Third seminar in the series coming soon!

The third seminar in the series, entitled 'Methodologies for Research in Literacy and Learning in Digital Contexts', will be held at the Open University on October 14th and 15th.

The programme is still being finalised -- as well as presentations and discussions led by the core members of the seminar group (David Barton, Mary Hamilton, Candice Satchwell, Helen Beetham, Allison Littlejohn, Lou McGill, Sian Bayne, Mary Lea, Chris Jones, Robin Goodfellow) it will include talks from two international invited speakers: Eszter Hargittai from Northwestern University in the USA, and Carmen Lee from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a plenary discussion led by Carey Jewitt from the Institute of Education.

Eszter has recently had an interview about her book 'Research Confidential' published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Carmen was an invited speaker at the 17th International conference on learning in Hong Kong this year. Carey is well-known internationally for her work on multimodality and education.

The previous two seminars (Edinburgh last October, Glasgow Caledonian in March) raised a number of key questions for future research on 'literacies of the digital' and 'learning in the digital age'. Some of these issues are summarised here on the Lidu blog, for example:

Socio-technical practices – what are they, how are they learned, what group, and group-use-of-technology practices need to be learned for collaborative, participatory practices?

How do universities respond, in terms of assessment frameworks, regulations etc., to new text types and literacy practices?

What is it to be a digital scholar? What makes a ‘successful’ ‘academic’ blog, for example? Will a blog ever have the same status as a paper in a reviewed journal?

The October seminar is focusing on the kinds of research methodologies, survey-based, qualitative, ethnographic, reflexive etc. that we need to inform the exploration of questions like these.