimodal (as multimedia allows for a rich interplay of modes).
The communicative space is shared and location diminishes in significance as the local fuses with the global.
The impression of co-presence and synchronous engagement increases.
Boundaries begin to blur (work/leisure; public/private; serious/frivolous).

(Merchant 2007, 122)

I think I agree with Merchant on these characteristics but with a couple of biggish reservations:

Firstly, because digital texts can do all these things (e.g. enable collaborative authoring, revision, blur generic boundaries etc.) does it mean that this is how they are actually being used? In essence, is Merchant describing actual manifestations of digital texts or suggesting some of the directions digital texts might possibly take?

Secondly, I think that on a more sophisticated level, printed texts (books) have never been contained by their physical limitations and have always been interwoven and multivocal. Here's Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes ( I should probably cite Julia Kristeva too) on this:

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network... The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands... Its unity is variable and relative.
(Foucault 1974, 23)

[text is] ... woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?) antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the 'sources', the 'influences' of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas.
(Barthes 1977, 160)

Do digital texts reveal more explictly the ways in which all texts are constructed? Is the really fantastic thing about them the ways they expose how all texts are produced?

References

Barthes, R. (1977) Image - Music - Text. London : Fontana.

Foucault, M. (1974) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock.

Merchant, G. (2007) Writing the future in the digital age. Literacy 41:3, 118–128

Literacies of fusion - first thoughts

2008-10-09T17:16:00.011+01:00

Much sympathy with the literacies of fusion concept. Millard advocates a productive dialogue between pupils and teachers about practices taking place outside school (TV, DVDs, videogames, readings of books and comics) and other, more conventional pedagogic practices rehearsed inside school.

There is some resonance for me in HE – what are our students doing (esp. with technology) outside the lecture theatre or before coming to uni? What can we learn from it? How can we use what they do to support them in their studies? Can the energies/enthusiasm of the fun/socialising stuff they do off campus be directed toward the learning outcomes of HE courses?

I like the fusion cuisine metaphor too – it doesn’t suggest one cuisine replacing another but, rather, a new combination. Analogue and digital terrine to start; a main course of fricassé of linearity and multimodality; a dessert of popular culture tart on a coulis of canonical texts? This appeals to me as I also think school is a place where you should be exposed to things you don't get at home as well (e.g. my white, European, secular children are learning about Diwali and Chinese New Year).

I also wonder – but others know schools better than I do - if Millard doesn’t construct a bit of a straw man in her description of the ways schools operate:

“… the precedence of written, over spoken texts with a hierarchy of importance topped by the analytical and expository skills of essayist literacy, which still dominate modes of assessment in higher education (Lillis, 2001). It is based on the reaffirmation of a standard, written, national language, transmitted largely through a print-based, linear pedagogy.”

Are things really that fixed? I'm always delighted by the creativity of the environments I see in my children's schools and nurseries (colourful work plastered on every wall, welcome messages in 15 different languages etc.).

I'd accept the claim that "essayist literacy" is probably still the default mode of academic discourse expected in HE - even on this course apparently ;-) - but is it the same in schools? I read Clare Dowdall's article on dissonance at about the same time and was struck by how the school-based writing activity ('Knightly Norman') encouraged pupils to engage in a degree of linguistic/stylistic play (news report on events of 1066) - some degrees removed from "essayist literacy".

I wasn't sure of the connection between Millard's advocacy of fusion literacies - essentially to support reading and composition - and her conclusion in which she cites Giroux's conception of literacy as "an emerging act of consciousness and resistance" (which sounds a bit like Paolo Freire). Literacy defined here sounds like the ability to uncover the mecanisms of ideological manipulation and discover the real relations of power at play. At what age could/should children be expected to engage with texts at this level of sophistication?