Digital Literacies

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.

Street has talked about autonomous literacy, associating it with traditional academic practices. This term describes the ways in which people (typically those in positions of power) think of literacy as being something to be taught; something to be aspired to; something to be earned. In a way it is not ‘of the people’ – but owned by powerful people who set the rules of engagement.

There are assessment criteria available which can measure people on a scale (that those in power have decided upon)  and compare aspiring writers and readers to each other. This model of literacy sees it as being about following rules set by others and the closer one can get to the norms, the higher the assessment. Ithe aim is to try and join those at the top – but you have to agree to their rules. The system is based on what is valued by the elite in educated circles; it is all about belonging to a club that sets rules for its members. Street has talked about this as autonomous literacy because it is about the individual and it does not recognise the social aspect of literacy.

Conversely, (and it is no surprise that Street is an anthropologist), there is another way of looking at literacy; it sees literacy ‘as a social practice’; as opposed to ‘autonomous’ literacy, Street describes this second type as ‘ideological literacy’. Of course it is not the case that autonomous literacy lacks in ideology; far from it. But it is presented as if neutral, as if it were the bare bones, the tools, with which to perform literacy tasks. Conceptualised as ‘ideological literacy’ , the other way of viewing literacy, is that it is absolutely about social and cultural values and practices. In such  amodel, I think we also see literacy as something which evolves by participation – in the same way as spoken language.  For me the analogy is spoken language; that it is something that has developed through community and that what gets developed is what is valued by the speakers. That  is to say, spoken language changes over time with new words being added, new phrases s adopted and even new ways of intonation or grammatical twists. The ideological view of literacy focuses attention on the nature and function of literacy in a social system. Literacy is an integral feature of the social system. Literacy is understood and used in myriad ways in the function of the social system. Literacy is a measure of social position, a metric of job eligibility, a tool for job performance, a device for exercising influence, and a medium for interpreting the world.
I think that in this sense we see that a move towards this newer conceptualisation of literacy is a move towards a more honest and open approach. It is seen to be as inherently GOOD. There is a moral stance being taken (I think) which is that the ideological model represents a view that is seen to be less judgemental, more accepting and even ‘kind’.
Brian Streets’ work fits well within the paradigm of the New Literacy Studies. Work has been developed, sitting on the shoulders of an argument first put forward by the New London Group whicjh proposes a new way of educating. The New London Group proposes that a new way of teaching literacy is required for the new kinds of texts being produced through digital technologies (etc); such new texts are multimodal and the fact that they are produced in different ways to those of a bygone era changes the meanings of those texts in all kinds of complex, subtle(and not so subtle ) ways.

Lankshear and Knobel’s (or Knobel and Lankshear’s) work is rooted within such a paradigm of new literacy studies and multiliteracies; they have developed the concept of New Literacies. In this concept they talk about ways in which people are producing new kinds of text; that they are involved in new kinds of literacy practice – because of the development of new technologies. New Technologies and all the affordances they have, allow us to communicate in new ways, with greater numbers of people and much more quickly than before. Crucially, we are able to collaborate on the production of new texts, we can change the texts produced by others, (see all the YouTube memes) we can have texts that change very quickly, that kaleidoscopically fit inside each other (eg through the use of hyperlinks) – we do not have to read in linear ways. All these things are NEW.

However, as a point of fact, I would like to say that more traditional literacy practices are not bad; nor are they likely to become obsolete. To conflate new literacy studies with new literacy practices is obviously an easy thing to do. However it is important to me, that I keep separate the ideas, since the new literacy studies is seen to be a theoretical move ahead. It takes a different moral stance to what Street has conceptualised as ‘autonomous’ literacy. However, older practices in themselves are not inherently ‘bad’ in the New Literacy Studies. We need to remember that in rejecting autonomous models we were also rejecting the idea of condemning the practices of others. All too often I see work which berates those who do not ‘properly’ adopt new practices. Whilst I would argue that we need, as teachers, to help as many people as possible to participate in what is possible with new technologies, we should not let this mean that we also condemn those who continue to value other types of text production and consumption practices. To do so, would be to play the elitist game and fall into the trap I outlined at the top of the post.

Street, Brian V. 1985.Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Lankshear and Knobel  (2006) New Literaies: changing Knowledge in the Classroom. OUP.

Anyhow… here is an interesting example of a literacy practice – this was taken in Chinatown NYC. What aspects of this reflect new practices? And what are conventional practices?

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 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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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!!

Today I had a go at playing Supple!! Thanks to PJC my life will never be the same again. It’s a bit like the Sims – but sexier. So that’s the game for me, obviously.

Bell Hooks is on YouTube:

some people mihght find that unexpercted, that intellectuals have stuff on YouTUbe.

But a lot of really good stuff in on there.

This video is a clip from a lomger video available from the Media Education Foundation

BUt you can check out quite a lot of stuff on YouTUbe from the Challenging Media section.

Rosa likes the stuff about advertising and the exploitation of women. Like this:

So, loadsa stuff about ISSUES on YouTube. You just have to know how to find it, I guess.

And I have used quite a lot of them on the New Literacies MA … maybe I will soon put up videos of my own onto YouTube.

I have been playing with a free down load of the software ‘Camtasia’.

I have been making rough and ready amateurish videos for the online MA in New Literacies.

I have to say the videos are less Hollywood than they are YouTube. You can see through the cracks of production – very much so.

But that is what web 2.0 is all about isn’t it?

Mind you I must admit I have not yet worked out how to put them in a YouTube friendly format … so an example of Camtasia is here:

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 have just done my first podcast. I wanted to check that it was easy to do … and it IS!! (I mention this new course in the recording.)

All I needed was to go the website, register and that was it. I recorded straight onto my powerbook and it just did it – no outside microphone or owt. Just stared at the screen and spoke.

So that’s that decided. I am going to do so many of these things that you will be sick of hearing my voice. ( I would like to have a different accent.)

Things to say about it … I don’t sound like me. I repeat myself. I talk rubbish. And at the end I say ‘Grrreat’ instead of ‘great’.

I think in fact that I need to script these things or at least make notes of what to include.

So yes, it is a learning experience. techNOLOGY = easy. TechNEEK – bad.

Makes me realise exactly how clever these young journalists are.

And in the meantime poor old Sheffield is still suffering. TT told me outallnight had some great shots of the effects of the flood as opposed to the floods itself ….

here is part of the busiest motorway in the UK – closed due to floods higher up ….

Well done to outallnight whose full set of flood photos are here.