Seminar No.2 Glasgow March 1st

The second LiDU seminar 'Digital texts and practices: learning across boundaries' promises some new perspectives from doctoral student colleagues at Glasgow Caledonian researching in workplace learning and the knowledge economy, as well as updates on ongoing work around this theme from our core group members at GCU, Lancaster, Edinburgh and the OU. We will also have the benefit of input from Caroline Haythornthwaite from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is currently Leverhulme visiting professor at the Institute of Education, and Alison MacKenzie, Chair of the SCONUL working group on information literacy, who have agreed to act as discussants for the day.

The programme for the day follows the same structure as the first seminar last October, which is: two main presentations and a group discussion session in the morning, and two doctoral student presentations and a plenary discussion session in the afternoon. The main presentations this time will be from the Learning Literacies in a Digital Age group at GCU (Helen Beetham, Alison Littlejohn, Lou McGill), and the Literacies for Learning in Further Education group from Lancaster (David Barton. Mary Hamilton, Candice Satchwell). The group discussions will be led by Sian Bayne & Jen Ross from Edinburgh, and Mary Lea & Robin Goodfellow from the OU.

As well as discussing issues raised in the individual presentations, the seminar will be a chance to see if any of the contact/contest points between Literacy Studies and Learning Technology perspectives that emerged last time have expanded our thinking. Some of these points were discussed in this blog following the October seminar, see for example Helen Beetham's Lit vs TEL - a response to Robin in which she argues that practices are 'technical' only in so far as they haven't yet been socialised; Mary Hamilton's Thoughts from the first seminar where she proposes a role in TEL studies for the 'the techniques of micro-analysis of practices and events that literacy people bring to the table'; and Mary Lea's 'Literacies and Technologies' or 'Why I think we need to keep talking' where she suggests that there is a potential commonality for both literacies and learning technologies perspectives , in a focus on institutional conditions framing students' practices in learning with technologies.

Amongst other developments since the Edinburgh seminar, a new report on Digital Literacies has been produced by the Technology Enhanced Learning phase of the ESRC's Teaching and Learning Research Programme, co-written by David Barton (with Julia Gillen). Helen Betham has co-presented (with Fred Garnett & Richard Noss) a workshop on What does the Future hold for Digital Literacy? at Leicester University's 'Learning Futures' festival. And Sian Bayne's talk on 'Uncanny Digital Literacies' has been the subject of discussion on a blog called The Popular Uncanny .