Digital Literacies

Vic mentioned this wonderful new project, which takes the ‘What’s in my bag’ idea a bit further.

A long time ago I contributed this to the pool:

(Showing a bag I continue to use and will be using again this weekend when I go to this conference.)

It is clear that people do not reveal ‘all’ but construct images in a manner so that they represnt themselves in a way that they feel OK about going online. To do this, they need to think about how people might read the images – (what will they think? what associations do the objects have? what do they ‘connote’?); they need to know something about how objects represent aspects of their persona; they need to consider what to leave out as well as what to include. Maybe they arrange things so they look smart/show their label/hide their label/ look casual/ appear expensive/cheap. And the inclusion of images of faces taken on a scanner connotes something ludic; maybe a cross-reference to office parties and ‘parts of the body image making’ and a presentation of self that says @I am game’ ‘I am fun’ – ‘I live life madly’.

I am really interested in the ways in which we display online identities and have noticed the continuities in the ways some people present themselves across sites. For example they may begin a persona on a flickr stream and then deepen it through displays in other spaces… like Niznoz’s stream and his two blogs here and here; or Gamma’s stream and his blog. They are serious reporters of the city; they show something of ‘life as it is’; of the history and the way things are changing. NizNoz has two blogs, each with a different function.

People often use their blogs as a way of SPECIALISING. People use different parts of the web, different types of software to perform different tasks. And they are getting good at working out what is good for what task. This is a digital literacy skill; not everyone will ‘GET IT’ intuitively and so there is a role for researchers in working out what the conventions are and a role for educators in teaching about these things.

It has recently become trendy to represent oneself as a Simpson on Flickr and use the image as an icon of identity. YOu can get one via a new gadget available over at The Simpsons new movie website here. Obviously a lot to be written about re avatars and icons people use on websites, but no time here… must go.

But I’ll just leave you with the image my dear partner in life made of himself on Sunday. What kind of impression does he give here? (Answers on a postcard please).

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.

So yeah. Really like the way Blogger has all these new gadgets.In particular the whizzy Google fim things. Look at my sidebar and see those four frames – they are videos about web 2.0. To put them on there – I just went to my blogger template, selected ‘New page Element’ and chose the Google video option. I wrote ‘web 2.0′ into the search engine and got four videos selected for me. And Bob’s your uncle. How cool is that? (v. cool).
so to speak.

And now for something completely different …..these are the sugardudes. Lovely little fellows. (more here.)