Digital Literacies

I didn’t realise that the government had videos on Youtube ….

here is the launch of the Byron report :

and here is something from the outtake genre of video …

funny what you come across when you aren’t trying.

So0arcOz has a great post here about a tv programme that I have not seen – maybe it is only available so far in Oz, but it is a satirical sopa opera based in aschool.
I love that the kids in this school have the same uniform as kids in a local private school near me.

Aaaanyway I think the programme looks just spot on for use in the classroom as it provides hot topics for kids to discuss and would also be a good media studies topic in itself – ‘what makes popular culture so controversial?’

Check it out.

Hilarious. I really wanna watch it on our tvs in the UK. Please can we buy it Mr BBC?

The Today Programme had a piece about how some kids are arranging suicides online – an ‘internet suicide cult’. (Listen to the first three minutes of the 8.30 section).

It refers to the 7 young people who have recently committed suicide in Bridge End, Wales. They suggested that it is websites that seems to be encouraging the spate of suicides. This is obviously a very serious business. And for some, BEBO gets the blame.

The MP interviewed suggested that young people ‘lose reality’ when they are online. The MP also said that she wished that young people realised that they could talk to ‘real people’ who could help them when they are stressed. (Mind you,closer reading of the newsreports shows that most of these people also knew each other in face to face contexts too.)

The Sun reported in this lascivious way. The Telegraph also ran this on the story. And they let readers leave comments. One person writes:

Posted by Steve (UK) on January 23, 2008 2:47 AM Report
this comment
It seems that many kids find it easier to talk to a computer
than to their parents. It is no longer sufficient for parents to leave their
adolescent kids to find their own way in life, hoping that they will eventually
turn out like themselves. Kids are being enticed by role models in the media
(including “cool” aliases on the Internet).

And there is also this vile remark:

Posted by K.Evans on January 23, 2008 1:43 PMReport
this comment
“I don’t know much about South Wales, but here in New South
Wales, Australia, my kids are too busy surfing, climbing, exploring, camping and
having FUN to be sitting, gibbering over some Internet site.” Well, there’s your
big difference! This is England and all such activities were banned years ago by
the government in case someone bumps their head and empties the local authority
purse in compensation payments. The streets are therefore silent regards happy
playing children, all victims of the ‘no ball games here’ culture. Instead we
have bored, badly parented gutter snipes drowning their empty, hopeless lives
with cheap alcohol and the other end of the spectrum we have those whose best
friend is the social networking site. Well at least they’re not out on the
street either drinking, battering law abiding citizens or getting knifed eh!

Aside from the sweeping statements about a whole nation (do we call it racist?) there is also the assumption that those who go online are lazy, ‘badly parented’ and so on. Hmm. Interesting stuff – they used to say that about people who watched TV, or before that, read popular culture novels etc. (Actually am glad that K.Evans keeps offline in the main – although what is s/he doing putting comments on virtual spaces?)

The Today programme mentions that there are ‘memorial websites’ and that young
people are wanting to have a site dedicated to them, when they commit suicide. I
found what they were talking about here. And here is one that has been set
up for one of the teens who committed suicide in Bridge End. The argument is
that the teens are attracted to the idea of having such sites. They like the idea of a memorial.

It did not take me long to find weird stuff on Google by using key words ’suicide’ and Bebo‘ - and certainly I think this blog is somewhat creepy.

Aaaanyway … what do I think? I can only comment in terms of the Internet, rather than say something about teenagers’ suicidal tendencies. In general it remains the case that teenagers’ mostly interact with people they already know from face to face (f2f) situations. There is a smaller group who sometimes connect with some people who they don’t already know from f2f situations; an even smaller group who exclusively talk to people who they only met and know from online spaces. So usually they are not confused by the virtual and the real. This makes me think that those who do get involved in this stuff, are already a bit ‘lost’ and impressionable.

Secondly, and most importantly, while I think that the Internet is GREAT and a wonderful opportunity in so many ways, it is definitely the case that parents and teachers need to understand what their kids are doing and guide them. Just as we give guidance to kids when they go out on their own, so too we need to guide them in the online spaces they go to. Many parents and teachers don’t understand about how the Internet works and they need to know so they can guide their kids. BEBO and other social networking sites have, frankly, enriched the lives of far more people than they have hurt and I think we have to be very careful about what we say about popular cultural phenomena – an easy way to alienate the young is to tell them what they are doing is bad, dangerous and wrong.

So. The Internet is not about to go away. It is going to increase its presence in our lives. So we all need to learn how to read texts; how to protect ourselves and be aware of how persuasive/seductive some texts/ online cultures can be. This is the role of Education and Educators. Like me.

What can I do?

I want a Mac Book Air … you can actually copy a CD or software from another computer without any wires … oh wow!!

| View | Upload your own

see this show or you can see on video here.

Had a good day at this conference on Monday.

Did a presentation about the online MA, which seemed to go down OK.

View Upload your own

It is hosted on slideshare here.
In my presentation I was wanting to share ideas about how to make an online course, which uses ‘clunky’ software, into something a bit more like a web 2.0 experience. I also wanted to share thoughts about what we had learned so far as teachers.

I think that Street Art merits a place as a New Literacy – I think it has always had many of the characteristics of New Literacies, but more so now.

If we think of New Literacies as being some or all of the following – multimodal; able to be changed by people other than the original authors; that it is often replicated – either exactly or showing slight adjustments to suit context; its meanings change over time and when it is used in different contexts – and the text itself can change as the environment interacts with it or as others ‘upload’ / ‘paste-up’ /’stencil’ (etc) new content near it….As Lankshear and Knobel explain here:

They can “travel” without requiring particular
people to transport them. They can be replicated independently of needing
other human beings to host the replication. The particular kinds of codes employed
in literacy practices are varied and contingent.

These days more and more street artists are conscious of their work being photographed and being put online. Like Celso. And this sometimes influences the way they DESIGN it, or where they place it – perhaps in places that are often photographed.

Often the streetartists are also very active on sites such as flickr, keeping an eye on the way their own art develops in the street (evidence of other art around it; art being added; the art weathering and going through an aging process) as well as how it is developing meanings in online contexts.
In this sense we see ‘the fracturing of space’ occurring as part of the whole streetart process.

See how goreb for example can look at all photos tagged with his name on Flickr. He and others can then see how popular the art is, how it is progressing in the environment – and see it as an online gallery like a museum collection. Look.

I love how Banksy has played with Flickr like this:

Home of the sugar dudes and so many other funky folk …

We flew in last week and had a jet-lagged stop off at The Rodeo bar with C-Monster, Celso, RubyMae and Arfer. No time for the Delice Bakery unfortunately, but we did have time to check out what was going on with some of the street art in Wooster and Williamsburg.

Really nice to catch up and chat and get some info for a new flickr article I am putting together for Carey’s journal Visual Culture.

We went on through to Austin where I caught up with Sarah and Dana at the NRC conference. Their papers were fabulous of course and will blog more on this soon….

Rosa enjoyed doing just that in the summer:

However, some people take this to extremes, and proving that you can find absolutely anything on the web, we have this for you: squirrel forms.

Oh yeah… I am so pleased with our new course which goes live today … I am so so excited and am looking forward to the students playing around in there and doing stuff on New Literacies.

it feels like its been a long time coming, but now it’s here, and we are ready to go.

We’ll be doing lots of stuff about new practices around new technologies … maybe analysing stuff like this very cool video here But I really love the way this video reinterprets aspects of environmental literacy to suit a lovely romantic story…

I love the way people are using YouTube as a way of being activist, or just exploring views. See this one here:

Why don’t you do the green thing?? Walk to work … you know you wanna.