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 have been interested to see that the British tv and radio have had quite a lot of stuff about diaries recently. Richad E Grant hosting something, ‘Dear Diary’ for example. This documentary features diaries kept by a number of people over many years… the iplayer info explains:

Richard E Grant, a diarist since childhood, uncovers the power of the diary. He considers the diaries of Joe Orton, Kenneth Williams, Erwin James, John Diamond and Rosemary Ackland and asks whether a diary should, or could, ever be totally honest, wholly accurate and absolutely true.

I was surprised to find the first in this treble episode series to be quite riveting; Richard is quite posh so I found it fun watching him amble about poshly and awkwardly asking nosey questions (pretending not to be famous and giggling like a kid) – there is this great part where his wife calls him while he is doing a webcam thing and he answers ‘I’m just doing the diary programme’ or some such. Anyhow this is all quite weird as we watch him question diarists about why they keep diaries all their lives. He asks whether people should be totally honest – and I thought that interesting as paper based diaries tend to be thought of as quintessentially private writings – unlike blogs, of course. So it is strange to ask whether people should be honest – when there seems to be moral outrage if blogs do not seem to be honest. Why would you be less than honest in a private diary? Today the radio mentioned that the Green Goddess has kept a diary since she was a kid (and is now 70) . Then (Lady) Antonia Fraser was on book of the week reading her diary about her life with Harold Pinter.

So all this stuff about writing in a private way and going public with it is totally age old and I just find it fascinating that there seems to be this widespread interest … also Dr Irving Finkel is assistant keeper in The Middle Eastern Department of the British Museum and his collection of private diaries, written by ‘ordinary people’ appears in the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition ‘Identity: Eight rooms, nine lives’ which runs until April. (I would like to go) It was funny as he was talking about how apparently boring diaries are interesting as they show us things about ourselves. On the radio he read excerpts which included things like ‘ I really hate Lindsay; I hate her hate her” etc…. showing that teenagers have always been the same! But I will be very interested to see if any critics slate this exhibition for being banal – in the same way as they often slate Twitter, or blogs for being so. Or will the fact that they are written on paper (and are a bit less than contemporary) save them this fiercesome criticism? I think that we love to see traces of people – and I like to see the lives of ORDINARY people. There is something that immediately makes things seem special if you put them in a museum – maybe it is the glass cabinet effect that CHANGES the meanings.

Fascinating also, is the stuff you find on Flickr that is so diary -ike. Check out this custom made diary from Traveliter

see all the interesting comments under the photo. And then of course there are all the 365 groups which ask for one photo a day per year – and thousands of people commit to this. Fabulous, I say.

Interesting this desire to leave traces of ourselves everywhere; the web allows us to distribute the narrative across spaces and time and to share aspects of our lives and to provide a particular version (or brand) of ourselves.

The Guardian reported today on someone who one day, scarily, burned every photo he ever took …a professional photographer who had had ENOUGH. he said ‘Photography was dead by 1972′

I am so glad he is less right; i.e. wrong.

Here are some traces of people doing identity work:

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.

I first opened my Flickr account way back in 2004. I only joined so that I could use it as a place to upload pictures to my blog. At that time you could not directly upload images into blogger and so I would upload to Flickr, get the code and paste into my posts. It was not until a while after I was using Flickr that I started to realise there was fun to be had looking at everyone else’s images, commenting and (most fun of all) joining groups and setting them up. Then started my OBSESSION with photographing my life and putting stuff up online.

However, I could not continue at that same rate forever and so I have gradually wound down so that last year I hardly used Flickr at all. This last couple of weeks, with more time on my hands, I am now uploading again and really enjoying it. It helps that TT bought me a fabulous new camera for my birthday – a Canon Powershot G11.

Much more portable than my SLR, but it still works so well – really versatile and can cope with some challenging macro stuff as well as handling night shots:

I feel like I am getting back in touch with the real me now that I am walking around with a camera again!

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.

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.

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.

The World of Dolly Parton sleeveface
Originally uploaded by Stephen Sleeveface

So is this a new literacy practice I wonder?
You get an album with a big face on; hold it to your head … and you’re a popstar!!
Ace.

It’s a group on Flickr and a blog.
It must be a meme.

As after the sleeveface blog … there have been loads spring up. Check it out on Google.

If you don’t know how to do it ….go on You Tube. Or look here >>>>>>

so are you gonna have a go?

Huh?

It made me laugh to see on Flickr that Elbowtoe has done a wheatpaste of Gamma Blog.

OPEN AIR from knox on Vimeo.

People often talk about Sheffield as being ‘like a village’. Well somehow when I am on Flickr, the whole world seems like a village.

Does that mean I am a Geek?