tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4133514722948599255.post441997017405620881..comments2023-06-24T01:51:27.999-07:00Comments on Literacy in the Digital University: If Literacy is social practice why do we need to talk about Texts?Robin Goodfellowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00138408404345093163noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4133514722948599255.post-91659694469494215082009-11-12T04:48:46.316-08:002009-11-12T04:48:46.316-08:00I've been thinking about Andy's comments a...I've been thinking about Andy's comments above for the last week and trying to compose a response short enough to be a comment and not a fully-fledged post!<br /><br />I wanted to pick up the notion of 'affordances' again, as I've always found this concept a bit slippery. They work in both directions don't they - artifacts afford uses for specific users: screens are for the sighted, social networks are for the sociable etc.<br /><br />The question of what counts as a digital 'academic artefact' is a crucial one as it implies the question what is academic about the user too. <br /><br />Is it the case that writing became privileged in the academy because of the available technologies (pens, printing etc.)? Or was it part of more general 'turn to the text' that characterised an increasingly complex and professionalised order of communication in society?<br /><br />'Writing as a technology' moves us towards quite a broad concept of technology - like Foucault's 'technologies of the self' meaning practices and techniques rather than media and tools. I guess this is where we might want to be, from a 'literacies'perspective, but I'm not sure where the concept of affordances fits in here.<br /><br />Just out of interest, I believe that in France the public oral PhD viva still survives in tandem with an extensive documentation process that is used to validate and record the viva outcomes.<br /><br />I agree that we need to embrace non-written textual forms as ways of expressing aspects of discourse and debate in the academy (in both its public and professional roles)- how the doing so will change the nature(s) of academic community(ies)is the question!Robin Goodfellowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00138408404345093163noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4133514722948599255.post-67199746452132014572009-11-06T04:30:36.808-08:002009-11-06T04:30:36.808-08:00Just had a blindingly obvious thought!
Having wad...Just had a blindingly obvious thought! <br />Having waded through treacle in my last posting about technologies always being part of literacies, the other side of this coin is that, in the kinds of contexts we are interested in, of course literacies and texts are always part of technologies That's why we need to talk about texts.<br />Mary.Mary Leahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05513887483767464764noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4133514722948599255.post-82598309648245704102009-11-05T06:58:12.604-08:002009-11-05T06:58:12.604-08:00@robin
Having thought some more about your presen...@robin<br /><br />Having thought some more about your presentation and using my studying technology lens I think you need to refine your arguments to take into account the affordances of technologies and particularly digital technologies in creating 'academic artefacts'.<br /><br />One aspect of this is that available and readily usable technologies have privileged the written texts as the main academic artefact, whether that was quill and paper or an email. Writing can be seen as a technology in itself and helps structure texts in terms of grammar but also form e.g. the essay vs the report. Texts dominate because the technology has enabled then to do so. Digital technologies and in particular their non-rivalled abundance features (in economic terms) means more people have more opportunities to create more lasting texts than has ever been the case before in human history.<br /><br />The greater availability of digital technologies allows many more people to create lasting visual artefacts (photos, diagrams, movies) or oral artefacts (podcasts, songs) than ever before but all these have a very short history of significant use compared to writing (literacy). Thus while oracy/articulacy and graphicacy are also talked about being in the wider 'literacies' stable there is a much less well formed and universally understood set of 'rules' for 'writing and reading' such visual or oral artefacts in general or in academia (what is the grammar of a digram for instance?). Yes we have had vivas to test articulacy (among other things) but these were ephemeral and not subject to recording and further use and review in the way that a paper TMA has been. <br /><br />I do not think that these other 'literacies' will blow away (mainly) written texts as the dominant academic artefacts but we do need to look and possibly embrace some of then as equally valid forms of expressing academic discourse and debate.<br /><br />Andy LaneUnknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15272558569748946619noreply@blogger.com