Digital Literacies

TT and I have to be out of the house most of the time at the moment as it is not very nice in our falling down hovel. We have “the builders in” and we are having to exist in a kind of bedsit existence – squashed into just a couple of cold rooms. Anyway it’s fine as we are having fun.

We went to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park today and a major bit of fun was to be had with my new kit… the Gorilla Pod. I cannot believe I did not take a photo of it in situ … but here is the kind of thing we were doing:

(Thanks to elanbeat for the image)

In the good old days when I was obsessed by Flickr there is no way I would have forgotten to take the meta photos alongside the photos. Interesting really, I was so obsessed by Flickr at one time and could barely go anywhere without taking loads of photos – and of course planned trips in order to take pictures. These days though I have calmed down – mainly because I just cannot squeeze in the time anymore for blogging, flickring, Tweeting and Facebook. How did I used to do it? So strange that already I am looking back into my early Web 2.0 days. We are all maturing in our uses and working out which bits we can fit in our lives and which we cannot. The obsessive start I had was a necessary one for me I think; I learned so much from being immersed. I still have not written everything I need to about Flickr even though I have written a couple of papers and maybe three chapters on it.

Anyhow, here are the pix we took using my little sony cybershot and the gorilla pod:

A Grand Day Out

It was a bit fiddly at first and we had to get the hang of it … I forgot to do the timer for this one:

adjusting the gorilla pod

And this one is funny as we were tentative wondering if it worked:

Anyhow it was good fun to learn how to use a new toy … and this kind of self portraiture is becoming a ubiquitous practice … albeit that normally we see people making the shots using outstretched arms and a curved spine away from the lens!

More stuff about Flickr coming again soon – we have a trip to Paris planned for the end of this month and I am teaching some stuff for the online MA in New Literacies on image based ethnographic research.

I have been trying to negotiate second life - although the way I do it, it is more like half life.  At The University of Sheffield I use the InfoLit area set up by Sheila Webber who kindly lets us education folk onto her island.

It is very stylish and cool and today I went on a trip in the new hot air balloons. It was truly fabulous – Sheila whispered to me as my guide while I sailed safely round.  It helps having this kind of gadget I find; especially as I have been known to get stuck on the bottom of the sea unable to get out however hard I jump or try to fly!!  This afternoon I discovered how to get to The University of Idaho which was fun. I met a student of marketing and technology there. It was all very quiet everywhere today though and I can totally identify with the new Getting started Guide (from JISC) which hilariously notes that

get a sense that there are some really interesting locations in Second Life but that you just can’t find them. Most of them seem to be either deserted or a disco

I mainly roam around on my own not talking to anyone. It is quite lonely but then again I dread meeting someone as I constantly walk into walls, bump my head on stuff and generally behave like a buffoon.

It maybe gives an insight into what it may be like to be disabled when you go to a meeting and cannot (for example) get your sound working. Everyone else is talking and you have to type as your microphone won’t function. You are disadvantaged and slow at communicating and everyone has to wait for you to type.  Or they skillfully move about the place whilst you turn in circles, walk in the wrong direction, and certainly cannot behave as smooth and slick as anyone else.

I need to keep practicing though as I do want to use this in my teaching  – we have a unit in the Online MA in New Literacies where we explore new digital literacy practices in Virtual Worlds.  Jackie Marsh leads that section but I want to join in this year as well!

Have been getting into Twitter big style and find the following benefits:

1. Can select tweeters to follow so that they fit a particular profile – for me this is people who are interested in talking about Web 2.0 and Education;

2. I can quickly and easily add to my contacts in a relevant way by looking at other people’s tweet feeds;

3. There is a constant stream of interesting things to read about – ever changing and frequently reporting on stuff as it happens;

4. I can keep up to date really easily;

5. I can ask questions on my Twitter stream and will quickly get lots of answers;

6. The 140 character limit means that it is a quick job to scan each tweet;

7. Most stuff is public but if need be I can contact people privately – allowing a back channel;

8. The search facility works very well – I can look quickly at who is talking about ‘New Literacies’ or use a string like ‘lost my job’ – great for research;

9. Tweets can point to other online material and thus publicise stuff in a fairly unobtrusive way;

10. As far as schools are concerned – teachers can get students to tweet on particular topics – only needing to write a little bit and learning how to be concise;

11. Teachers can encourage kids to communicate to others what they are learning in school.

That’s it for now. Apart from of course…. Flutter:

but hey, I have been busy.

Thank Goodness I have a short break now before the new academic year. (Although Guy and I do need to finish that book (2009, we hope) Web 2.0 for Schools: Learning and Social Participation for this series before end of August … but it’s coming along …)

This last few weeks I have been to this conference hosted by UKLA – did a keynote with Guy that links into our new book (did I mention that?)

And then moved on to Mississauga, near Toronto where I did a summer school with Guy, Colin and Michele. That was fun. here is the slideshow of my keynote on the interface between Flickr and Streetart (and stuff).

Am now in New Jersey, having a fabulous time meeting Flickr Friends and partying.

Been looking at streetart as usual:

had our first ever facebook party. Met so many interesting people.

(Thanks to TT for image.)

It is a year since the Information Commons opened at The University of Sheffield.

What better way of celebrating than viewing a YouTube video filmed in that luscious space…

The popularity of YoTube is immense and in a recent piece of research I found that this is the favourite website of 24/24 interviewees aged between 16 and 18 . What is the attraction … well for the most part it is WATCHING videos and then talking about them on MySpace, Bebo or Facebook. It is a vital part of online conversation. Videos most watched are music videos ..’ so you don’t have to buy them’ and ‘funny videos’ . they did tell me that they would love to make videos and upload and would like to learn how to do this in school….

Seems to me that just as on other social networking sites, people do stuff in order to upload to YouTube… not ust about recording stuffalready going on. Look at this bit of naughtiness as students trespass on the roof of the infamous Arts Tower.

I went to Lewisham yesterday and talked to Primary ICT co-ordinators about New Literacies, Social networking and the future … I had enjoyed the weekend preparing for it … putting together a list of sites and examples of wikis, blogs, and so on. The conference participants were really welcoming, enthusiastic and fab. I really enjoyed talking with them.

I gave examples of:

1. Flickr.com – photosharing;
2. Bubbleshare; – photosharing where you can add speechbubbles etc
3. Voicethreads; – photosharing and you can add sound and text;
4. Evoca; – podcasting;
5. 21 Classes blogging software;
6. Blogger – blogging software;
7. You Tube – video sharing;
8. Making the News - podcasting and more;
9. Radiowaves - podcasting and more;

Well all seemed OK and at the break people talked to me about how they were going to try some of these ideas. Am excited at the thought that a few said they were interested in doing the online MA in New Literacies at Sheffield.

Then came the presentation from Kent Local Authority who talked about how they had totally banned all social-networking sites in every school in their region. (And Lest we forget … Kent still has grammar schools and wotnot). They had distributed more than 100 thousand leaflets to parents which includes information on discouraging use of chat-rooms and social networking sites. The leaflets promoted the use of pcs for educational purposes only and suggested also that young people should not ever use computers unsupervised. Here is an example poster.
I feel OK about most of this but am unhappy about only going to websites that the teacher has set out or to never use chat is not really responsible in my view. We have to teach students how to independently research in a safe way.

This is the policy document…. here. Again a lot of good stuff but some areas where I think that they have used a hammer to crack a nut and I do hate the idea of banning things. (We once burnt books you know.)

This is all on the same day that the much awaited report from Dr Tanya Byron brought some similar approaches – with children constructed as totally manipulable, passive, uneducable dupes. The Guardian reports:

Byron, who shot to fame with the BBC series Little Angels, was asked by the prime minister, Gordon Brown, last year to complete the study. She will say the pace of the online revolution has left parents as “the internet immigrants” and children as “the internet natives”, often causing worries for parents struggling to stay in touch with technology.

There is a funny thing going on here, with on the one hand children as expert in technology, but unable to make any kind of moral choice. Also I am not keen on the terms native or immigrant; they have negative connotations at the best of times and undermine the complexity of what it might mean to be competent. Education is what is needed for everyone, including parents. We need to run classes for them too. Classes where their kids show them things and we show them things and we all learn from each other. I definitely think we need digital literacy researchers involved in future research in this area, not just psychologists who see children in quite strange ways sometimes!! (Dr Tanya is the one who suggests that to teach kids to behave you can sit them on their own in a room – I am just not into this kind of punishment malarky I have always believed in talking to kids in a reasonable way at every stage.)

So without spending my whole day on this blog rant I want to identify reasons why I think Social networking sites should NOT be banned from schools:

1. Social Networking is here to stay. People will use them even if they are banned in school. Children therefore need to be taught how to use them safely.
2. Students use social networking out of school, – so do many parents and this number will increase. We will (continue to) alienate learners if we ban what they value.
3. Some children do not have access to the Internet out of school. Schools are places where we should try to balance out inequalities and provide equal access. Children (and adults) increasingly use the sites to continue social activities begun elsewhere (and vice versa).
4. Students can be shown the value of citizenship journalism and the need for other voices than those officially constructed by mainstream media. This is an important social literacy practice for citizenship education.
5. In a classroom context students can be shown how to enjoy, control and be wary of the power (their own and that of others) in online text production and consumption.
6. If teachers use SNW sites in school, they can talk with students an ongoing basis, without using scare tactics, about how to stay safe online.
7. Students can be taught to read online texts critically and discern ‘hidden messages’ – for we know that some insidious sites, such as Nazi sites, KKK sites appear innocuous at first. If we ban all sites like this, they will only read them unsupervised.
8. The nature of literacy is changing; to ignore social networking sites is to exclude a whole area of literacy practice from the educational domain – thus making the school curriculum a dinosaur. Multimodal texts are easy to produce using social networking software.
9. There are excellent educational benefits in using social networking software – even when it is not used to actually network with others – such as using Voicethreads and embedding work into a blog.
10. Social networking software is changing all the time and thus brings constant fresh and exciting FREE material into the curriculum.
11. Children are motivated by using such software – especially boys.

Let’s hear from the kids: Top Ten Reasons to Use Blogs in the classroom

There is a need to treat kids as responsible people and to show them things carefully. Not ban things as you will never be able to keep it all out. So you need to teach them to protect themselves and to ENJOY what there is online and not pretend that the Internet and pcs are only there fore boring educational sensible things.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about that really. Apart from that the slideshow for the conference is here:

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Here’s swoon talking at MOMA about her work:

and part Two:

I am currently drafting an article called:

Location Location Location: Changing places, modes and meanings of streetart as digital image

Briefly it’s about the use of online spaces to promote and share streetart and the ways in which the online space impacts on meanings of the art and how this then is brought back to the street…. that is to say, that I have seen how streetartists use Flickr to promote their work; to talk about their work; to show their work. They influence each other online; they see how flickr people respond to their work and and how they love to photograph it. And this can impact on what artists do next – and they certainly participate in photographing and ‘collecting’ the art in Flickr spaces. This whole process creates an interesting and dynamic archive online where images are replicated, arranged, labelled, organised and tagged. The art work becomes part of multiple narratives and acts differently for different people, meaning different things.

Themes in the article will be:

• Different modes and moving texts from one place to another
• Re-articulation of materiality
• Meanings change
• Presentations of identity
• Transforming spaces
• Interaction of items with environment and interaction of people with the art (or not)
• Changing over time
• Mash-ups
• Replications and memes

I will submit it to Visual Communication and hope for the best.

And, I forgot to mention, I found out about the Swoon videos, because another street artist, anaperu told me about it in a comment on this picture here. So there we are. More evidence, my dear Watson.

I have had a fantastic time over the last few days at the Literacy for Lifelong Learning Conference here in Jamaica – The University of West Indies Education Department. .

When I get my photos and my head sorted out a bit more about the experience of being here, I will post more about the trip, but for now, here is the slideshow which I used for the keynote presentation. (Click on the orange and blue shareware icon to go to the shareware site and see the show on full screen)

I will add more links into this post when I get home so that conference delegates can access the paper I have written relating to the keynote presentation. and also the powerpoint I used and and resources I referred to in my workshop.

But in the meantime …..I also mentioned the book in my workshop by Marsh and Millard – see here.

And Kress’s book here.

Exciting, accessible and intelligent is Lankshear and Knobel’s book on New Lteracies …. as well as their book The New Literacy Sampler … which is also available online to read here.

When I first got an answer phone in the 1980s, I would spend ages recording what I thought were whacky messages for all callers. Some of these were quick and quirky, some of them … well, best forget.
But I got over it and stopped that rubbish. People don’t have to listen to me burbling on any more. And I am sure they are happier for it.

Same with ‘joke’ emails. When I first went online (when was that? It seems like I have been here forever, but I think t was 1995)I used to love getting ‘forwarded emails’ with cartoons and songs and links to sites. I would forward them happily to whoever else I thought would like them – the grand total of people on my mailing list being around 20.

But then I got wise and I stopped. At over a hundred emails a day we really can do without the sexist wise guy cracks about women drivers and blah blah. I especially don’t like ones that tell me the world is evil aand the world is coming to an end. If these people really liked me and knew me, they would not send me these things and so it is not fun or sociable at all.

I suppose I find it all intrusive – again this is why I am not keen on facebook with its facility for sending messages out indiscriminately. It is time for people to become more careful and sophisticated in their use – especially as there are so many of us ‘in here’ these days. I include myself in this criticism actually – someone who too happily uses ‘reply all’ sometimes!!

We have now got over the novelty of t’Internet – OK so I am a miserable sod, but these e mails are driving me batty (.com)

Nettiquette here.

This is a totally unrelated image – taken at a conference a coupla years ago.

I had some today . It was staff development here. It began with a thing from the new ‘Environment Group’. It was quite funny as it was all about saving the planet and global warming. I discovered that we must not drink from polystyrene cups; china mugs are the best and re-using is apparently MUCH better than re-cycling. (You see, I was listening.)

But all the while there was a storm outside and it did not seem the globe had warmed at all. We have had floods all day. And the development is that people had to be rescued from their ROOF TOPS in Sheffield (where we were and I still am.) I think it may be a classified environmental disaster. Oh no.

People have been quoting records of how many years ago it was so bad as this (125) and how many inches of rain we’ve had – (I can’t remember)- and that it is equivalent to two months worth of rain in one day.
Statistics statistics.
Blah de blah blah.

In the meantime…. I did a little spot with Tim about blogging and stuff. It was quite fun and maybe a few people were interested. You never know. Bloggers are like smokers .. always looking for new recruits. (Maybe smokers can start blogging as a new hobby on July 1st…)

There is a conference on feminism and popular culture I would like to go to but have only just discovered… I found out about it by a gigantic surf around the TinterWeb on the trail of this image here…

Can you see how I found out about the conference, starting with this picture? (Clue below the picture…)

Another DEVELOPMENT was that Verity asked me about working on a bid to develop second life teaching ideas… cool or what?

And finally Jackie M has a blog. Hooray.

OK so the image was done by Tild but I found it here first. Then here.