Oxford Dept of Education – Learning and New Technologies Research Group December 5th 2012

This talk considers the processes and outcomes of an ESRC-funded seminar series, held between October 2009 and April 2011.

The series brought together researchers and practitioners involved in four research projects that were focused, in different ways, on literacy, tertiary education, and digital communication (LIDU 2010).

The seminars set out to develop an agenda for new research, drawing on the range of conceptual, methodological, pedagogical, and political approaches brought to the discussions by participants from the different projects. But bringing these disparate people and approaches together was one thing -- ensuring coherent outcomes was quite another! In this talk I will review some of the problems we ran into, and the lessons we learned, trying to find common ground amongst linguists, social theorists, and learning technologists, talking about texts, practices and technologies.

I will describe how we eventually overcame most of these problems, and identified three major themes around which to propose future literacy-oriented research: ‘digital scholarship’, ‘post-human pedagogies’, and ‘the borderless university’. These themes are further explicated in an edited book called ‘Literacy in the Digital University’ to be published by Routledge in 2013, which I will plug shamelessly during the talk.

References:

Barton, D., Hamilton, M. & Ivanic, R. (Eds) (2000) Situated literacies: reading and writing in context. London: Routledge.

Bayne, S. (2010) ‘Academetron, automaton, phantom: Uncanny digital pedagogies’, London Review of Education, 8(1): 5-13.

Goodfellow, R. [2011] Literacy, literacies and the digital in higher education, Teaching in Higher Education, Volume 16 Issue 1, 131

Goodfellow, R. (2009-11)

Blog posts  in Literacy in the Digital University http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/

 LIT meets TEL. Tuesday, 20 October.  http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/lit-meets-tel.html

The great LiDU Twitter debate!  Friday, 23 October 2009. http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/great-lidu-twitter-debate_23.html

If Literacy is social practice why do we need to talk about Texts? Thursday, 5 November 2009 http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/if-literacy-is-social-practice-why-do.html

'Literacies and Technologies' or 'Why I think we need to keep talking' Friday, 6 November 2009 http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/literacies-and-technologies-or-why-i.html

3rd Seminar report Monday, 18 October 2010 http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/3rd-seminar-report.html

Summary of seminar themes - towards a research agenda for Literacy in the Digital University (long post!) Tuesday, 30 November 2010 http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/summary-of-seminar-themes-towards.html

Digital literacy events: Revisiting the twitter debate (rather long post) Friday, 2 December 2011 http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/digital-literacy-events-revisiting.html

Goodfellow, R. & Lea, M.R. (2007) Challenging E-learning in the University. Open University Press McGraw Hill.

Goodfellow, R. & Lea, M. (eds) (2013) Literacy in the Digital University: critical perspectives on learning, scholarship and technology. Routledge

Gourlay, L. (2012) Media systems, multimodality and posthumanism: implications for the dissertation? In Andrews, R., Borg, E., Boyd-Davis, S. & England, J. SAGE Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses. London: SAGE, 85-100.

Hemmi, A, Bayne, S and Land R (2009) The appropriation and repurposing of social technologies in higher education. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25(1). pp. 19-30.

Ivanič, R., Satchwell, C., Edwards, R., and Smith, J. (2007) ‘Possibilities for pedagogy in Further Education: Harnessing the abundance of literacy.’ British Educational Research Journal,. 33, 5, pp.703-721.

Lea, M R. and Jones, S (2011) 'Digital literacies in higher education: exploring textual and technological practice', Studies in Higher Education 36 (4) 377-395

Lea, M., & Street, B. (1998). Student writing in higher education, an academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 157–172.

Literacy in the Digital University (2009-2011) Series Home Page. http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/lidu

Littlejohn, A., Beetham, H., McGill, L. (2012) Learning at the digital frontier: a review of digital literacies in theory and practice. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Volume 28, Issue 6: 547–556