Digital Literacies

I am looking forward to going to Oxford today to give a seminar and to meeting people from the Education Department – and this will be my first time as a visitor to the University.

Thanks to sisyphus007 http://www.flickr.com/photos/kiedyszko/5658404181/

The presentation is based on a paper I gave at Manchester and have re-written for Computers and Education. .

Slides available on slideshare and draft paper on scrib’d.

I am planning the next step in my Facebook research – wanting to look at how female trainee hairdressers ‘do friendship’ through Facebook.

One of my all time favourite studies is Jen Coates’ book ‘Women Friends‘. It is a study of language – and how women enact friendship through the language they use with each other. I want to do a similar study but within Facebook – and look also at other ways my research participants enact friendship, e.g. through Facebook updates that include words, images, games and so on. This research will combine my academic interest (you could say passions) in several areas – language, gender and new technologies.

It will also be fun working with hairdressing students and I think that ways in which they negotiate and present their emerging identities as hairdressers will come through the work. I can’t wait. Nothing better than having a good old chit chat with young women. For me to access the girls’ /women’s Facebooks, they will need to let me ‘friend them’ (and I will reciprocate).

I have submitted my ethical review and the first reviewer has already come back to me asking how I will deal with the ethics of other people, additional to my research participants, who will be visible to me online when I am looking at my participants’ pages. I have answered I will be involving groups of friends and will follow their interactions with each other and will not cite or get involved with others. However this is a complicated area – and I am not sure how feasible this will be. I may have to end up asking for additional consent if it becomes to hard to disentangle some of the data.

What it will also mean of course, (and my reviewers have not noticed this) is that my participants will also be able to see all my updates and any contributions that my friends put on my wall. So I guess if and when the research starts I will need to alert my Facebook friends.

I really hope I will get some students wanting to be involved in the project as I think it will be so fun. Oh yes. And a fantastic contribution to research.

It is really hard to concentrate in the summer. Somehow the more time you have, the longer it takes to do anything. I find myself drifting into Facebook; re-checking emails and … not working on my to do list.

I am supposed to be working on a re-draft of an article about teenagers’ uses of Facebook for Computers and Education … where the two reviewers are asking for different things – contradicting each others’ requests. All very frustrating and all reinforcing what we know … that even with peer-reviews, things are subjective. Writing in academia is pressurised … we are all so aware of the REF . It’s not just about quality it is about Impact and being able to demonstrate that once you have published, that your work is relevant to others.

Writing about Facebook for academic peer-reviewed journals seems to be the antithesis of what Facebook is about. One of the great things about FB is the way it embraces spontaneity; its write-now, publish-now affordance, and the immediate feedback that goes with it.
I like the way online social networking texts are at once ephemeral and permanent. Permanent because the texts stay online … but ephemeral because readers write things intended for the moment – and so they usually won’t get read more than a few days after being written.

So FB distracts me from writing about FB – I am after the immediate gratification it gives me, rather than the three months later, get your writing deconstructed by someone you don’t know.

I am tempted to look for another distraction and to write a book proposal. Cup of Jasmine tea?

Kate Pahl and I are talking about the Centre for the Study of New Literacies conference for next year. The theme will be

Challenging the Binaries

It is going to be asking people to think about the oppositions we sometimes set up when looking at New Literacies Research. Examples are Home/School; Formal/Informal; Digital Native/ Digital Immigrant; Academic/non-academic; New/Old; Online/Offline; Multimodal/monomodal; Virtual/Real.

These binaries are often useful but more often we need to be aware that these are not hard and fast separate domains – and perhaps new technologies are helping us to challenge these boundaries more and more.  Anyway that will be our theme – and preliminary dates are 29th and 30th June – but yet to be confirmed.The Call for Papers will be coming before too long.

call for papers

Ah the blog. I am coming back to it – driven by a pact with Eve that we will write weekly because we think it will help our thinking.  Maybe this will also pave the way back for me to Twitter. A long gap of not writing here, partly caused by the fear that things may get personal when I did not want to mix up thoughts about heart attacks, cancer and research into Web 2.0. But in fact they are inextricably mixed as they weave through my life and so I guess will all at some point emerge somehow here. Why? Because web 2.0 technologies somehow bring together the public and the private,  and maybe that is because web 2.0 is so much a part of our personal lives. Perhaps this is what is scary to so many people and thrilling to others. The Internet (and especially social networking sites) weaves around us, mediates and constructs, pushes and pulls as we push and pull at it.

That’s all. I am being vague & mysterious this week as there is time later to be profound and clear.

So below is a mash up from the beach – whose relevance is vaguely that this blog will bring you all the stuff that has washed up during my week.

It seems to be taking ages to get the year off to a start. The snow is still slowing everythng down and so I hardly feel I am off the starting blocks. In January there always remain a few post-Christmas traces…. not just the extra weight on my scales… but also stuff like unfinished chocolates:

and bits of tinsel still stuck between the carpet tufts. Beautiful as it sometimes is, the snow has been making it hard to get about. It seems quiet everywhere.

As I have been mentioning the last few weeks, I have been getting into Flickr again and been thinking about good shots to take and enjoying looking at things others are taking. I really love Sophies’ Photos and was interested in how this particular image draws on the book by Annette Kuhn – something I have used in an article I wrote for Discourse. What I have started to become interested in now, is images which show traces of what has been; which show a history. You have to be like an archeologist and look for clues – look at the layers of meaning, at the traces of what is there. This idea relates in some way to palimpsest; there is a good definition(illustrated) in the Palimpsest Flickr group here. Palimpsest might be this kind of thing:

this paring away of text is something that appeals to me and reminds me of the research process which involves tracings and the discernment of patterns – making sense from little things you gather. I am looking forward to February when I will FINALLY have the space to write my article on Streetart and spaces and how narratives can travel across time and space – often aided by online technologies. I talked about this kind of thing in Toronto – July 2008; details here.

And then I will focus on Facebook, where I will be researching how multimodal narratives travel across spaces via multiple, dispersed authors. Yes. That is what I will be doing soon.

Davies, J. (2007) ‘Display; Identity and the Everyday: Self-presentation through online image sharing’. In Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education. Vol. 28, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 549_564.

Getting to the end of the year, so I guess I am like most people and am looking back on the last one and thinking ahead to the new.
Last year was a funny old year; my first book out (authored with Guy); launched the Centre for the Study of New Literacies (with Kate); Got funding from ESRC for this series; put in a bid for FP7 funding. Momentously Rosa started getting out a bit more and even went to Devon on the train. Could not believe it. Here she is picking plums in Dorset (on one of the best holidays we have ever had):

TT and I had a great time in Paris too, at the start of this month. Went on the Eurostar and that was a first:

So much going on and it all seems more poignant having had surgery and treatment for breast cancer too. I like to think that I can show people that it is not too bad a thing to happen and you just have to get on with stuff and look ahead. And of course all my friends, family and colleagues have been wonderful. (I just thought I would mention it.)

In the New Literacies MA we are doing the Research Methods Module with the second year, and this week we are looking at Visual Methods and Ethnography. One of the activities is to take a photograph of your workspace and upload it with a commentary (the course is online).

Here’s my post for the activity:
OK so this is my image along with text which attempts to provide a ‘made strange’ commentary. It is hard to make this stranger than it already is as you will see. Luckily I was able to set up the image remotely and take the shot with me in it, (actually Gareth took it, tbh) for added madness. What you need to know, is that we are having building work done in the cellar and lounge and so all the belongings from those spaces are in the bedrooms. We have had to dispose of all the comfortable furniture (and loads more besides). My daughter has had to go and live elsewhere for a few weeks as she would not be able to cope with the mess, cold, noise & general discomfort. The lounge window is ‘out’ and there is a huge hole at the front of the house which has been boarded up but it is very ‘leaky’ so we are quite cold. OK so that’s the background. Here is the title, picture, and commentary:

‘Making the Best of It’

I am in what WAS the dining room of my house. Evidence of this is to the right of the picture, a table covered in debris – stuff to do with my work and Gareth’s cycling. Central, are the two chairs which Gareth and I sit on. He has the bigger one as he is the biggest person and this is more comfortable for him. In the very little amount of stuff we can access, you see our priorities. The folding bike Gareth uses to do his bike-train-bike commute; my precious bike (on a turbo trainer) protected by a curtain on the left; and 2 chairs central. I realise now it is even funnier than we first thought (and we do think it is funny!). We are sitting in a row, as if to watch tv. But we have no tv!! We should sit and face each other as we can then talk more easily; we are obviously totally used to sitting in a row in the evenings from when we had our tv.  I am wearing an apron and yet am working on my laptop – as is usual I am cooking tea at the same time as working. I am wearing an incongruous sparkly cardigan (and new shoes). The whole space, although totally disrupted by building shows our values for sport and work (and my penchant for fashion). It also shows our determination to carry on as usual and to position ourselves in the room in a manner that suits custom rather than purpose. (Oh and we are using the chairs we take when we go windsurfing). We are doing what is known as ‘making the best of it’.

Not thinking ethnographically for the minute … I actually think this picture is hilarious.

I do have sympathy for the views shown in this kind of article: The Ten Things I hate about PowerPoint. The Ten then things formula is pretty common across blogs. Like this. Or this. Also common are the critiques of teachers/presenters (etc) who are just trying to get through the working day. (I have much less sympathy with this.)

I do agree though that PowerPoint is overused and I think it has started to influence not just how we present things to people in terms of structure – but also how we conceptualise our ideas. It affects and structures our relationship with audiences. The bullet point was something I very rarely used to use. Yet these days I am forever listing things off to classes of students or at conferences. I think in lists. I think PowerPoint also keeps your audience at a distance. Keeps them as an audience. While you are messing about with clicking and laying with your fancy transitions and wotnot, you are not really talking to the people properly. If you depend on the technology to wow the folks, the chances are they will not be wowed. Not anymore. We are getting used to the flashy gizmos and sound files. It has got to the point that we filter a lot of these things out if it is not relevant; if it s overdone; if it is not accompanied with interesting ideas. Audiences are more demanding these days – and don’t really wan to be an audience. They would prefer to participate! (As Guy and I mention in our book – a lot of uses of technology in Education are about providing polished performances of old practices. Nowt wrong with being polished, mind you.)

Totally agree that you can come up with snazzy stuff and ways of keeping things interesting. But I think we need to start thinking about the possibility of presenting without PowerPoint from time to time. See what happens when you do stuff differently – although please – don’t let this be a move back to reading a lecture from a little notebook.

Anyhow, I prefer KeyNote. Check out the animations!!

Amazing how many post its you can fit in around one thesis.

People get so nervous about their PhD vivas that this is the kind of manic preparation we feel driven to. Post it notes really come into their own in this situation; markers, colour coded and even with extra little notes written on them. It looks like an elaborate fringed ornament. Text upon text, multi-layered as well as multi-coloured. I am not sure if it also makes it multimodal – probably.

But anyhow congratulations to Jools Page for getting her thesis through on minor amendments. Marvellous. Her thesis is a brave one: Mothers, Work and Childcare: Choices, Beliefs ad Dilemmas. Jools follows (and tells) the stories of mothers who leave their children in the care of others while they work; one of her themes is about love – and she explores the idea of ‘professional love’ of carers for children. In this day and age where adults often feel they have to repress their emotions for children, even when choosing to work with them, I think this is a brave argument – that professional love is part and parce of what carers need to offer and that this is something mothers need to know their kids will get from nurseries (etc.) Considering these kinds of professions attract those who feel want to protect and nurture children it is bizarre that nowhere in the professional guidelines or training is love spoken of. There is a kind of embarrassment around it – and I Think it s great that Jools addresses this aspect head on in her work. Maybe, just maybe, it will have an effect and one day people will be allowed to bring this aspect of childcare to the fore in their work.

Lovely piece of work in my opinion and I am so glad it got through.