Digital Literacies

I have a tough job keeping up with blogging, Flickr and Facebook. I like to keep up some kind of presence on all of them – communicating with different groups of people on each one – with my blog probably serving my purposes more than that of any readers’. My blog is me thinking stuff through; Flickr I like to comment on photos and have comments back. I definitely want interaction on Flickr. Most of my Flickr contacts are people I met IN Flickr rather than knowing them before. It has opened up new groups of people for me. Facebook is the place where I only talk to people I know face to face; it does the job of helping me keep in touch with friends and family I don’t see often. So I have my own ideas about how I want to interact in ecah space and who with. I wish I had time to keep up with Twitter – I follow loads of people who I think are interesting … and I am able to pick up their leads to useful sites and bits of info. I really appreciate it all – but at the moment don’t offer much. And I think I have not really yet worked out properly qhat I want Twitter to do for me and how I want to use it.

On Twitter I love how you can gather names of like minded people – I use mine to follow people interested in web 2.0 and education – but there are only so many hours in the day and I have not worked out yet exactly how to get the best from it, for my purposes. However I do really love to see what Orange Class (known as ClassroomTweets) are up to and think it is wonderful that a Year One group of kids are learning about how they can communicate beyond their classroom walls – that learning need not be confined to the space they are in. They have a teacher, MultiMartin, who is very inspirational and always looking for ways to broaden the learning experiences of his class. And in case you are wondering, here’s a handy list of reasons why teachers might decide to use Twitter.

In the meantime Mrs Cassidy has won an award and has showcased her Web 2.0 classroom activities on a super new video.

I love how her kids present the video and are so proud to show their learning. I am sure that knowing they can share what they do, engages them and motivates them.

Finally, I have another interest in the way people challenge walls … and that is with streetart. Here’s some from Toronto:

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I am a co-organiser of this seminar series. on Children’s and young people’s digital literacies in virtual online spaces. It has been a great series so far and we have had some fantatstic speakers – as you’ll see from the site. (Check out the slideshows etc.)
I was not very interested at all in Virtual Worlds until the last couple of years as I asociated VWs with gaming and the need to be able to be dextrous in mouse controls etc. I had a notion that you had to have brilliant hand/eye co-ordination – which I am afraid I have not developed. In fact whilst it helps to be quick – actually you do not have to have those skills and you can learn at snail’s pace and still get by like me. In fact I probably bump into fewer things in SL than RL, so there you go.

Anyhow, I have realised that like so many things online, there are lots of different spaces to go to, and different ways that you can interact with people within the one Virtual World. It is a heterogeneous space, and just like the blogosphere, or Twitter or Flickr (etc) smaller networks form and people negotiate their way through, usually travelling similar paths on each visit and interacting in habitual ways – just as we do in real life (my ‘Sheffield’ is different to someone else’s experience of the same city, for example).

Thus with Second Life there are academic spaces and shopping spaces; sports spaces and media spaces; there is a clubbing scene and there are offices and seasides and islands … the list is not endless however! It seems that SL – like all the other VWs I have seen- imitate a great deal of what we have in Real Life. In some ways this is disappointing, as the dream, I suppose, is to be able to exist in a different way in a different world. However we can only build on what we know and if we knew other ways of being with each other, we would have created them in RL too – if you see what I mean…. maybe.

Nevertheless it remains the case to an extent that we can try out new things and we can visit places virtually, that we may not visit in RL; and interact with others that we may not manage to meet in RL. We can leave aspects of our RL selves behind and take on new ways of being – thus SL can become (to an extent) liberating to the disabled, or a space where new skills might be developed – be it a new language or even people management skill, for example. A case in point is that a friend of mine in RL has, in her SL, run a night club and escort agency; she made good money, many friends and gave a lot of people jobs in-world. She was able to support others through friendships she made. Now, in moving into a new job in SL, she is thoroughly excited by working as a journalist on the news programme of metaverse. Here is one of the most recent news programmes, which includes Lisa reporting on issues to do with Education in SecondLife:

MBC News 1-27-2010 from Metaverse TV on Vimeo.

In case you are interested , this report has Lisa talking about the “adult continent Vindra” in Second Life.

Hats Off to Lisa I say!! I think her reports are fabulous and she has to research for them as well as be confident enough to talk publically and spontaneously on the show – with a view to her global audience. She has to temper her language (note her use of ’spiffing’) – and be aware of local idiom. Sadly though, these activities (which involve learning of many kinds) that people are becoming immersed in, in a range of Web 2.0 spaces, seem to go unnoticed most of the time. Second Life participants are often held up for ridicule – with stories of marriages being made and broken being top ones in the tabloid press.

Obviously this kind of coverage adds fuel to the fire of all the other scare Discourses around why the Internet is so bad, why you have to stop your kids going online etc etc. It is part of the whole Toxic Discourse which I find naive in the extreme. Fact of the matter of course – as I always end up saying – is that because there are lots of people online there will be a diversity of experiences to be had, and you have to learn to stay safe online, just as you do off line. Hence, we need educators online, so that they can teach within online spaces as well as outside them; they need to become confident users of these spaces so they can teach in an informed way.

I love that we are thinking about ways of using Virtual Worlds in Education and of course we already know that many Universities are using SL as a space where students can learn as well as hang out. Lancaster University SL space had this slideshow in a presentation on their island; I spotted this after a meeting the other week

A lot of SL Education arenas use slideshows – perhaps rather an old fashioned medium now, but nevertheless I found this a powerful tool for sharing learning when I spotted it the other day. The reference in world for where to find it: Lancaster University, Lancaster University (52, 231, 22). If you drop by, you will se that each of the statements on this slide, is explained on others.

There’s an interesting conference up and coming on Virtual World Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) via Peak education conference in Second Life | Treet Business and also see info here.

We do need to think about Best Practice as just going online is not enough; although we see a lot of learning happening in out of school practices, I think that f schools, colleges and universities are going to spend time in Virtual Worlds, then they need to structure the learning and show they take it as seriously as everything else.

Maybe it could all become part of the Slow Education movement. A concept which I find compelling.

Finally , I went on the Sheffield wheel yesterday. That was an experience I found just a tad too physical – and also my partner TT kept blocking my view!

Here’s Hyde Park Flats in its current incarnation:

So far the election campaigning in the UK is pretty low key – with no date yet fixed – but there are rumbles growing. It was a week or so ago that I heard Evan Davies scoffing at Cameron’s air brushed posters. (I see Evan has blogged about the interview here.) I have now seen the posters for myself and they are pretty smarmy to say the least.

It is clear there has been a fair bit of air-brushing going on:

Obviously I love a bit of photoshop to improve on a picture … and I am pretty sure dear Obama’s team of little helpers will have helped him into office by using a fair bit of pimping and primping to make him look dashing.

Nevertheless I enjoyed myself participating in this particular meme where you can produce your own version of Cameron’s campaign. This is my attempt:

I was referring to the Tory ideas of improving Teacher Education. . Have a laugh … read about it here.

The 2005 election saw a fair bit of use of the Internet to promote their messages, but no doubt it will be used more this time around. But I am pretty sure also, that there will be a lot more stuff buzzing around the Internet which will be about the election campaign as opposed to part of the campaign. I wonder if this will make people feel more a part of the process? And I wonder if this kind of participation will encourage more people to actually vote.

Check out the urban dictionary for definition of a meme.

When I first started researching online texts I was drawn into looking at sites created by young people. This was way back in about 2002. I was looking at teens’ personal websites (not blogs) and discussion boards relating to babyz... all sorts of weird things like sites for Wiccan teens. I was really interested in all the stuff they were collaborating on and looked at the texts really closely – was totally bowled over by what they could do. S I wrote about all these online texts and about what the kids were doing and how they were playing and learning online.

Then I started doing a blog myself and getting into Flickr and so was writing about Blogging and Flickring (and eBay, and YouTube) . This was good as I realised very quickly how and why young people were getting so seduced by, absorbed by technologies.

As time has gone on, I have realised that it is important to not just look at the texts that are being produced, but at the processes by which they are being produced. A text that is online reflects a social process. It has been produced within a social context that cannot be presumed or assumed. In order to understand online text production, we need to know about the provenance. The meanings are also rooted outside the text, often in social happenings and events that exist outside the online space. As researchers of online spaces we have to understand that those spaces are often rooted elsewhere and the texts are not always self-standing, independent and self explanatory.

So I have realised that you need to look at the texts, but also at where they are produced so look at both ends.

Nevertheless in what I would call ‘mature’ online spaces, – spaces which have a social history, an often intricate set of networks that have been woven within the web, – these can be comprised of texts that root into the virtual space itself and have independence from geographical place. Not all mature sites do this of course, since some social networking function alongside or in support of offline activities and relationships.

So I draw a distinction here between mature sites and less mature sites … and texts which have roots in online and offline spaces; and texts which have roots just in the online world. I think that sites / online texts which root only in the offline world are less likely to survive.

Pic from Emblatame

I would have imagined that anyone having three months off work would immediately take to incessant blogging; uploading zillions of back logged photos onto Flickr and even …. even …. starting to write the book she had been thinking about doing for a while.

But no, no no. This is not what has happened to me … so far. Just the opposite. I have been hiding under the keyboard and feeling strange and in a funny space of not being at work and not being able to think in joined up sentences. I have been off work now for about 7 weeks …. but look at this … I am blogging.

What has helped me feel brave enough to plunge in again? The culprit is Twitter …or specifically people I know Twittering me ….. allowing me to just dip my toe in and help remember how nice it is to get glimpses of your friends online… getting messages through of just a couple of lines has helped me back in somehow and maybe just maybe, when I get back to work I won’t feel so twitty having first been tweeting and blogging my way into digital literacies again.

So this is an interesting little use of social networking … a vehicle for helping people to make their way back into communities after absence.

What have I been doing meanwhile? Not a lot … but I have read this (yesterday) by mad old Janet Street Porter; this (REALLY hilarious); and this (not hilarious but totally not put downable) . I have over the last weeks been forced into reading articles about Jade Goody like this and it has driven me batty. How can anyone bear this stuff??

I have been eating healthily in extremis lately and so I have been reeling from looking at this blog which beautifully illlustrates the path to fattiness and obesitydom.

Obviously, we all know vegetables are good for you:

(OMG do not make the mistake of viewing the WHOLE of this video…)

This is perhaps a new take on the ‘five a day’ rule:

As you are aware, vegetables are great for your health, but it turns out they have a great number of other uses too. Plenty more where this came from:

I wrote before a bit about memes here and here and here. Just wondering if the whole veggies as musical instrument is also a meme.

I am pretty sure that the ‘How to …’ format is a meme of some kind… which THE PERKLETS have heroically joined in with.

I think that the term meme is a term to be used to describe a social phenomenon but is NOT something that determines what should happen. That is to say I think a true meme evolves through and across groups, but f it is kind of DIRECTED, it does not seem like a true meme to me As in this example here.

Or am I being too purist about this? If you want to row about this check out this

the loveliness of this idea as a piece of streetart by joshua allen harris… oh it is delicious….

(Thanks to the food of the future for this).
There is also this video which shows an hour in the life of a Banksy piece:

There is some doubt about the authenticity of the guy in this video … and it’s probably and April fool thing

Really loving the way these pieces spread round the web these days.

There’s nothing like a good meme or a good piece of gossip.

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:

| View | Upload your own

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.

Have been looking at the new 21 classes blogging software. Looks like a great new package for the teacher who wants to use blogs but is nervous about keeping control of things. Looks easy to use and privacy settings are changeable very easily.

Here is what I have just set up.

Jackie told me about Voicethreads a way to combine sound with images – and again user-friendly software set up with schools in mind. Here’s my space.

You can embed what you do on voicethreads, into your blog or website:

(I know it’s a bit rubbish but I rushed this!)

Next up …. we all know the frustration of our pcs and software going wrong. Check this out.

And for easter … there’s this link. Enjoy!!