Digital Literacies

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.

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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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.

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?

The message was spread mainly via Facebook for everyone to KEEP STILL and FREEEEZE yesterday at 3.30p.m. in Trafalgar Square.

People turned up from all over the country to take part in a massive piece of art work – a community event which begins online, moves off line to the real world and is reported and documented online again.

Enabled by the web these flash mob games continue through the world.

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.

Amazing stuff down the pub on Ebay …

I love the way they have a discussion board called The Nag’s head. People in there can just chill n chat.
Lots of the people in there have no selling or buying history on eBay and so are just hanging out in the discussion rooms just because they can. It’s like a free place where you can go in and loll about – only attracting attention if you break the rules.
It reminds me of the young people who hang out on street corners or in shopping malls. Those cool places where adults don’t want them but they reclaim as their own. They change the nature of a place by doing different stuff in them – and sometimes they get noticed, sometimes they don’t.
The other day I came across a thread where people were talking about brandings, piercings and body carving. Really. And there was a link to the most horrendous images. (I am not putting in a link as I don’t want it connected to my blog.) Of body carving. But they basically can talk about anything at all…so here’s one person moaning about her mother …

Basiclly I just need to rant
when Im on the phone to her or Talking to her in person I could say something she looks at me blankly and then just starts ranting about something thats on her mind

Shes had a few problems with her sisters lately and resulting in her only talking to 1 out of 5
she constantly goes on and on and on And ON about them and TBH Im getting really sick of it

Its like nothing I have to say is important because she has this problem even my kids had to listen to it when she was here last week. Carl listened to it one night and then disappered for the rest of the week

or there is this one about people with no manners:

Really wind me up
13 people said their child was coming to Connors party today, i put on the invitation that i needed to know exact numbers by the 7th as i had to pay in advance, most of them i had to chase up because they were too lazy to tick the box saying i would love to come/ i cant come.
On friday i had 13 “definitley coming” i paid £161 for the bloody party £11.50 a child and 4 of them didnt turn up after their parents said they were coming

I am so temted to tell the parents tomorrow they owe me £11.50 each

and breathe

I think that people plan to meet on these discussion boards and then have a chat. I think they know each other face to face and use this as a spce to catch up. Which is a good idea I spose as it is free and there is loadsa room to put up jpgs and the like.

So my point is that people re-fashion online spaces to suit their needs. Interesting.

Such is the fascination of eBay, that one of the most viewed images on my Flick stream, is the teacups I once bought from eBay:

At one time I used to receive loads of ‘jokes’, stories, images (usually sexist, laughing at how stupid men/women are) even prayers on email.
These have died down now – maybe as people have tired ofthese things, or maybe because I rarely responded to the ones sent to me (perhaps everyone else gets as many as they used to) . I think that what they do is kind of ‘poke’ people, reminding them of who they cpuld interact with if they want to, in the same way as facebook does I suppose. And maybe now a lot of this kind of phatic socialisation and development of in-jokes has transferred to facebook, Bebo and so on and on.

Anyway I got this today:

According to today’s regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids
in the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s probably shouldn’t have survived, because
our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint which was
promptly chewed and licked.

Yes, you’re getting old!!

I admit to having quite liked reading this and felt a bit smug and thought ‘oh yes!! That’s true – especially as I started remembering spending days roller skating while pushing along my old dolls pram filled with stuff.There are myths and tropes about today’s kids, yesterday’s kids and today’s adults. I guess the meme within this whole thing is the one that has persisted over generations which is that in the old days, people had it tougher and it did them good.

Certainly the author of ‘Toxic Childhoods’ has a rose coloured notion of the past and probably has loadsa conversations about the good old days.

But I am not glad I have thirteen amalgam fillings in my teeth; that my Mum used to cut a hole in the front of my winter shoes to turn them into summer sandals; or that Sundays were so endlessly endlessly boring; or that oneof my junior school teachers smoked in the classroom and that kids got whacked on the hands, legs or face if they did stuff wrong in school. Don’t et me wrong, I enjoyed my childhood and it is quite thought provoking getting these kinds of email from time to time. (And it is this that shows my age – I can talk about my childhood and know that it was very very different in so many ways to that of ‘kids today’.

Wow Thursday already. Time for an update. How about a trip to a website to see other people with the same name as you?
Go here.

Funny way to network… you can link up with others who share your name . It’s quite fun to see what’s there.

Maybe you are more interested in finding out that if you are in Britain now and reading this (which you are) you are more likely to be a woman between the ages of 18 and 34 than any other type of person… see here.

I am amazed by this:

They now account for 38% of game players. Women over 18 represent a significantly greater portion of game players compared to boys under 17.

This sounds whizzy and all counter intuitive, but then there ia also this list here:

• iVillage Parenting Network
• Huggies
• The Full Experience Company
• BBC Parenting
• Galaxy Radio
• hairboutique.com
• Foxtons
• La Senza
• FCUK
• Pregnancy-info.net

which provides details of where most women are going online. Not so funky, huh?

The original report is here.

For those who are just getting into social networking online, you could do worse than start on Club Penguin … and to entice you …

Dress up your penguin, decorate your igloo, be the first to discover new areas and lots more, when you become a member!

But what is NOT mentioned here is the introduction to capitalist practices through networking – the poor little penguins have to work to earn money in order to do anything much on the site – by making pizzas…