Literacy in the Digital University

That Zengestrom post - scholarship or just 'sociality'?

2012-01-06T04:48:00.000-08:00

Some colleagues and I at IET spent an hour yesterday discussing Jyri Engeström's six-year-old posting about 'object-centred sociality' (nb: my earlier posting on this). (I include some of the notes I made about the post itself below).

I introduced this as a topic for our (face-to-face) reading group partly because I'm interested in the theory of object-centred sociality but also because I wanted to see whether talking about a blog post would be different from discussing a journal article, which is what we usually do in the reading group. This seemed to me to be relevant to our ongoing consideration of what is involved in digital scholarship.

In the event, I thought it was a different kind of discussion, although I'm not sure my colleagues agreed with me.

For a start, the presence of the text itself was ambiguous. Usually everyone prints out the article & sits around in a circle holding it in front of them. In this case, one or two people had printed it out, a couple had it on their laptops (although not necessarily open in front of them), another had it on his phone, another didn't have it at all (although they said they had read it.) It all felt a bit ephemeral to me, with some of the more extended features of the text (its links out, its later follow-up postings etc.) not present at all even when they were being discussed.

And then, I felt that the discussion was more reflexive than usual – with people talking more about their own experiences with social media rather than about what Engestrom might be saying about Knor Cetina's theory, or what the commenters might be saying about Engestrom's views.

Lots of interesting points were raised however: the relation between links in a blog post and references in an academic article; the effects on the persistent text of its links becoming broken over time; knowing where the boundaries of a blog text actually finish...

On the issue of digital scholarship, it seemed to down to whether we see Engestrom's post as a kind of mini-example of 'good ' conventional scholarship (well-researched, concisely structured and expressed, appropriately referenced etc.) or whether we are prepared to take the whole set of connected texts (comments, linked sites follow-up texts) as representing a different kind of, more collaborative, scholarship.

Whilst I'm broadly in favour of the latter view, my problem with it in this case is what has happened to Knorr-Cetina's principled notion of 'objects of sociality' in the translation from Engestrom's invoking of it to account for the failure of some social networking practices in 2005 (45 citations in Google scholar), to, for example, Hugh McLeod's distinctly non-scholarly appropriation of it to publicise his artwork 2 years later (2950 hits on Google).

Reading through the 100 comments on Engestrom's post I only managed to find two that referred back to Knorr-Cetina. Most of the other constructive ones ran with the issue of what makes social networking successful or otherwise, without really bothering whether it might be evidence of a 'post-social' turn in contemporary social life or not! Understandable it may be, but rather more digital than scholarly I thought.

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Some notes on Engestrom's post:

This was prompted by a blog post from Russell Beattie http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/1008411 explaining that he had decided to close his LinkedIn account because he had too many contacts and nothing to say to any of them, and the system would have required him to delete them individually.

E. claims there is a 'profound confusion about the nature of sociality' due to the use of the term social network to refer to a 'map of the relationships between individuals’.

He proposes an alternative approach to social networks – based on Knorr Cetina - and sets out to explain how this approach accounts for why some social networking services succeed while others don't.

Summary of comments:

<><><> <><><>

Content topic	No. of comments
Google Maps, Flickr and Camera Phones as an infrastructure for new location-centred social software	7
Open question/development of original topic	28
General approval/re-blog	20
Own site/blog/talks/promotions	24
Trackbacks	5
Critical	7
Personal	2
Misc/irrelevant/spam	18
Responses from JE	1

Google search: Jyri Engeström "the case for object-centered sociality" -site:www.zengestrom.com/

Approx 2760 results (in all languages), 1930 in English

Approx 45 citations found by Google Scholar including articles in: - British Journal of Educational Technology, Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management, Interactive Learning Environments, Open Learning, Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group, Computers and Composition…

Subsequent posts on Zengestrom.com on the theme of sociality:

June 10, 2005 –announcing his talk on object centred sociality at Reboot conference in Copenhagen (links to summaries on David Weinberger's blog, Bohellz blog, PowerPoint and PDF no longer work).

19 comments on this post: http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/06/speaking-on-object-centered-sociality-at-reboot-updated-with-slides.html#comments

December 3, 2006 – announcing his talk at the MSN-sponsored Innovate event in Stockholm, on social objects (link broken).

3 comments on this post: http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2006/12/social-objects-talk-in-stockholm.html#comments

September 17, 2007 – comment on cartoonist Hugh MacLeod on wine as a social object with reference to a label created for Microsoft and its employees. Link to MacLeod's website (May 18, 2008) 'Free cartoons as social objects http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/cat_microsoft_blue_monster_series.html

10 comments

August 15, 2008 – comment relating object centred sociality to Google Readers updated Shared Items functionality. Chat conversation as a social object.

February 13, 2010 – another message about Hugh MacLeod on social objects for beginners (from 2007) (http://gapingvoid.com/2007/12/31/social-objects-for-beginners/)

6 comments

Digital literacy events: Revisiting the twitter debate (rather long post)

2011-12-02T09:31:00.000-08:00

I'm going to talk a bit about the LIDU twitter debate at the Society for Research in Higher Education conference next week, so I thought I would revisit it here and create a handy link for myself, for the talk (which makes this post a kind of meta literacy event!).

The twitter debate illustrates the ideological dimension of literacy practices - how communities use them to include or exclude others - so it's quite a good case to use to combat the relentless digital-literacy-as-online-skills discourse that seems to be rather setting the agenda for these kind of discussions at the moment.

I've illustrated it to break up the textiness a bit...

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It was four o'clock on a sunny autumn afternoon, and the seminar had reached its final plenary session. CJ, in his role as discussant, was summarising the events of the day. Behind him was a large data projection screen. There were about 30 people in the audience, sitting informally in rows. Some of them had notebooks in which they were writing, others were using laptops. Plenty were just listening. It was a typical academic seminar in 'winding-up' mode.

To illustrate what he was saying about the difficulty of separating technology from practice, CJ projected a view of the live twitter stream to which a few of the audience had been, and were still, posting. The twitter stream remained displayed on the wall behind him while he continued his summary, scrolling occasionally as people in the room continued to post comments.

When the summary had finished, and the audience was invited to respond, a participant said that she felt a surprisingly strong reaction to the the twitter stream (still projected on the wall) which was distracting and intrusive. She felt irritated by the people who were tweeting, as if they were absenting themselves from the live group in order to talk to unseen others.

The tweeters responded that being able to maintain contact with their remote networks enhanced their participation in the seminar. One said that coming from the learning technology world it had not occurred to her that people might object to tweeting, or to the stream being made public.

Others joined in the dispute, but it was relatively mild, nobody punched anyone, and the whole thing was put to rest after about 10 minutes when the projection was switched off and the conversation took another tack. However, most of the tweeting stopped.

Moreover, the episode left its mark on the memories of several of the participants. Feelings were involved: objectors experienced strong negative reactions, some of the tweeters felt got at, exasperated by the objections. Also, the event disrupted the 'knowledge agenda' of the group: a seminar about literacy in the University was forced to see its own practices as problematic, not just those involved in teaching students. The discussion was followed up a few days later on the seminar blog. It was still being referred to 12 months later, in the third seminar, and here am I rehashing it again after two years.

For me it illustrates the ‘ideological’ dimension of literacy as social practice really well. It was an example of contested social action -- a struggle for the legitimacy of a certain kind of text. The twitter stream, both online and as projected onto the wall of the seminar room at this time, is the text – its legitimacy as part of an academic seminar is under attack.

Social literacy has operational, cultural, and critical dimensions. At the operational level there are skills involved in using twitter to communicate. But it isn't inability to use the tool, or to write the kind of things that tweeters write, that causes the non-users to object. They don’t want to use it. I make this rather obvious point to demonstrate the problems of ‘competence deficit' models of literacy. Whilst using twitter may be an aspect of 'digital literacy', not using twitter can’t (yet) be seen as indicative of digital illiteracy.

(It is possible that there are aspects of the operational skill of tweeting which are to do with managing the general communicative context, rather than the specific requirements of the tool, and which might prove taxing for anyone who wasn't practised at it. For example, an engaged tweeter will not only be posting their own comments in parallel with their participation in a face-to-face discussion, they will also be receiving and replying to the comments of others, both present and remote. Multitasking of this kind is characteristic of digital social communication in general and is supposed to be easier for ‘digital natives’ to do successfully, because of personal disposition and, some say, cognitive adaptation (see Prensky and others). But the key word here is 'successfully' because determining what is successful in terms of communication is a cultural as well as an operational matter. In literacy, performance enacts social relations as well as individual skills.

If twittering is seen as a literacy practice for this seminar, it is clear that operational and cultural dimensions are aligned for some participants but not for others. For one participant, prominent as an expert in the learning technology community, there is no reason not to tweet at an academic seminar. For another, recognised as expert in the literacy community, it feels as if people are engaged in private phone conversations with others not present. The management of focus of attention at an academic seminar is a cultural practice that has developed over time. The purpose of maintaining a single focus of attention, as far as possible, is to further the practice of debate, an academic tradition. At one level those who were tweeting could argue that their activities were not undermining debate, but at another level, some of their colleagues clearly did feel undermined - there were other conversations going on, to which they were not party, somehow devaluing the seminar itself as the focus of the discussion.

Both groups in this case seemed to feel that they were being marginalised or otherwise disempowered by the practices of the other. Empowerment and marginalisation are the central 'problem' of literacy at the critical or ideological level.

Both online and face-to-face debate are characteristic of academic discourse around learning technology. But when they happen at the same time participants can come to see others' alignment of operational skills and cultural practice as disruptive or constraining to their own expression. This is fertile ground for the emergence of a critical sensibility, focused firstly on whose practice has appropriated the right to dominate, and then subsequently on how to recognise the rights of all. The critical dimension of literacy is its ideological expression, the manner in which practices function to 'normalise' power relations, including marginalisation, in a social group. Both traditional academic debate, and contemporary social networking, argue for their role as forces for the democratisation of knowledge. However, as we've seen, the practices of each can be perceived as disruptive, or oppressive, by the practitioners of the other. In bringing these (unsuspected, problematic) perceptions into the open and accounting for them through a social theory, such as the theory of literacy as social practice, a larger truth underlying their apparent opposition can be signalled -- the truth that all communication practices privilege some and disadvantage others.

English in the global academy

2011-11-09T09:02:00.000-08:00

Here's (what I thought was) a perfectly good English sentence that I included in a paper that I submitted to a certain educational technology journal:

The role of teachers who have little or no face-to-face contact with their students, and their use of available online resources to support such engagement, is the focus of this paper.

One referee objected to it, and to several others like it, and advised me to...

"consider using a concise subject to start a sentence, not a long prep phrase or modifying clause".

Here's another of the modifying-clause offenders:

Evidence of ways in which these tutors perceive their students to be increasingly challenged by the conventions of academic writing was provided by a survey carried out in 2008.

Now, whilst I'm satisfied there is nothing grammatically wrong with these sentences I was taken aback to read that the same referee found them 'confusing' and 'difficult to understand'. Aside from the embarrassment that this causes me, as a English-speaking academic writing about the teaching of academic writing, I'm quite deflated by this. It suggests that my academic literacy skills are not as they should be.

In a world where English is being adopted and adapted by readers and writers from a huge diversity of educational and linguistic backgrounds, I may have to learn to modify not just my sentences but my whole approach to writing in English. Out with 'left-branching' rhetoric (politically suspect too)! In with the 'concise subject' as theme. I stand corrected.

Still, I vaguely yearn for readers like those the Capital Community College Foundation advises:

" if, as reader, you let yourself go a bit, there's a well earned delight in finding yourself at the end of such a sentence, having successfully navigated its shoals."

Object-centred sociality – what happened to this discussion?

2011-11-02T03:49:00.000-07:00

Jyri Engeström (not to be confused with Yrjö Engeström – which I did at first) wrote a blog post back in 2005 entitled Why some social network services work and others don’t — Or: the case for object-centered sociality, which attracted about 100 comments and seemed to open up an avenue of discussion about social media and social networks that look like leading to some interesting new theory, and perhaps new approaches to the design of social media.

In fact, not much came of it. Apart from a couple of responses in other blogs at the time, mainly of the 'wow cool' ilk, and subsequent journal articles (Hoogenbloom et al 2007), Conole & Culver (2009) the idea seems to have missed its moment.

I think this might be because it was the approaches to the design of social media rather than the interesting new theory that caught people's attention. Engstrom's post was apparently triggered by reading Russel Beattie's account of why he was stopping using LinkedIn. Many of the comments addressed the issue of social networks needing something to socialise about and discussed the pros and cons of systems that support the sharing of different kinds of 'objects'. The authors of the two journal articles referred to above also pick up the idea of the object as a kind of focus for the relation between people in a network, and discuss the design of systems intended to facilitate object-centred exchanges conceived in this way.

My own reading of the work of Knorr-Cetina , cited by Engstrom, however, is that she was conceptualising object-centred sociality as being about relations between people and objects – where objects include epistemic entities, like theories, models, descriptions of things in the world. In describing these relations as sociality, she ascribes reciprocal agency to the objects themselves - a relation markedly different from our usual view of objects as either instruments or commodities. The way that this kind of socialty 'aggregates' into relations amongst human collectives (networks, communities etc.) is not really addressed.

Knorr-Cetina's kind of thinking seems to me to be quite different from what is going on in the discussions referred to above. It is much more challenging for a start, and may be able to lead us to quite different ways of conceptualising the objects of our knowledge construction activities online. For example, what is the difference in the 'sociality' of my relation to each of the two 'objects' pictured below?

On the left, the journal where I found Knorr-Cetina's article in the OU library. On the right, the same journal on the Internet (sadly not going back to 1997 - hence the library ).

I'm not going to attempt to answer my own question (above) in this post - for the time being it will have to remain rhetorical! Suffice it to say, that Knorr-Cetina's concept of an epistemic object includes the dimension of textuality – the capacity to be represented via different semiotic systems. You can see where I might be going with this.... textuality is also central to concepts of literacy.

Do we still need academic journals?

2011-10-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

As we in the UK higher education sector approach the next round of our periodic national research assessment exercise (this time hubristically called the 'Research Excellence Framework') the pressure to publish in 'high-impact' journals intensifies. One of my colleagues has, in fact, this minute sent round some advice on identifying high impact journals, and a couple of useful websites, e.g. the Journal Citation Reports Website: http://admin-apps.webofknowledge.com/JCR/JCR

Impact in journals, as we all know, is calculated on the average number of citations each paper published in the journal gets. Citations are regarded as measure of the extent that papers are read, indicating their contribution to a particular field, but they may also be a measure of the overlap between readership and authorship in a particular journal. If a group of authors frequently publish in a particular journal and frequently cite their own and each other's work in their papers, the impact factor for that journal goes up.

Reviewing my own case, I've put myself at a disadvantage (I only just managed to scrape into the previous two research assessment exercises) as I haven't tended to pay much attention the impact factors of the journals I publish in. This is because since I stopped being part of a particular scholarly community writing about computer-assisted language learning, in the late 1990s, I  haven't tended to pay much attention to journals for reading purposes at all. Almost everything I read I find in the reference lists of papers and articles, or through keyword searching in databases and through Google. Yes, these sources are usually organised into journals, and I'll sometimes find myself downloading two or three papers from the same journal, especially if there has been a special edition in in an area I'm interested in, but my point is that I don't go to the journals first,  I find them incidentally while I search for papers on topics.

I think my 'topic-driven' behaviour is a consequence of the fact that there aren't any journals   dedicated to 'literacy and technology in higher education', which is how I define my interests.    Not only does this mean that I don't have a natural home to publish in, but it also means there are no obvious other authors whose work I can follow consistently - or who are likely to follow mine - as most other authors sensibly associate themselves with particular fields and journals.

As I look through my CV I realise that, not only do I not publish consistently in a single journal, but I haven't published in the same journal twice in the last 10 years!   Here are some of the journals where I've published one paper in the last 10 years:

ReCALL
Distance Education
Language and Education
Journal of Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education
Education communication and information
E-learning
International Journal of Educational Research
Teaching in Higher Education
With this range it's not surprising my citation count isn't very impressive. I've managed to maintain a research profile within educational technology by writing and editing books and book chapters, although this would probably serve me in better stead as far as citations are concerned in the Humanities than it does in the social sciences.

...and more recently I've been exploring avenues of digital scholarship such as with this blog (although if comments are the equivalent of citations there's not much progress here either).

For myself, and I think quite a lot of other academics in interdisciplinary fields, the identity and the impact factor of a journal is not the main consideration, rather whether some of the people whose work we are citing have published there, giving us an idea of who we are writing for. As I tend to read quite eclectically, and very seldom from some of the journals with high impact factors in what is supposed to be my official REF-oriented field - educational technology - I find myself wandering from subfield to subfield around the topics of literacy, language, pedagogy, e-learning, social theory, culture, higher education practice, teaching and learning, etc etc . Not very scholarly I admit, and not very efficient either. No way to have an impact but still rather satisfying all the same.

To answer my own question - yes I think we do still need journals, to help us organise our thinking and to ensure that we think about how we write for different audiences. (This only really works, of course, if we write for lots of them, which brings this argument full circle!).

Reflections on the Bayeux tapestry

2011-10-20T01:58:00.000-07:00

The famous multimodal tapestry depicting the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066 combines figurative images (the events depicted), symbolic images (around the borders), and written text (the Latin commentary), all mediated via a popular representational technology of the time -- embroidery. Here's a typical section of it:

This bit shows William' s men feasting before they get on the boats for England. (Actually this is not a picture of the original tapestry, but a drawing I did of it while I was on holiday. Yes they did have postcards that I could have bought but I wanted to see how difficult it would be to draw. The hardest bit turned out to be getting the colours something like the originals. I don't think I was particularly successful here - despite having 10 times as many colours at my disposal than the original authors did).

It's interesting too from a literacy-and-technology point of view, not least because you wonder why they bothered with the literacy bit - the Latin commentary which runs throughout the strip and simply describes what you can see happening. It identifies some of the characters, like the Bishop (Odo) in this example, but they could have done that just as easily with little labels, like political cartoonists do today. You can read the whole text at http://www.aemma.org/onlineResources/bayeux/bayeuxIndex1.html and it's clear it must have added quite a bit of work to the overall job. Given the relatively few people at the time who could actually read it (mainly the bishop and his mates), you wonder if the authors were thinking about readers from the future who might not necessarily already know the story-- like putting a message in a time capsule. Or perhaps they were using the Latin as a kind of stamp of authority - validating the account, as it were, by giving the Church a hand in it.

Also interesting are the little pictures in the borders top and bottom which as well as decorating the strip apparently contain all sorts of allusions to Aesop and other myths and fables. According to middle-ages.org (http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/bayeux-tapestry.htm) the running theme of these references is cunning and betrayal -- and interesting literary, if not exactly literate, device.

Is tweeting literacy? Or just short-winded conversation?

2011-10-17T09:39:00.000-07:00

This is a pic I took sitting in the observation room of the IET Ambient Lab, here at the OU, during a focus group discussion set up by colleagues on the digital scholarship project, that I happened to be observing. The group was discussing their, and other people's, use of twitter for professional communication.

The group is being vidoed live - shown on the screen on the left. At the same time, other colleagues around the university are discussing the same questions on twitter -- shown on the screen on the right. (One of the group facilitators is tweeting the questions as they are asked). The feed from this twitter discussion is projected on the wall in the room where the live group are, but only one of them is paying any attention to it -- she's actually tweeting to the remote group in between contributing to the discussion of the 'present' group.

A lot more words are being used, inevitably, in the face-to-face discussion. And other signs are being used too - facial expressions, body language, as well as the bits of paper and other media that the facilitators have on the table. By contrast, the tweeters get through fewer words (even though there is no break in the stream) and their visual signals are limited to punctuation, capitals, smileys, and the odd URL.

Both groups are discussing what they do with technology. The focus group reflect across a range of life and work contexts, going on at length and wandering off at tangents. The twitter group stick mainly to talking about twitter. They 'talk' in turn, are very concise, and generally keep to the point.

I would love to do a proper discourse analysis comparing these two discussions around the same topic. I wonder if it would provide me with grounds to talk about the twitter activity as 'literacy', in a way that I could not do with the face-to-face discussion? Or would it show the twitter stream to be basically the same kind of conversation, only with a lot less said?

LIDU final report

2011-10-14T08:51:00.000-07:00

Now that the end-of-award report from the seminar series has been accepted by ESRC and while we wait for it to appear on the ESRC website, here is an extract from the 'findings' section:

The series has not produced any ‘findings’ as such (it was a seminar series after all, not a research project). However, we are claiming the following ‘clarifications’ of key issues around literacy in the digital university:

1. Conceptualisations of ‘literacy’ amongst educational developers concerned with digital technologies in teaching and learning continue to reflect a polarisation between those who take an ideological (literacy as social practice) and those who adopt an autonomous (literacy as individual competence) perspective.

For example, researchers exploring textuality in digital contexts, and practitioners concerned with the development of skills in digital communication and information management, seem to share little in terms of theoretical assumptions, methodologies, goals and outcomes.

This does not mean, however, that there cannot be any dialogue between researchers and practitioners coming from these different perspectives. The seminars have shown that the two agendas can co-exist productively. Viewpoints can meet over the discussion of principled means of describing practices that teachers and learners engage in when they do ‘university business’ online. Both perspectives can benefit from the analysis of quantitative as well as qualitative data, and from engagement in reflexive as well as analytical deliberation.

2. The idea of the ‘digital university’ is not a given. New conceptualisations of the institution and its practices have emerged from the attempt, during these seminars, to circumvent the differences in disciplinary and pragmatic orientation described above.

These include the concepts of: digital scholarship, the borderless institution, and post-human pedagogies. These keystone concepts will need to inform any research agenda that is developed on the basis of what has gone on in these seminars.

Debating digital scholarship

2011-06-21T03:43:00.000-07:00

Here's another pic of academics engaged in a conventional academic literacy practice - sitting around around talking about a bit of text on a screen. In this case the event was a traditional debate, about the likelihood of untraditional practices like tweeting ever being regarded as prestigious enough to build a scholarly reputation on.

It was Martin Weller's idea, as he is proposing the motion that “In the next decade, digital scholarship (in open journals, blogs and social media) will achieve the same status in academic settings as traditional scholarship” at EdMedia 2011 next week and needed some practice!

Rob Farrow opposed the motion, with all the sophistry of a philosopy graduate with his tongue wedged firmly in his cheek.

The debate was light-hearted and interesting and I ended up voting against the motion, just to tease Martin, although I secretly wondered whether the proposal might not be right. After speaking first and thinking after (a failure of mine I admit), what I should have said was that traditional scholarship was likely to change quite a lot in the next decade under the impact of the public engagement agenda, and that digital communication was likely to be instrumental in this. In that sense, digital scholarship and traditional (engaged) scholarship are indeed likely to converge in practice. Whether the real status can be wrestled away from the academy's gatekeepers and/or the research industry's CEOs in that timeframe is another question...

Anyway - good luck to Martin in the debate (judging by the preponderance of white male faces on the EdMedia website I'd have thought there would be no problem about them achieving the same status as traditional scholars whenever they liked! Thank goodness for Patrica Leigh)

Rosie Flewitt's 'Literacy in a Digital Age' blog

2011-06-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

Rosie's new blog is at http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/literacy-in-a-digital-age/

Rosie Flewitt's notes from the OU Digital Literacy seminar

2011-06-07T03:30:00.000-07:00

(This seminar commented on in this blog on May 23rd)

On 20th May 2011, researchers in the Centre for Research in Education and Education Technology (CREET) hosted a 1-day conference on Literacy in a Digital Age. Unusually, the event brought together participants from research, policy and practice, from the UK and further afield, and from a range of education sectors, including early years, primary, secondary and higher education. The aim of the day was to throw some light on two main questions:

1) What have new media practices got to do with literacy?

2) What are the implications for practice, policy and research?

We began with a series of quick-fire presentations of OU research projects spanning early years to post-compulsory education, and discovered a surprising degree of harmony in issues arising from the changing nature of ‘literacy’.

Rosie Flewitt reported on an ESRC-funded study Multimodal Literacies in the Early Years that investigated 3 and 4-year-old children’s reading practices with diverse media at home and in a preschool nursery. Rosie found that whilst most adults recognised the importance of new technologies in young children’s present and future lives, many also feared their potential harm to ‘childhood’. This, coupled with a lack of guidance on using new technologies to promote literacy development in the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum, has led to a 'digital divide', where some children are developing sophisticated skills with a range of new technologies, while others lack skills and confidence.

David Messer, Natalia Kucirkova & Denise Whitelock then showed us a new iPad and iPhone App called ‘Our Story’, which they have designed so young children can make personalised icards and stories by adding their own pictures, sound and writing. Our Story shows how digital technologies can provide interactive, personalised and creative literacy activities, and can motivate personal story sharing.

Delivering his talk via Skype from Bangladesh, Chris Walsh presented a gameplay model for teaching and professional development that enables educators to valorise pupils’ gaming literacies in ways that support their acquisition of traditional and multimodal literacies. Chris showed us how young Australian students with previously low engagement with schooled literacy activities had produced highly complex and polished literacy texts through digital games and their paratexts (ancillary texts about digital games), and highlighted a need to integrate digital games authentically into the literacy curriculum.

In a written paper, Anna Craft argued that children and young people’s contemporary interactions, learning, play and development are characterised by four P’s: Pluralities - of place, of activity, of connection, of their own online presence; Possibilities - being able to transform from what is to what might be, and multiple opportunities to act ‘as if’; Playfulness – the online expansion of playworlds into extended make-believe through opportunities to self-create through emotionally rich gaming, social networking and generating content; and Participation - becoming author, maker, performer, audience, in a democratic space where all ideas are welcome. Anna proposed that the four P’s reflect a discourse of empowerment at odds with the competing discourse of ‘childhood and youth at risk’ and bring into focus the tensions in current and emergent educational provision.

Moving on to post-compulsory education, Rebecca Ferguson argued that by the time young people leave school, most have extensive experience of learning together through speech, yet they have far less experience of learning together through text, although this is increasingly important for online education. By observing some of the new literacy practices used by adult students learning together online, Rebecca has identified a range of practices that enable online learners to share knowledge, challenge ideas, justify opinions, evaluate evidence and consider options, and argued that certain skills that characterise online literacy practices should be made explicit, such as stressing unanimity, transferring responsibility, complimenting, mirroring and empathising with fellow learners.

Mary Lea presented findings from an ESRC funded research project into academic literacies in a digital age, highlighting how contemporary HE students now work with multiple sources, which in many ways brings reading – in contrast to writing – to the fore in their literacy practices. Mary’s study found that in an increasingly complex digital world, students are becoming adept at drawing on hybrid, textual genres, using a range of technologies and applications, and integrating these into their work for assessment, yet they remain uncertain about which texts are considered ‘valid’ sources.

The last morning presentation (and most of the audience was still looking surprisingly alert by this stage!) was by Robin Goodfellow, who gave us a quick account of some of the outcomes from the ESRC Seminar Series Literacy in the Digital University. Robin discussed how researchers from different paradigms approach ‘literacy’ from different perspectives. Focussing on issues that have arisen between applied linguists and learning technologists, Robin proposed how these two groups of educationists might find synergies in their work which could help to anticipate the changes in academic literacy practices associated with the increasing digitisation of post-compulsory education.

In an afternoon plenary session, participants and presenters exchanged their views and experiences of changing literacy practices across all education sectors, and finally, Julia Davies (University of Sheffield) drew together key themes that ran through the day’s discussions. Julia reminded us of Victoria Carrington’s use of the term ‘the uncanny’ (from the Freudian ‘das Unheimliche’) to describe the sudden unfamiliarity of the literacy practices and texts of young people around digital technologies - both in terms of the anxiety caused by the unexpectedly unfamiliar and by the increasing fuzziness of the concepts of text and literacy. Julia also made a distinction between digital literacies - which she presented as a term which is mainly about using digital media to produce text - and new literacies - a wider, more socially-contextualised category that describes how new collaborative practices are emerging in new communicative spaces. Julia drew our attention to how ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ literacy practices are currently existing side-by-side, and how in the future we may need to adapt not only the curriculum to reflect changing practices, but also change the way we ‘do’ education.

The afternoon’s plenary sessions led to rich discussion, which we would like to continue to develop on this blog. Some of the themes that emerged include:

Emerging Themes

The afternoon’s discussions were very rich. Here are a few of the themes and ideas we discussed – please add your thoughts to these:

1) What have new media practices got to do with literacy?

Participants reflected on whether literacy practices with new technologies are fundamentally different, or whether new technologies are making more visible issues that were also identifiable in traditional literacy practices. Do we put too much on the digital? What is different? What is the same? Discussion around this included:

• Recognition of an increasing range of genres and the need to move across genres and media;

• Multiple reading pathways in both digital and new forms of printed texts, sometimes sequential, sometimes non-sequential, left to right reading pattern is often disrupted, some online texts have two or more sequential reading paths (e.g. following different ‘threads’ in online conversations);

• Readers/writers need to be able to transform/ transduce meanings across modes, and to understand how modes are valued within and across media in different sociocultural contexts;

• Reading can now be viewed as active and interactive (e.g. Wii and mobile phones); and ‘readers’ learn that taking action has consequences (e.g. Virtual Worlds); the boundaries between reading/writing boundaries are becoming blurred

• Literacy practices are increasingly crossing boundaries, and offer great potential for further boundary crossing (e.g. home/school; curriculum and other worlds) and offer the potential to integrate personal lives into other spheres. However, there is a danger that education could attempt to ‘colonise’ the private lives of children, young people and older students

• Is there a new form of ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu) evident in ‘gaming capital’ – the kudos that comes with being an ‘expert’ rather than a ‘newbie’

• There are many issues of access, of access to digital skills and competences and to digital hardware; we need to consider how diverse texts, media and practices are policed and/or valued

• New media sit uncomfortably with traditional education practices, particularly with forms of assessment that are based on intermental, cognitive approaches to knowledge

Implications for research, policy and practice

Research: There is a need to develop a new meta-language to describe contemporary literacy practices, and to develop new definitions for literacy to guide policy and practice;

We need to reflect on the future of literate ‘texts’ (input and output; text as having a lasting presence – ephemeral or more enduring; texts as enactment in social contexts as part of social practices);

Dialogue is needed between disciplines to clarify different interpretations of ‘literacy’;

Consider post-humanist approaches to notions of agency and technology

Policy: Need to recognise new definitions for literacy, not ‘the basics’, not ‘simple’, not the 1990s policy shift to literacy as an economic driver, where ‘literacy’ was a proxy for cognitive skills; need new definitions that reflect the diversity of practices and purposes for literacy;

Need to recognise different pathways into literacy through diverse media to build up children’s skills, competences and image of selves as literate beings;

Need to make explicit things that are learnt implicitly through digital practices (what is acceptable behaviour in different digital environments);

Need to consider the implications of new media for formative + summative assessment;

Reconsider the design curriculum? (design as multimodal rhetoric + ‘designedness’) = a real strength so must be valued in curriculum and assessment;

Practice: Practitioners should value and validate the processes of text production, sources of text production, and clarify how different sources are valued within a given discipline;

Help learners to understand how to get to the end point, to promote/practice negotiating, risk-taking and contingency planning, to find ways to harness digital practices as intellectual resources and to value collaboration;

There is a fear that due to financial constraints, HE sectors may be forced back into a transmission model of learning ; however, on a more optimistic note, this could open the door to encouraging more collaborative peer group work;

Practitioners could explore more ways to exploit the motivational pull of digital game playing to promote learning.

On being an academic and being a bidder

2011-06-07T02:39:00.000-07:00

Warning - Dragon-enabled posting.

(My relationship with this animal is sadly worsening.We haven't talked properly for a couple of weeks now. This is mainly due to the fact that I've been working on the JISC bid that I mention below, and Dragon's habit of playing havoc with the logoff times on my PC, not to mention its random dumping of the contents of the clipboard into my e-mails, makes it rather hard to co-operate with on such fiddly work).

On being an academic, I recently enjoyed reviewing an article for a journal called 'Pedagogies-an international journal', which I hadn't come across before. It's a Taylor Francis/Routledge eJournal but the OU library doesn't have it in its database. I looked through the six volumes that they have published since 2006 and found a handful of articles relating to literacy and higher education. A couple of these I've now ordered through the OU library electronic document delivery service, which involves filling in a form by hand and posting it! (I like doing this -- it reminds me what I have hands for).

The Journal seems to have a bit of critical slant, which comes as a relief after dealing with the 'visionary' discourse of JISC's digital literacies call. The article I reviewed encouraged me to believe that there is an emerging field of research around cultural and critical conceptions of literacy in the Digital Universitythat I might be able to contribute to.

On being a bidder to a JISC e-learning programme ('developing digital literacies') - this has been striking in the way it combines the expansive rhetoric of 'new literacies' with an oddly restrictive set of institutional print-literacy practices required to complete the documentation. For example, JISC's project management guidelines (66 pages of them) contain a set of Word templates to use in the bid which are basically tables setting out required information in columns. Eg: the stakeholder engagement template looks like this:

Tables certainly make the information clearer, but they are quite wasteful of space. Given that the bid document will be automatically binned if it goes over 12 pages, every table considerably reduces the amount of information that can be included elsewhere. I tried to get round this by putting the tables on their sides. But I'm not sure that I haven't lost some of the point of having the tables in the first place by doing this.

It's interesting to reflect on the relationship between these conventional institutional literacy practices (developed in the interests of standardisation and clarity) and the 'digital literacies' that the bidding projects are concerned to develop in students and others. Being able to turn a Word table on its side doesn't make me digitally literate in the terms of JISC's 'vision', but it did enable me to get the bid in.

Digital literacies across the sectors

2011-05-23T01:44:00.000-07:00

The one-day research conference on Digital Literacies that Rosie Flewitt organised at the OU on May 20th was unusual in that it brought together people from early years education, primary; secondary; and tertiary education, all in the same room, all eating the same pastries, and all (most amazingly) talking about similar practices and problems!

The problems we all share are to do with the changing nature of 'literacy', and how to retain cultural and critical perspectives on it, in the face of policy agendas that seem determined to ignore research altogether.

How can schools be contemplating a national literacy curriculum for 2012 that pays not attention to multiliteracies and the 'design' curriculum?

How can universities respond to a funding agenda for digital literacies which unashamedly adopts a competencies approach in an era of 'social' media?

But aside from the head-scratching, there were some really absorbing demonstrations of the sheer complexity of children's engagement with tools and toys that add layers and layers of interactivity (with the screen and with their co-readers) to the simple practice of reading a story.

But Rosie also reflected on some early years settings where adults were so anxious about the potential effects of 'new technology' on the children that they timed out their activities on the PC with an egg-timer. The same adults didn't seem to regard the things the kids did with mobile phones, TVs, and other digital devices etc. as 'technology' at all.

David Messer and Natalia Kucirkova's presentation of the 'Our Story' application also drew us in to the intimate and familial world of early years literacy.

It made me feel just a little envious of what seemed to me an uncomplicated synergy between the digital and the literacy aspects of the learning that was going on. Nobody was suggesting that there is any conflict between the goals of learning to read in the conventional sense, and learning to 'read' multimodally. (I was made aware in the later plenary discussion that this is an idealistic illusion!)

An equally fascinating session on gaming from Chris Walsh via Skype did raise some potential conflicts: not least between our recognition of the personal value to a child of their world of creative play, and our wish to use this to engage them in classroom activcity! All the same, Chris' presentation gave us food for thought in differentiating the idea of 'enacting' a text from that of 'reading' it.

The plenary session was led by Julia Davies who produced a wide-ranging but completely coherent summary of themes that she had detected running through the day's presentations and discussions. I was interested to hear her refer to the idea of the 'uncanny' in connection with teachers' attempts to come to terms with the multiply-mediated literacy practices of their teenage pupils. (We've met the uncanny before, in Sian Bayne's talks in the LIDU seminars).

She also made a distinction between digital literacies, which she presented as being mainly about digital media (logically I suppose), and new literacies - a wider, more socially-contextualised catgegory of activity taking in new communities and new purposes etc. I guess I broadly agree with the ideas behind this, but it is a question of where you are coming from (or who you are talking to). New literacies seems to belong more to the schools sector (through the work of Lankshear & Knobel - who I notice are not above borrowing the term digital literacies for their 2008 book of the same name) - digital literacies is a currently a proxy term for 'skills-that-employers-want' in the tertiary sector. (I've tried to unpick some of these terms in a paper in Teaching in Higher Education called 'Literacy, Literacies, and the Digital in Higher Education').

The discussion that Julia prompted was lively and insightful. I took lots of notes and I noticed that Rosie did too, so hopefully some of these will find their way on to this blog. But, for the time being, this post is quite long enough as it is....

You wait years for a book on literacies in the university and now two are about to come along at once

2011-05-08T02:41:00.000-07:00

Routledge are currently anticipating proposals for 2 edited books focusing on literacy/literacies in the university. One is our own proposal for a book based on the LIDU seminars 'Literacy in the Digital University', edited by Mary Lea and myself (Open University), which we glossed thus:

These accounts draw on recent and on-going research which addresses some of the key educational issues associated with the spread of digital technologies into teaching and learning within colleges and universities, and at the borders of these institutions with contexts of work or informal learning. Issues such as the disruption of conventional academic knowledge practices by those of the 'social web'; the challenge to the authority of teachers and 'experts' posed by the immense resource of the internet; the opening up of practices of 'scholarship' to practitioners and work-based learners; threats to trust and the confidence of learners arising from 'crowd' behaviour online, etc.

The other will be called 'Embedding academic literacies in university courses: research, concepts and case studies', edited by Cathy Gunn and Lorraine Stefani (Auckland University), which they describe so:

A book of research, concepts and case studies featuring the use of interactive technologies to embed academic literacies into university courses. ‘Academic literacies’ is a term used to describe the attributes listed in graduate profiles, e.g. critical, reflective and relational thinking, information literacy, reflective writing, critical reasoning and problem solving. English for non-native speakers is added to this list in many institutions.

These two descriptions nicely illustrate some of the differences between 'social' and 'cognitive' perspectives on literacy, and critical and instrumental perspectives on learning technologies.

Hopefully the publisher will see them as complementary and allow both collections to come to fruition and get published, and the discerning audience for such books will dig into their pockets and buy both in huge quantities.

LIDU Seminar 4 at Lancaster

2011-04-15T08:37:00.000-07:00

The fourth and final LIDU seminar was at Lancaster University on April 8th.

This was a smaller one-day affair, intended to allow a more in-depth discussion of 'next steps' for this seminar group.The discussion programme and some of the informal position papers that fed into it are on the series website.

Lancaster managed to produce some of the nicest weather, and the tastiest lunch, of the series to date. It did produce some in-depth discussion, focused around: a review of what we felt we had achieved in the series, and where it left us individually; consideration of the most appropriate form of publication output; and plans for taking forward a 'Literacy in the Digital University' research agenda. Below is a short summary of these discussions, 2 decisions, and a shortlist of emergent research themes:

We began with a discussion of issues around 'digital scholarship' -- a theme introduced in two of the OU-led sessions during the series. Whilst the Open University is the only institution which has formally instituted a digital scholarship development program, there is clearly a wider sectoral relevance in the concept for the development of literacy in the digital university. Most of the meeting participants felt themselves to be involved with the concept in some way, either actively or critically. How do new digital communication contexts impact on, and change our understanding of, what we and our students do as scholars? Are we simply re-conceptualising conventional ideas of scholarship in order to preserve them in the 'digital university', or are we open to the challenge of completely new academic and study practices? Is the conventional notion of scholarship as a solitary, reflective, individual activity still relevant, or will it be swept away by the current 'fetishisation' of digital interactivity?

The discussion round the Lancaster statement focused initially on the importance of keeping FE in the frame when we are talking about the digital university, with a possibly reduced relevance for the scholarship discussion in this context. This led to a more general debate about what is meant by 'boundaries' and' borderlessness', relating to the relationship between the university and the workplace, the university as a workplace, and wider theoretical questions concerning the body and the technologies that extend it beyond the person.

The GCU statement generated more discussion around the idea of the digital university as a 'borderless institution', and the kinds of knowledge practices that this might imply. The suggestion that companies and the 'world of work' are challenging the university's 'monopoly of legitimate knowledge' was debated, and the notion of university study and what it means to be a student was revisited. There is an important tension between the idea of permeability between the university and the world of work and the idea of scholarship/studentship. The institutional university as a centre of scholarship is undermined by discourses of e-learning/digital native from both the right (new forms of digitally empowered individualism) and left (new kinds of digital collectivism). But these 'grand narratives'of institutional transformation are relatively meaningless unless they are informed by an understanding of specific learning contexts.

The Edinburgh statement began with a positive commitment to the possibility of a joint research agenda that addressed the re-conceptualisation of conventional boundaries within the digital domain. They suggested a focus on the 'autodidact' and linked this to a philosophical move to post-humanism, by which they meant a questioning of humanistic presumptions about agency in assemblages that involve the individual, the social, and the technical. These concepts received some discussion - particularly around the problems that this perspective creates for Education, which is traditionally based on humanist principles.

The individual statements re-emphasised issues such as: the necessity to start being specific about the kinds of learning contexts that we needed to explore, and the inherent challenges of empirical projects in this field ; the impact of audiences and of issues of trust, for example related to plagiarism; the hybrid nature of texts and social identities in the 'digital university'.

This session concluded with the question: 'would/could we have had this same discussion at the beginning of the seminar series 18 months ago?'. There seems little doubt that we had all come quite a long way towards being able to talk constructively about learning across the disciplinary gap between 'literacy/language' and 'technology/interactivity'. The gap hasn't gone away, as we still differ over what we mean by key terms such as 'text'. However, we do feel we are all talking into the same conceptual space now. Which wasn't the case at the beginning of the series. So no, this discussion would not have happened then.

To summarise emergent research themes, I took it on myself to write a list of about six items on the whiteboard. Nobody seemed to object so here is a compressed and annotated version:

Scholarship -- what does it mean and who does it identify?
The borderless institution -- can it still be a university?
Moving beyond humanism -- where is agency?
Trust and assessment -- empowerment or threat?

Notice the absence of the words 'literacy' and 'digital'! But to paraphrase the cyborg...

they'll be back...

Eternal Sunshine of the spotless C: -- more Dragon tales

2011-04-01T09:28:00.000-07:00

Following a particularly virulent virus picked up through carelessness whilst charging around the websites of US academic conferences trying to get costings for a research bid I had to have all the applications on my PC scoured clean and reinstalled (a severe case of digital obliteracy).Sadly this had to include my dragon friend, with all the careful training data that we have been building up over the past 18 months of co-authorship. The consequences have been devastating ...it just doesn't know me any more, its memory has been wiped clean.

It is like losing a friend -- what has happened to all those secret little pet words we use to share? All those cryptic commands that it alone knew the meaning of? All that special vocabulary? All those OU acronyms? How long did it take me to teach it to write literacies instead of literacy is? How can I bear to start building our relationship all over again?

To console myself, whilst I was in NZ last month I sought out and bought the little volume of poems by Fleur Adcock called 'Dragon Talk'. (I've referred to this earlier in this blog). There is only one poem in it that is actually about Dragon - the title one - here is another extract from it:

I do the talking;
you do the typing.
Just try a bit harder
to hear what I say!

Dragon Talk by Fleur Adcock: Bloodaxe Books, Northumberland NE48 1RP

Digital University (part 2)

2011-03-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

This is a reconstruction of the second post I made in February as it seems to have been lost: Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (2007) have argued that digital technologies constitute a new context for learning and teaching for several interrelated reasons:

The technologies themselves and their availability in advanced industrial countries;

the social and cultural changes related to these new technologies (e.g. Castells 1996);

the consequent epistemological changes affecting what counts as useful knowledge and how knowledge is produced, circulated and consumed;

the nature of work and the growth in demand for qualifications from universities;

the way the changing nature of work affects universities in relation to faculty and their work and the relationship between universities and their students;

the changing nature of the students entering university.

The term Digital University is one that although poorly defined can be taken to apply to all university functions as they are revised to make use of digital technologies and accommodate their impacts. This suggests a two way process in which universities, and various bodies within and beyond them, actively seek to develop new modes of working that make use of the new possibilities that digital technologies make available and at the same time accommodate to changes deriving from the deployment of digital technologies, which are outside of their control, but which have direct consequences for university operations. The main areas of change involving digital technologies include all main university functions:

Teaching

Learning

Research

Library services

Management, administration and working practices

The term also offers an alternative to other attempts to grasp the nature of change using terms such as the Virtual University (Ryan et al) or the Global Virtual University (Tiffin and Rajasingham 2003) and it avoids the presumption that digital technologies are somehow less real than other forms of mediated contact. Finally the idea of the digital can provide a kind of stability in a period of rapid change. The digital, as a general technological form, has affordances that are more stable than the specific technologies developed using digital technologies. Boyd argues that four properties arise out of the digital nature (bits) of new technologies in this context:

Persistence: Online expressions are automatically recorded and archived.

Replicability: Content made out of bits can be duplicated.

Scalability: The potential visibility of content in networked publics is great

Searchability: Content in networked publics can be accessed through searching.

It is of course possible to generate further affordances of the digital, such as manipulability, the capacity to edit, mash and reform digital artefacts. The interesting feature of the use of the idea of affordance by boyd is the way she directs attention to relatively stable features of digital technologies and elaborates how these features shape peoples participation in a relatively new Web service and the way this structures networked publics. I have separately tried to capture the changes connected to digital technologies in relation to education in the following list:

Time shifts – Computer networks used in education affect the usual time patterns of education. Many courses delivered across networks are asynchronous.

Place – The introduction of mobile and ubiquitous computing devices have begun to make the idea of education occurring at anytime, anyplace, and anywhere seem more feasible.

Digital preservation – The outputs of synchronous and asynchronous activity are easily preserved in transcripts, logs and a variety of other forms including the archiving of web casts and audio interviews/podcasts.

Public/Private boundaries – The preservation of what would otherwise be ephemeral materials alters the boundaries between what is public and what is private. Tutors can now view and preserve the details of student’s interactions during group activities, making these available as tools for assessment.

Forms of literacy – The still largely text based world of networked learning has generated new forms of writing that are neither simple text replications of informal conversation nor are they formal written texts. The integration of images and audio into digital environments has suggested new forms of multimedia literacy.

Content – The boundary between content and process is shifting. Blogs and wikis can provide elements of content and cut and paste re-use is common practice. The idea that there is a clear distinction between activity/process and artefact/ content is becoming strained. (Jones and Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2009 p10)

Once again the feature I would draw your attention to is the relative stability of this list in relation to the constant change in technologies, tools, digital devices and networked services. Many of these features were applicable in the early years of educational use of the Internet (see for example Harasim et al. 1995). Acknowledging the contextual nature of users’ interpretations of technology does not mean succumbing to the idea that technology once fixed in place has no role in shaping the nature of use. Hutchby argues that:

“The concept of affordance has been applied to technology in the sense that: technologies possess different affordances, and these affordances constrain the ways that they can possibly be ‘written’ or ‘read’ (Hutchby, 2001, p. 447).

It is this sense of constraint that I wish to convey here. Technologies are indeed read by their users, but the reading is constrained by the features of the technology and the technological infrastructures that have been put in place.

The Literacy & Technology 'Onion'

2011-03-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

There is a discussion about digital literacy going on in Cloudworks at the moment as part of an OU event. I wanted to say something about definitions, using the diagram below, but couldn't immediately see how to embed the picture into a Cloudworks message, so I've posted it here instead (since worked out how to do it in Cworks too).

This diagram...

...is a simplistic view of the developing media context against which literacy education is set.

...is an ‘onion’ because it represents the building up of layers of context one on top of the other (ie: one layer gradually becoming the next one, not being superceded by it).

...represents layers of media communication practice, each characterised by a governing principle (trying hard to avoid the p word) and each associated with a 'literacy' label.

So: ubiquitous print was one of the first forms of mass media, and reading & writing is at the heart of all 'literacy'...

Mass media communications, which came to include the internet, changed the relation between ‘reader’ and ‘writer’ and brought multimodality and criticality into education in the form of media literacy...

The information ‘explosion’ generated by the spread of internet technology and new knowledge practices (commercial, journalistic, educational, scientific, governmental etc.) brought the concepts and practices of information literacy into education

So far so good, but the layer of the onion that is currently growing (represented by Web 2 & 3, mobile communciation, ubiquitous computing etc etc) is hard to characterise at this early stage. Various suggestions for its governing principle have included:

Networked Individualism (eg: Wellman, see http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue3/wellman.html);

Sociality (e.g. Boyd, see http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/03/16/web_123.html);

Connectivism (e.g. Downes, see http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/02/what-connectivism-is.html);

Digital publics (e.g. McNely, see http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/uncategorized/dce1023_mcnely_abstract_2010/).

We are all busy exploring these practices at the moment, and their relation to the comparatively well-understood principles of the print, mass media and information layers is not at all clear.

We might, for example, go with Engstrom's notion of mass 'object-centred sociality' (see http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why-some-social-network-services-work-and-others-dont-or-the-case-for-object-centered-sociality.html). Educating for a world characterised by social connections between people, centred on shared objects, will shape digital literacy practices rather differently from their information, media, and print literacy predecessors. See, for example, Howard Rheingold's musings on 'participatory pedagogy' and literacy (http://freesouls.cc/essays/03-howard-rheingold-participative-pedagogy-for-a-literacy-of-literacies.html).

So digital literacy might have to wait for a definition, until we can see what kind of practices we are educating for (and through).

The LLIDA project's digital literacies curriculum development framework maybe gives us a bit of a start, prompting us to ask where in the curriculum learners get the opportunity to:

participate in hybrid (digital/f2f, learning/professional/academic) networks
input to the design of their personal or group learning situation
develop awareness of audience, purpose, genres, means of production
develop awareness of digital rights and responsibilities
understand how digital practices produce new ethical issues

etc. All aspects of sociality on the expanding surface of the onion!

Chris' Jones post on the 'Digital University'

2011-03-29T06:24:00.000-07:00

[This is the text of the comment that Chris added to the 'Slot Reserved' created for him below, since he wasn't able to post it himself]

I recently wrote a draft paper for a visit I'm making in February to the OU Japan. Part of the paper examined the term digital university and I thought I'd share it here. I think it is a thin term that isn't commonly used, but it might have its uses as I mention below.

The term Digital University suggests a binary distinction between new information and communication technologies based on computing and analogue technologies up to and including television and telecommunications. The analogue world covers many epochs and a variety of technologies but the use of the term digital marks the shift from the electronic world of TV and early international telecommunications based on analogue systems to the world that emerges from the pervasive application of digital technologies and computing. In this regard it is perhaps worth remembering that the idea of the global village and the information society largely preceded the spread of personal computing and widespread digital networks.

Whilst mainframe computing was beginning to have an influence by the 1960s most of the ubiquitous technology prior to the late 1970s was analogue in form. There are few academic references for the idea of the Digital University. The most prominent is the edited book of that name published as part of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work series in 1998 (Hazemi, Hailes and Wilbur). The book is very much a creation of its time and focuses on the use of the World Wide Web (WWW) and collaborative methods in all the areas of work involved in a contemporary university. These areas are identified as research, teaching, support and management. The book contains little theoretical development concerning the term digital university, indeed the term itself, although the main title of the book, only appears three times in the book’s index.

Digital University is therefore a term that needs some further development, and the elaboration of an adequate working definition, for it to be useful for our purposes. The digital university is undoubtedly a recent phenomenon, related to the widespread deployment of computing and digital communications technologies and their integration into day to day university procedures.

Early terms used to discuss the changes taking place often focused on the computing aspect of the new technologies, making use of terms that are still current such as Computer Assisted Learning, Computer Supported Collaborative learning etc. These were supplemented by new terms when the balance of technologies shifted towards the new communication technologies associated with the Internet. The idea of Asynchronous Learning Networks, Networked Learning and the ubiquitous term Information and Communication Technologies belong to this period. In turn they were followed by the deployment of the WWW and the widespread use of e-learning to cover all aspects of the introduction of digital and networked technologies.

More recently the focus has moved to Web 2.0 (Sclater 2008) and the use of new networked communication technologies such as Social Networking Sites (SNS), blogs and wikis. Without labouring the point the argument being made here is that the idea of the Digital University encompasses some significant developments in terms of the available technologies and the ways in which we have thought about the technologies themselves and the kinds of educational affordances that they enable.

Part 2 to follow ...

Slot reserved

2011-01-20T01:26:00.000-08:00

This slot reserved for Chris Jones' promised blog post about his visit to Japan...

End of 2010 round up on the literacy-digital-university front - 2

2010-12-24T04:44:00.000-08:00

In a reply to a message I sent to the other Lidu 'core group' people in which I said that I thought the focus of our 4th and last meeting next April should be the Digital University (on the basis that we've been talking a lot about literacies and technologies but not much about what the DU actually means) Helen Beetham sent us a link to this site called 'Hacking the Academy' which claims to be a book 'crowdsourced' from the blogs of a number of writers concerned with digital matters in academic settings.

I've reproduced the image of the front page below (on the assumption that I'm allowed to - I'll take it away immediately if anybody objects) because I think it's interesting how exactly like a book they have made it appear. Perhaps to give us academics a sense of security, in the face of some of the upsetting opinions that are contained within!

The only bit I've read properly so far, is the section on digital scholarship, because I happen to be involved in doing some research on this topic. I've got every intention of reading the rest, though, as it all looks very thought provoking, and, as Helen observed, is as likely to undermine as to inform our ideas of what the Digital University might actually look like, when it arrives.

I can't resist observing, too, that just as this looks pretty much like a boring old print collection, so the claim that it has been 'crowdsourced ' might also be a slightly glamorous way of describing the familiar process of putting together contributions from a number of relatively well-known commentators in a field, most of whom have well-deserved reputations as experts. Hardly the wisdom of the crowd, eh?

Doing it in a week is pretty impressive though.

End of 2010 round-up on the literacy-digital-university front - 1

2010-12-23T10:38:00.000-08:00

These two pictures don't say much for my digital camera skills (taken with my HTC phone in fact). But they illustrate some thoughts I've been having about the 'digital university' aspect of LIDU's focus.

They are from two seminars I went to in November - the first was an 'ESRC Educational Futures' seminar called Ethical Challenges at the London Knowledge Lab, and the second was a BAAL seminar on multimodality held at the Open University.

Seminars of this kind are very much a traditional 'university' literacy event and both were conducted in a very traditional university kind of way, with presentations from emminent speakers to an audience, questions, and some small group or 'breakout' sessions. Both of them had digital communication at the heart of what was being discussed, and in the BAAL case Literacy was an explicit concern. Keri Facer's talk at the OU was entitled (in case it's too blurred to read above) 'What Futures for Literacy? Education, Technology and Social Change.

These events made me think about the liklihood of this kind of academic get-together ever being substantially transformed by available new communciations. The pictures show that the technologies change (although, interestingly, whilst - sorry, can't remember who this is - is using an old medium, the flipchart, to support a relatively new practice for academics - breakout groups reporting back; Keri Facer is using a new technology, digital projection, to enhance an old practice, a lecture). However, the essential, personal, located, day-off-for, travelled-to, free-lunchedness of the occasions, seemed so definitive of the events as university literacy events, that I couldn't imagine a time when we wouldn't be doing this, whatever the online environment might offer by way of a cheaper alternative.

I did attend an example of the cheap online alternative a bit later when I signed up for an online seminar on 'Google apps as an eportfolio solution'. This was run by Google apps for education and basically had Gayle Ring from Clemson University and some Google bods extolling the virtues of Google Sites for building student portfolios. The event can't really be compared with the whole-day research seminars mentioned above, but it was rather striking how unengaging it was -- there was no interaction at all amongst the audience (which probably numbered hundreds of people across the US) and the speaker could only be questioned by typing into a chat box, clicking send, and hoping that the Google event conveners would pick your question to be answered.

Online conferences don't have to be like that of course, my colleague Linda Wilks and Martin Weller ran one at the OU last summer on Learning in an Open World in which they used Elluminate to enable smaller group interaction and a greater level of engagement. As a cheaper alternative to a face-to-face day,though, I'm not sure how it rated. I suspect not a lot cheaper when you take into account the time spent setting up and managing it -- although of course there was no travel or free lunches to be paid for!

Summary of seminar themes - towards a research agenda for Literacy in the Digital University (long post!)

2010-11-30T07:20:00.000-08:00

This is a summary of the 'keynote' talks, discussants' comments, feedback forms, and subsequent discussion on this blog, from the three LIDU seminars to date. I'm offering it as a basis on which we might start to discuss a future research agenda, in advance of the last seminar in Lancaster on April 8 at which we hope to make some concrete plans.

There is much missing from this summary, inevitably. Particularly from the discussions that went on in the parallel sessions. Most of these sessions are recorded on the LIDU website but not always very audibly. If anyone remembers points made or questions raised in these discussions, that should be included in this summary please post a comment here to that effect.

Similarly if any of the authors of the talks summarised below want to amend or correct any of my interpretations -- be my guest ... (and any innaccuracies are likely to be Dragon's!)

Seminar one (Edinburgh) October 16 2009:

Academic Literacies in the Digital University (Mary L & Robin)
Technologies have the potential to disrupt some of the conventional literacy practices of the Academy, but these continue to be dominated by a a traditional model of academic written discourse. In order to understand the nature of emerging practices of scholarship, we need to compare texts produced under different conditions and for different purposes.

Uncanny Digital Literacies (Sian)
Online communication destabilises classrooms, producing disorienting and disquieting effects on the participants by loosening the connection between the bodily and the digital self. A pedagogy which 'revel[s] in the ontological mixups and volatile literacy orientations' of networked digital media, raises problematic issues relating to the agency of individual students, questions of assessment, and the ethics of deliberately embracing chaos.

Discussant (Chris Jones)
...unease with terms like 'literacy' and 'text' ... what are we talking about? Also, digital and networked are not the same thing - literacy has to do with people's capacity to deal with technologies - digital technologies have a capacity to 'act back' - also network effects... composite forms.. where is the self? - persons and institutions becoming fragmented through technologies

Discussant (Gunther Kress):
This has been a discussion from one particular cultural viewpoint (Anglo/American). How do other cultures discuss these issues? What kinds of ideologies are driving the 'top-down' (i.e: sociocultural) approach to these questions? Should we name it as the 'university of digital age' or the 'university of the neo-liberal capitalist age'? ...Too much freight on the term 'literacy' - losing its usefulness as a tool to prize open the questions we are interested in? ... Prefer the term 'knowledge practices'. ...Pedagogy means social relations in the classroom - related to rhetoric - but what sort of rhetoric can you have when you don't know the audience? We can't always transport existing ideas to a new site. ... The issue of pace - the pace of technical change is not the pace of institutional change (although institutions feel obliged to try and mirror it) - also not the pace of human evolutionary change. How do we adapt ourselves to pace - should we attempt to simply describe passing phenomena, rather than trying to analyse them in depth?

Subsequent discussion in this blog:

LIT meets TEL (Robin)
... challenging the association of literacy with individual competence -- not much of the discussion drew on a theoretical perspective on literacy -- the term gets used as a descriptor of technical practices -- LIT people need to shift TEL people away from this view of the concept -- we need to talk about 'relations' that shape meaning-making: power, identity etc.

Lit vs TEL - a response to Robin (Helen)

... literacy already comprehensively theorised within a very particular domain -- prefer to talk about 'knowledge practices' in particular situations -- technology is only 'the point' as long as you are an outsider to technical practices -- to insiders the online and the 'real' exist in parallel -- the technology only becomes visible when it doesn't work. We need to surface and explore and negotiate social practices around technologies.

Thoughts from the first seminar (Mary H)
...we need to take up the challenge to think about multimodality and how it operates within the academy -- literacy studies people need to better understand how reading and writing are changing, not just in terms of practices but also academic and scholarly values -- technologies people need to better understand the expectations practices and associated identities that staff and students bring to new technological practices in the academy -- research techniques of microanalysis of practices and events from literacy studies should be of use

More thoughts: Some Ontological Issues (Mary H)
...How do new technologies change the nature and boundaries of what we have in the past called “the text” -- Do we need some new language terms to describe what we are doing in a virtual worl? -- are approaches from Science and Technology Studies, including Actor Network Theory, helpful in bridging our understandings of literacy and digital worlds? -- it would be good to look across different genres and see how they are expressed as the same or different in print and digital environments

If Literacy is social practice why do we need to talk about Texts? (Robin)
...how much we don't know about 'Net' communities, as opposed to 'Academy' ones, and how much we don't know about the potential impact of 'Net' cultures of knowledge on the historical mission of universities to educate in a broad, critical and ideologically-aware sense -- practices in the university are uniquely defined in terms of texts -- [but] as practice-oriented communication becomes more mutimodal and time-shifted and otherwise dispersed won't the notion of text as a defining characteristic of university practice become less and less relevant?

'Literacies and Technologies' or 'Why I think we need to keep talking' (Mary L)
...The commonality between our findings [research drawing on Bernstein/notion of boundaries, structure and agency/actor network theory/activity theory, academic literacies/multi-modal theory] is in the fact that we all highlight the significance of the institution in framing and understanding students practices around the use of technologies in learning contexts.

Sian Bayne's uncanny talk at the Edinburgh seminar (Robin)
...issues are raised here about the kinds of social action that a lifestream and its re-making of identities might take part in -- 'virtual ethnographies' of Internet communities ... are the scholarly and informal blended together here?
Comment (Sian): I'm not really trying to construct the online as simply 'spooky' ...I'm really looking for a way almost of formalising - or at least theorising - models of course design which engage with uncanny principles [time, presence and embodiment]

Seminar two (Glasgow) March 31 2010

Beyond competence: Digital literacies as knowledge practices, and implications for learner development (Helen, Allison, Lou)
...Efforts are being made to support learners' ICT skills ... are rarely integrated with the development of other capabilities critical to higher learning -- we aim to investigate how learners are developing literacies for learning and meeting their learning goals at a time when valued knowledge is predominantly communicated in digital form -- how are digital tools changing the nature of knowledge practice in specific disciplines and professions? Our core values and epistemologies changing or being expressed in new ways? How are these changes explored with learners, and how are staff committed to such exploration being rewarded by the Academy?

Crossing boundaries: literacy practices in formal and informal contexts in FE and HE (Mary H, David, Candice)
Literacy practices of staff and students as part of a bigger institutional shaping in the changing post-school sector -- how the literacy practices of academic staff are adapting to major change in the culture and infrastructure of the university sector -- 'sense of identity' as an overarching aspect in the configuration of literacy practices in the different domains of people's lives -- -- technologies as acting to dissolve boundaries of time and space ... sometimes welcomed sometimes resisted by users -- practices in informal contexts do not migrate in any simple way into educational settings even when technology is in place to facilitate this -- literacy studies approach needed to untangle elements of social practice 'boundaries' that differentiate home life from work.

Discussant (Alison MacKenzie)
...Boundaries between Information Literacy and other literacies are breaking down, but professional boundaries within the institution haven't adapted - focus on development rather than deficit needed...

Discussant (Caroline Haythornthwaite)
...What makes people have a 'good collaboration'? Socio-technical systems as a way of understanding situated knowledge practices - changes in what is acceptable as an academic 'product' - what do we need to teach about how to be participatory ('group literate') citizens? Who is the audience (student, teacher, employer, university admin?) - haven't brought up the issue of the content of technology-enhanced learning.. bio-sciences...computational visualisations... data mining ... literacy around understanding of representations...

Subsequent discussion in this blog:

The Glasgow plenary - a microcosm of the question? (Robin)
'Digital literacy' is beginning to lose its meaning, as applied to an increasingly broad range of learner capabilities and activities and institutional competences and practices -- but literacy has a precise meaning for the Lancaster product (characterised by a framework of attributes such as audience, purpose, mode, technology etc) and a precise application for the GCU project (aligned with actions for developing lifelong learners: authentic tasks and contexts, community practices of meaning making, knowledge practices as resources for learning etc) -- one a disciplinary, the other a practice perspective on literacy - a conversation between people who think they know how practices 'work' and people who think they know what practices are 'needed'...

From the feedback forms for seminars one and two:

1. Focus at institutional and workplace level:

How can an awareness of digital literacies, particularly issues of power, subversion etc., engage with much narrower, technicist, university agendas?

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

Research into ‘authentic’ workplace practices, i.e: looking at literacies in real workplace compared to courses preparing for those workplaces.

2. Focus on academics & practitioners in higher and further education:

What kinds of digital environment do practitioners create and use? How do particular toolsets influence or reflect work practices, attitudes and beliefs?

Should digital literacies be the aim of professional development courses (e.g. PG certs) for new academic staff?

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?

3. Focus on learners and learning:

Production, assessment and practices in collaborative learning – how to consider e-discussions, collaborative writing projects (wikis), in educational contexts, or certification of what is learned/produced by whom?

Exploring notion of audience with literacy and technology. E.g: the public multiple audiences for students’ work implied by an ‘exhibition’ as opposed to essay or logbook.

Understanding the balance between context-specific & cross-context literacy development.

Assessment frameworks for digital assignments in HE, notions of the ‘essay’, and what counts as ‘criticality’ in digital writing?

‘Ownership’ of the goals of learning and assessment criteria.

Visuality and the assessment of multimodal texts.

4. General research issues:

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?

Further deconstructing the ‘digital native’.

Seminar three (Open University) October 14/15 2010

College Students’ Digital Literacy: A Reality Check (Eszter Hargittai)

we need empirical examinations of the extent to which different people embrace various affordances of digital media -- who is participating, who is not ... implications for the democratising potential of new tools and services -- in US colleges, privileged, male, white and Asian American students know more about the Internet, are more confident and take part in more participatory activities...

Distance as a positive principle: posthuman literacies (Sian)

...Exploring the insights of critical post-humanism as a way of thinking through the new literacy modes -- rethinking educational purpose as 'a gathering of the human and nonhuman to establish matters of concern'-- rethinking literacy in terms of disaggregation, reaggregation and gathering - reflexively and explicitly engaging with fragmentation...

New literacy practices in the academy: exploring digital literacy is in higher education (Mary L)

... challenges to the description and analysis of practices and associated texts and technologies which constitute data -- the need for a nuanced research framework for understanding meaning making in contexts of integrated textual and technological practice -- actor network theory as a perspective in which tools/applications and literacy practices are not distinguished...

Researching learners digital experiences: a holistic and participatory approach (Rhona Sharpe)

... eliciting, capturing and problematising the student perspective on learning -- how the dynamic between personally and institutionally owned technologies is changing research and learning relationships -- an 'anthropology' of the student experience...

The research site as a research tool: experience from studying text-making practices in online writing spaces (Carmen Lee)

... textually-mediated online spaces and their users -- text-making practices of online participants -- 'ways in which people choose and transform resources for representing meanings in the form of texts for different purposes' -- turning the research site into the research tools -- need for a discourse-centred online ethnography examining texts across participants and within individual participants' practices...

Researching everyday learning in digital contexts (Candice,Mary H, David)

...methodological issues of access, shifting texts, ethics of public online data, collaboration, digitally-based research tools -- specific discourses of learning within new vernacular writing practices -- domains of social activity online -- experience of changing technologies across the lifespan -- intergenerational and cross-cultural sponsors of learning -- material factors affecting learning and take-up of technologies for communication -- technology as a method for investigating literacy practices -- tboundaries between formal and informal literacy and learning

Researching scholarship in the age of the Internet (Robin)

... Impact of digital communication on practices of scholarship in research and teaching in higher education -- disciplines, institutional missions, digital tools and applications, 'open' knowledge-sharing practices -- combining text/textual practices and socio-technical interaction frameworks to investigate functions of the academic university in the digital age

Discussant (Carey Jewitt)

The papers in this seminar have focused on: getting at hidden practices, uncovering, differentiation of users and practices, making visible forms of practice/the digital gaze, reality checks, debunking myths, invisible frameworks of sociotechnical designers -- current research fails to capture nuances of situated digital literacy moments/events/practices -- research methodologies need to be more flexible, to move beyond the snapshot, to make connections across existing binaries,to get at complexity and process, to reimagine time and space, to better understand both the search subjects and us as researchers

Subsequent discussion in this blog:

3rd Seminar report (Robin)

...the problem terms 'literacy' and 'technology' are being absorbed into shared notions of practice and learning in digital environments

Eszter Hargittai's talk at Seminar 3 (Robin)

...she is finding ways to mine the responses of hundreds of informants, and if these studies can be satisfactorily replicated in other countries and cultures (which she says they have) I would think this is a really valuable 'other' dimension to the qualitative description of the practices of situated individuals.

Carmen Lee's talk at Seminar 3 (Robin)

Her association of 'text' with 'writing' is part of her methodological approach - writing is also data for a linguist - but of course there are others who might use the term in a wider sense, to include other modalities too. Nevertheless, I for one am completely convinced that a 'literacies' approach to learning with technology is always going to have at least one eye on the written word, as it is so often the 'bottom line' where social action grounds out (especially in formal education and scholarly practice: assessments, evaluations, appraisals, arguments, evidence, reflection, etc.).

Carey Jewitt's summary for Seminar 3 (Robin)

she picked up on, and re-emphasised, the necessity for us as researchers to be reflexive - to put ourselves into the literacies frame and interrogate our own practices, across media and across time. Research in this field is a boundary-crossing activity [as MaryH and David have demonstrated in their workshops].

From the feedback forms for seminar three:

implications (on the ground, in schools and unis) of digital capital and uneven distribution of digital skill?
what is the relationship between the systematic integration of skills into the curriculum, and the choices that students (and their teachers) make about their academic practices?

a clear conceptual map or model of what we have been discussing in these seminars?

explore the overlaps with research in the Information Literacies domain?

interaction between students online texts and traditional assessed texts -- innovative assignment types, e.g.: assessing Powerpoints, blogs, websites?

comparative international work -- can findings from qualitative studies inform instruments and measures for quantitative studies?
alignment of research methodologies?

Carey Jewitt's summary for Seminar 3

2010-11-11T02:47:00.000-08:00

Carey graphically demonstrated the emergence of shared concepts central to our discussions, through the use of a Wordle cloud generated from the abstracts of the all the sessions. She showed that the 'literacy v technology' dichotomy has given way to a common focus on practices, on learning, and on students.

One key issue that she surfaced (see the summary on the LIDU website for her slides), was the fact that most of the studies that people have been talking about during the seminar were looking below the radar of existing research (ie: focused on 'hidden' practices, the debunking of myths, uncovering phenomena etc.). [This has important implications for a future research agenda in this field - if we want funding we probably need to connect at some point with recognised agendas in both literacy and technology studies. Hopefully these seminars are helping us to see what these agendas are].

Carey analysed in some depth the 'alignment of methodologies' that is necessary to capture to capture 'the rich nuance of people’s situated digital literacy moments/events/practices'. She noted the importance of
re-articulating approaches to researching textual practices in the context of the proliferation of multimodal digital resources, and the emergence of tensions (productive, but still tense!) between the 'creative appropriation' of these resources by learners, and on-going practices associated with teaching and assessment.

She drew our attention to the need to 'look beyond the snapshot', that is, to work with transition over time - between and across institutions, technologies and spaces. Working towards a better understanding of what the conceptual work of ‘looking over time at change’ is focused on.

And she picked up on, and re-emphasised, the necessity for us as researchers to be reflexive - to put ourselves into the literacies frame and interrogate our own practices, across media and across time. Research in this field is a boundary-crossing activity [as MaryH and David have demonstrated in their workshops].

The Literacies of Funding our Future

2010-11-11T01:55:00.000-08:00


Traditional literacy


Digital Literacy

Carmen Lee's talk at Seminar 3

2010-10-26T07:02:00.001-07:00

Slides and recordings from Carmen's talk are on the website at: http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/lidu/p4_3.shtml (Friday 10.20 in the timetable). The Olympus recorder was feeling keen that morning and caught the whole session, including the questions afterwards, so it's all there.

I've divided the recording up into 3 sections - one with Carmen's discussion of the methodological background to her research, one with her description of her studies of Hong Kong students' textual practices with Instant Messaging and Facebook status updates, and one with the audience's questions and her replies.

Carmen revealed herself as a reader of this blog when she quoted an earlier discussion we had on why talk about texts (that post actually got 3 comments - a record!) - she answered the question herself by pointing to the ubiquity of writing online and the way it is implicated in in almost all interaction. Her association of 'text' with 'writing' is part of her methodological approach - writing is also data for a linguist - but of course there are others who might use the term in a wider sense, to include other modalities too. Nevertheless, I for one am completely convinced that a 'literacies' approach to learning with technology is always going to have at least one eye on the written word, as it is so often the 'bottom line' where social action grounds out (especially in formal education and scholarly practice: assessments, evaluations, appraisals, arguments, evidence, reflection, etc.).

Eventually she described herself as doing 'discourse-centred online ethnography' which allows for all sorts of non-textual (in the writing sense) meaning-making as well. This was effectively evidenced by some of her examples of Chinese-speaking students' facebook updates, and her account of the process of 'turning her research sites into research tools' by progressively engaging participants in reflection on their own practices.

During the subsequent question-and-answer session, Carmen's responsive methodology led some of the audience to question how far participants in this kind of online ethnography can be said to be 'informed' in what they consent to revealing for research purpose. This issue had come up the day before in Sally Baker's talk about doing research using Facebook too. Is the 'tell all' ethos of social networking an adequate ethical justification for reporting anything that participants write or do?

Personally I felt quite comfortable with this, as with all of Carmen's ideas in this talk - it seemed to me pretty paradigmatic of qualitative, ethnographic, literacies research. Principled, thoughtful, and respectful of informants, especially if they are students (with the 'structural' relationship to the academic researcher that this often implies). It is true that Facebook participants might not have much idea of is going to be done with their words and their identities later, in the name of research, but that must be the case with most informants in ethnographic studies. In the end they, and we, trust the researcher to be like Carmen.

I felt hoist by my own petard when, just as I was looking forward to her telling us what kinds of variation in individual practice she had uncovered, she announced that she wouldn't be talking about findings as this was a methodology seminar. That had been my own insistence (vindicated too I reckon by the quality of all the presentations) - but a peek at what she found would have been nice.

Eszter Hargittai's talk at Seminar 3

2010-10-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

Eszter's slides and audio recording are now on the Lidu website at http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/lidu/p4_3.shtml - sadly the audio is incomplete, as the recorder cut out inexplicably with 10 mins still to go. It did that with almost all the talks, in some cases (eg: mine) deciding to stop after just 5 mins (maybe it had heard enough). I've summarised the last part of Eszter's talk below, plus a couple of the questions from the audience.

Eszter's focus was on what she is calling the internet skills of US college students. By this she means what they know about it and what they can do with a computer connected to it. Her interest is to establish whether differences in levels of skill between people are random, or due to some systematic factor like gender, social background etc. (She has a nice graphic illustrating the cycle of skills->types of use->academic achievement ->life chances etc.)

The audio of her talk is split into two sections - about 15 minutes on her methodology, and then 10 on her findings. Under methodology she discusses issues such as the 'digital data paradox' (the Google fallacy: data about internet uses = data about users), and the realities of finding out what the 'wired generation' (95% of her student informants had access to the internet at home during their high school years, and they spend an average of 17 hours weekly on it not counting email, chat and Skype-type communications) can actually do. Eszter used observations, pen & paper surveys and interviews to rate informants' understanding of a range of internet terms ('download', 'bookmark', 'jpeg', 'Bcc', 'RSS' etc.) and their ability to carry out the procedures that these terms describe.

(I caught myself out wondering if I really do know what 'Bcc' does, even though I know what it means. I don't think I ever use it. I wonder if this affects my life chances?)

Under findings she provides some interesting (though not always surprising, if we think about it)data, for example:

Women consistently rate their skill levels lower than men do (there is no research domain, Eszter says, where this is not the case)..
..however, where self-rating is equivalent between men and women, so are actual skill levels
There is a large skill/knowledge differential between Female/Hispanic students and Male/Asian ones
There is a differential between skill levels of students whose parents' education stopped at high school and those whose parents have college degrees
Most-used sites are Facebook, Youtube, wikipedia - only 18% use Twitter, correlating highly with interest in celebrities
Men upload content more
Women change their privacy setting more
63% don't use mobile phones to access the internet (possibly because it's quite expensive and they all have laptops)
Some think that if Google found it it must be true
25% don't engage with web 2.0-type activity at all

Eszter's conclusion is that there is non-random variation in skill level and that this may be indicative of 'digital inequalities' that should be addressed through education.

The audience threw a number of questions at her, particularly around the relation between her concept of 'skill' and the uses to which it is put, and the notion of 'practices' and the skills which they engender. She is clear about the methodological difference, but I sensed that some of the more social-literacies inclined people were not totally convinced that she is coming at this from the right direction!

For myself, I found her approach, her data, and her whole presentation convincing - she is finding ways to mine the responses of hundreds of informants, and if these studies can be satisfactorily replicated in other countries and cultures (which she says they have) I would think this is a really valuable 'other' dimension to the qualitative description of the practices of situated individuals. I wouldn't trust an educational policy-maker with this perspective alone, mind you - that 25% of non-engaged students might be doing something even more interesting while the others are online!

3rd Seminar report

2010-10-18T09:35:00.000-07:00

Personally, I thought this seminar was brilliant! Two days of high-quality presentations and stimulating discussion, interleaved with some excellent cakes.

[This will be a quick descriptive report, there is a lot of comment and reflection to be done over the next couple of weeks while we put audio clips and presentation slides up on the website.]

The strategy of having two quite different international guest speakers, one on each day, worked a treat. Eszter Hargittai began the proceedings with a 'reality check' on US college students online skills and activities.

Eszter's presentation of her large-scale survey-based studies contained a number of nuggets of information that caused a frisson or two in the audience -- that male students are far more likely to overrate their skills levels than females, for example, or that males create and upload more content, but females spend more time changing their Facebook privacy settings. And most surprising, that only 18% of 2009's respondents were twitter users, or that 63% do NOT use their mobile phones to access the internet.

In contrast to Eszter's statistics, Carmen Lee's talk on the second day gave us what she called a 'discourse-centred online ethnography', looking at Hong Kong students' use of micro-blogging features in Facebook.

Many of us were particularly intrigued by Carmen's examples of student online texts which mixed English words with Chinese ideograms and phonetically-spelt Cantonese exclamations. The subsequent discussion raised the issue of anonymity (or otherwise) for informants in this kind of research, an issue relevant to the presentations of several other speakers.

In and around the presentations of these two international guests, the LIDU core seminar group fitted talks and workshops covering a wide range of topics, none of which could fail to engross anyone who has ever stopped to think about the actual literacy demands of engagement in online practices, from putting your homework up on Flickr to blogging your scholarly reputation.

Sian Bayne's meditation on distance education as a 'post-human' human-technology symbiosis was later illustrated by Jen Ross and herself with some impressive examples of their own MA students' virtual 'lifestreams' assembled from a variety of feeds over the course of their study. Lynn Coleman's and Sally Baker's joint discussion of the use of the digital as both object and artefact for research kept the focus firmly on methodology -- the theme of the seminar. Mary Lea gave an account of the pedagogical 'sandwich' in which unpacked and little-researched students' practices with technologies are the filling between layers of text-based task and assessment. Rhona Sharpe reported on research into learners experiences, demanding more reliable and usable methodologies to involve practitioners and students in data collection that captures and retains the learner's voice. David Barton, Mary Hamilton and Candice Satchwell, discussed and demonstrated Flickr as a learning environment, the possibilities inherent in collaborative research methodologies in which informants and researchers make collective decisions at all stages of the process, and the highly engaging online exchanges of children (and some of their parents) during a climate change project. Helen Beetham and Allison Littlejohn cajoled workshop participants into some meaningful reflexivity about aims and outcomes in digital literacy research, and I raised the spectre of the 'digital scholar' and the breaking down of the walls of the Academy!

In between all this we talked a blue streak, and I had the feeling that the whole topic was really beginning to open up, and to overcome some of the difficulties in communication between 'language' and 'technology' people, that we had found in previous seminars. This was confirmed by Carrie Jewett, who spent some of her preparation time as discussant, when she wasn't enthusiastically contributing to the discussion itself, compiling a 'wordle' out of the abstracts of the seminar talks.

This demonstrated vividly how research had come to the fore, and the problem terms 'literacy' and 'technology' were being absorbed into shared notions of practice and learning in digital environments.

The discussion that followed Carey's plenary session will be the subject of a subsequent post all to itself. In the meantime, here is a caption competition: who is saying what to whom in this snapshot of Jenn, Sian and myself sharing a post-human moment?

Post graduate e-forum on academic writing and text production

2010-09-27T01:40:00.000-07:00

A new online discussion forum for postgraduate students working in the areas of academic writing, text production, literacies and ethnography, has been launched by the academic literacies group at The Open University.

The forum is a development of online discussions held around the one-day seminar Ethnographies of Academic Writing in a Global Context organized by Theresa Lillis on 16 July 2010 at the Open University. To make this forum work over the longer term and continue the fruitful discussions amongst post graduate students a new “re-launched” forum has been initiated. The new forum is called the Post graduate e-forum on academic writing and text production and will focus on exploring ethnographic and contextual approaches to academic literacies within the global context of higher education.

Post graduate students working in the broad areas of academic writing, text production, literacies and ethnography who are interested in participating in this forum should send an e-mail to the current forum moderators Lynn Coleman and Jackie Tuck l.coleman@open.ac.uk and j.tuck@open.ac.

The 'Digital Turn' in the NLS

2010-09-09T04:35:00.000-07:00

[I'm experimenting with a new practice -- blogging my response to an article as I read it, using the Dragon speech recognition software].

The article is by Kathy Ann Mills in the Review of Educational Research June 2010. It's called 'A Review of the Digital Turn in the New Literacy Studies and I'm particularly interested in it for two reasons: one because it's relevant to our ongoing discussions in the LIDU seminar series and in this blog, and two because I'm still waiting for referees’ comments on my own review 'Literacy, Literacies and the Digital in Higher Education' which I submitted to Teaching in Higher Education last March, and I'm anxious in case Kathy Ann turns out to have said everything already. Thus am I motivated by the pure and disinterested search for knowledge.

[Dragon note: I’ve moved from my nice comfortable armchair back to the office chair, so as to be able to make keyboard corrections manually when Dragon slips up and refuses to recognise commands dictated to my extension wall-mounted monitor]

This article focuses on literature which is explicitly associated with the New Literacy Studies -- work that introduced the concept of 'literacy practices' to replace earlier notions of cognitive competence as an explanation for peoples’ communicative behaviour in text. Literacy practices can only be understood in relation to the particular social groups that value them, thus scotching the idea that literacy 'skill' is something that, once gained, can be switched from context or context unproblematically. So far so good.

There is a lot of literature referenced in this article, about 176 citations. (I've only got 51 in mine, but, mind you, I'm only talking about higher education, Kathy Ann's field takes in the whole of the compulsory education sector as well. Still, I have to admit she has done a much more thorough job than me, of warranting her claims by showing that she has considered everything written that is relevant to the subject -- describing her search processes, search terms, search engines used, etc. A typically rigourous Educational Research approach). I won't try to report on everything she says, just pick out a couple of points that make this a really worthwhile read for anyone interested in the relation between literacy and technology, and then have a very minor grump about extensive referencing as an academic literacy practice that doesn't always do what it says on the tin.

One of the interesting things that came through to me from this review, is the way that the focus of 'literacy' thinking in education has begun to move, influenced by multimodal practices, away from the idea of written text as being a single mode. Mills points out that in virtually all the empirical research she reviews, 'participants engage with the written word in the process or product of their textual engagements, while frequently drawing on other modes and conventions' (Page 249), going on to refer to research done in Brazil that shows students using written forms such as dialogue and song lyrics, in two languages, as an integral part of multimodal presentations.

Opening up the space of possibilities for writing as part of a multimodal semiotic system raises questions about the value accorded to more colloquial, informal, and personally expressive forms of writing in institutional contexts of learning. Mills says, tantalisingly, 'there is surprisingly little evidence of any resistance to official literacies in the digital strand of this [new literacy studies] tradition’ (page 252). This surprised me a bit, because Lankshear and Knobel’s work (to name but two) is full of references to 'alternative' and 'resistant' youth literacy practices. It was them that tempted me (in my own review) to characterise media literacy research focused on schools as significantly anti-establishment as far as official literacies are concerned, and to contrast this with higher education where media literacy research has yet to get any proper foothold at all.

Mills refers us to the Digital youth network research (2009) large-scale studies of African American youth in sixth to eighth grades. These found, tellingly, that 'in formal settings, the most powerful examples of digital literacy programs were based on learner rather than teacher interests ... [with] ... unstructured experimentation with new media, rather than ... direct instruction from authority figures’ (page 253). She goes on to relate this to research around authoritative knowledge, mentioning studies that highlight 'the destabilising of traditional loci of authoritative knowledge and expertise’ and the new centrality of 'peer collaboration, mentoring, and voluntary support to members of online communities'. (Which, I must say, is very much what proponents of eLearning have been claiming for a couple of decades now, without that much evidence of significant changes happening in knowledge practices in higher education).

[Dragon note: rather than save time by trying to use Dragon to blog-as-I-read, I'm finding that this is taking just as long, if not longer, as it would if I just read and made notes, and then wrote it up in the conventional way. I'm only halfway through and this post is already far too long. I clearly need to be more disciplined in deciding what to comment on. This is not Dragon's fault I hasten to say, it's doing its best to adapt to me I must try to adapt better to it.]

If I've got time (and when I get back from my holiday) I might carry on discussing this review, as it's excellent, and I recommend it. However, before I finish here, I want to note something about all those references. This article makes an implicit claim for comprehensive coverage of its subject by searching for, and listing, as many other articles as it can find using keywords searches such as '(literacy Or reading Or writing) And (sociocultural Or social practice) And (digital Or techno* or comput* Or multimedia)' (page 247). What results is an invaluable list of references that enables the reader to scan titles for topics of interest without having to do their own search. What I find a little bit more spurious (and this is not just about what this author has done, but about academic practice in general) is the explicit grouping together of particular citations to suggest common approaches, themes, even research movements. I was pleased to see two references to my own work there (don't we always look for these first!), But I was puzzled by what Kathy Ann had given one of them as an example of: I've never written anything about ‘online chat’ as far as I can remember. I know that it's easy to forget who said what when you're referencing a whole load of sources, but it does make me wonder how many of the other citations might actually not be particularly relevant to the point being made.

Does it matter? Not if you like your academic rigour with a tiny grain of salt.

The 'literacy problem'

2010-08-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

Have just read something entitled 'New Literacies' on the ALT wiki http://wiki.alt.ac.uk/index.php/New_Literacies I found the posting rather frustrating with regard to its cursory use of bodies of work which have been grappling with the issue of literacy as a social and cultural practice, across a range of mediated contexts, for the last thirty years.

The author, whose name I had to dig around for but finally found, seems to be setting out to discuss what he refers to as ‘the literacy problem’. He draws on an eclectic range of literature, some of which is referenced at the end of the posting and some of which is not. Secondary sources figure pretty strongly. What causes me the most irritation is the way in which someone claims to be writing about New Literacies, throws in many of the dominant writers in the New Literacy Studies (NLS) field, Street, Gee, Barton but also manages to misrepresent some fundamental principles of this field of enquiry and how it has evolved and developed as a critical lens on practice in specific cultural contexs, including new media and technological contexts. Also there is no acknowledgement that literacies theorists have always been aware of technologies in relation to literacy practices. The author claims that new literacies researchers “never studied literacy directly but only through the lens of organizations, institution and groups”. I am left wondering what he has actually read of the work he refers to. There are serious omissions, too, for example, no reference to the 2001 vol 4 & 5 special editions of Language and Education on New Directions in Literacy research, Kress’s Page to Screen, or Carey Jewitt’s work on multimodality. Throughout much of the posting the word literacy seems to me to be a kind of shorthand for anything to do with skill or competence. In fact, a quick web search of my own yesterday evening reinforced this, with links to
Agricultural literacy • Aliteracy • • Computer literacy • Cultural literacy • • Diaspora literacy • Ecological literacy • Electracy • Financial literacy • Health literacy • Information literacy • Information and media literacy • • Mental health literacy • Mental literacy • Multimedia literacy • • Racial literacy • Scientific literacy • Statistical literacy • Technacy • • Visual literacy not to mention, emotional literacy - environmental literacy - political literacy- physical literacy........

So where do I go from here if I want to be able to think and write critically about literacies in a digital world? I remember Brian Street some years back critiquing the association of literacies with particular categories. His position was that terms such as ‘computer literacy’ were misleading since they suggested something unitary, whereas literacy always involves different uses of literacy in different contexts. At the time I wasn’t sure how far I agreed with this and still felt comfortable about using the term ‘digital literacies’. I believed that in associating digital with the plural literacies we were embedding the notion of literacy practices as primarily socially situated and contextual. I am no longer convinced that the term is doing this job. I want to continue to find a way of signalling my interest in exploring meaning making in a digital world and foregrounding the critical contested nature of literacies and literacy practices which the long history of NLS and by association, Academic Literacies, buys us. Since the LiDU seminar series started, I have been increasingly concerned that the ubiquitious use of the term digital literacies no longer carries these connotations for me and this ALT posting reinforces my disquiet. I find myself searching around as to where to go from here. I’m moving further and further away from using the term ‘digital literacies’. Literacies in a digital world is working better for me right now and, with regard to my own work, academic literacies in a digital world/context/age seems to conjure up where I am located, with my interests in meaning making through participation in textual and technological practices.
I am hoping that with our 2 day event in October, focusing on methodological issues, we will be able to explore this further.
Mary

Third seminar in the series coming soon!

2010-08-20T05:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Ethnographies of academic writing seminar

2010-07-21T06:38:00.000-07:00

This was a seminar held at the Open University on July 16, coordinated and led by Theresa Lillis. The full name of the event was 'Ethnographies of Academic Writing in a Global Context: the politics of style'. Theresa is running a longitudinal research project called Professional Academic Writing in a Global Context (funded by ESRC) looking at practices in writing for publication in English-language journals by non-native-English-speaking scholars - the seminar topic was based on ideas derived from this, particularly ideas around what is at stake in academic text production in global contexts, and how an ethnographic approach can help us to understand the significance attached to 'style'. See the outline programme.

Highlights that stuck in my mind were: Ana Moreno's fascinating exploration of the different ways that English and Spanish academics express critical comments in book reviews; Constant Leung and Brian Street's interesting discussion of methodological issues involved in using multiple and multimodal sources of data about students writing, which never quite crossed the line to talking about students' own multimodal text production; Lucia Thesen's critical but ever so understated observations on the way that an academic literacies/ethnographic perspective can itself be problematic for research carried out in Africa, in its orientalising effect (my word not hers) representing local contexts, strange data, and problematic theorisation etc.; Mary Scott's informal discussion of 'ethnopoetics' informed by striking examples of extracts from student essays transformed stylistically by being presented as poems.

As is often the case with mainstream writing-focused events (as with WDHE 2010, reported on in an earlier post), I was a bit frustrated with the continuing scarcity of work that uses the theoretical and methodological insights from this field to examine emerging media-intensive practices in both actual and virtual contexts of writing. If applied linguists would pay a bit more attention to learning technologies, I tell myself, it might be easier to get learning technologists to think seriously about students' writing.

In my own presentation to the seminar I talked about a bit of desktop research I've been doing into the meaning of the term 'scholarship' as applied to academic blogging. Starting with the premise that all scholarship must be discipline-related (which seems true to me, although some people may want to dispute it), I sought to characterise some academic blogs that I found through Technorati, Scienceblogs, and other sources, as to whether or not they conformed to conventions of writing 'typical' for their disciplines. I used Bazerman's 1981 paper 'What Written Knowledge Does' as a model. Bazerman looked at canonical research articles in the fields of molecular biology, sociology of science, and literary criticism, and distinguished them according to how they treated the assumed 'fixity' of the knowledge they were dealing with, how they engaged with the literature of the field, how they positioned their assumed readership, and how the authors represented themselves. I applied his criteria to selected postings from academic bloggers in the same 3 fields, namely: Pharyngula (PZ Myers), Understanding Society (D Little), and DG Myers' blog on literary criticism.

I'm still writing up this paper for conventional publication (not entirely a digital scholar as yet) so I won't go into any more detail here. Suffice it to say, that the three posts I mentioned above do reproduce Bazerman's features of typicality for their disciplines to an interesting degree. Interesting to me that is -- I sensed that the seminar audience found it quite interesting, but were not convinced it had much to do with ethnography, nor with the real business of academic writing.

Writing Development in Higher Education conference

2010-07-01T04:52:00.000-07:00

The 13th WDHE conference was hosted by what used to be called the WriteNow CETL (when we still had 'settles').

I've been to the last five of these conferences and as usual I quite enjoyed this one, although I was a bit less engaged this time because of competing commitments (like the SCONUL meeting), the need to travel down to London from Milton Keynes each day, and most pertinently because I felt that many of the same discussions were being had over again. It's significant that the issue of how to get writing more centrally onto the agendas of disciplinary teaching and student support never seems to get any less pressing. From my own point of view, as well, the continuing marginality of new media issues in the context of student writing is a bit depressing. I've had a personal agenda for a few years now of trying to get writing in online contexts recognised as a central part of the student writing experience at university, but I still found only a handful of presentations at this conference that had a digital dimension.

The ones I attended included Trevor Day's presentation about designing an online writing support resource at the University of Bath, Maria Jersky from LaGuardia U. on promoting multilingual writers self-efficacy using Web 2.0, Florence Dujardin on student voice and social bookmarking at Sheffield Hallam, and the keynote by Andrea Lunsford from Stanford U. who was ostensibly talking about a longitudinal study of student writing practices, but in fact spent most of her time eulogising three of her favourites who were doing remarkable things with websites, as well as probably getting A's in their essays.

My own presentation was about a little project that I'm involved in at the OU and AUT University in Auckland, trying to create an open access resource for academic writing support online that can be contextualised by teachers and students to their own tasks in hand. The project is called Contextualising Online Writing Support which means that I could use little cartoons of cows on my slides.

The high point of the conference for me was, as last time in Glasgow, catching up with Claire Aitchison from the University of Western Australia who is doing some very interesting work into the writing practices of postgraduate students, and is, as I found out, a fellow Dragon user ...

... Claire is actually much more experienced with this beast than me having been at it for two years but she still jumped up and down in gleeful recognition of my problems -- trying to get it to learn that 'Hi’ at the beginning of an e-mail should never be spelt 'high'; trying to correct its default assumption that everything I'm writing is at heart a business letter, so that its knee-jerk interpretation of a name like 'Annette Byrne' is 'net earnings'; getting over all the glitches it seems to cause with other programs including stopping the computer from shutting down by refusing to end its recording function. We agreed that the goal of speak-writing was a worthy one and much better for our eventual fluency, but that there should be a dragon users anonymous group giving each other support and therapy while we were trying to get there.

SCONUL information literacy study

2010-07-01T04:13:00.000-07:00

I had an unexpected invitation to attend a meeting of the Society of College, National and University Libraries Association (SCONUL) to discuss ideas for a large scale study of the impact of information literacy programs in higher education. I thought at first that the invite had come through Alison Mackenzie, who I invited to our second lidu seminar in Glasgow last March, but it turned out that Cathie Jackson who was organising the meeting for SCONUL had been googling around looking for people who might be interested, and found us.

The meeting clashed with the first afternoon of the writing development in higher education conference I was booked to go to (more of that in my next post) but I was intrigued enough to want to attend. They'd sent out a proposal for a study that had been written by Ralph Catts from the University of Stirling (here is an example of his work on information literacy indicators), which I found challenging on a number of fronts, not least because it draws on a highly empirical/experimental tradition of educational research which I had not previously thought appropriate to the study of literacy. Information literacy, of course, develops from information skills, traditionally the province of libraries and historically considered to be testable via a pre-test -- intervention -- posttest model.

After a preliminary discussion with a colleague in the OU library I went to the meeting with the idea that the OU could definitely contribute to the more qualitative case study aspects of the proposal. In the event, two of the other preliminary speakers also expressed concerns about the theoretical and methodological feasibility of determining the contribution to learning, or student attitude, or retention, of information literacy programs. Not to mention determining what constitutes an information literacy intervention in the first place. Ralph himself was completely open to discussion along those lines and the afternoon was very productive.

My own introduction drew attention to the experience of writing centres in the USA who found their funding cut by their universities when 'impact' studies proved inconclusive. For some managers no evidence of value clearly equals no value. I also talked about the work of our lidu partners in the 'Learning Literacies in the Digital Age' project with regard to information literacy and the way it tends to be supported in UK colleges and universities (by central support services like libraries, as opposed to academic and media literacies pretend to be located within the subject curriculum).

In the general discussion, there was some support for the idea that the impact of information literacy might be more easily measured in terms of its influence on the input to student learning, including on academic practice, rather than directly on learning outcomes. We also discussed possible sources for funding for a study, including JISC, the EU framework seven, and a possible ESRC seminar series. It was left with Alison and Cathie and Ralph to summarise what we had been talking about and to propose an onward strategy for developing a study and a bid for funding.

We will definitely be re-inviting SCONUL c olleagues to the OU lidu seminar in October, where Esther Hargittai's large-scale research on information literacy skills will be of interest to them.

Catching up -- more problematic E-literacy practices

2010-07-01T03:04:00.000-07:00

I suspect it's not good blogging practice to save up one's ideas for posts over a three-week period and then send them all at once. If there are casual readers who have dropped in from time to time and found nothing more, they have probably already concluded that the blog is defunct. And anyone who's actually got a feed from the blog suddenly gets a whole bunch of messages arriving at the same time and probably hasn't got time to read them properly.

However, unless you are an experienced diariser it's quite difficult to keep up a regular output of comment. When you are continually inundated with e-mails, proposals, forms to be filled in, reports and papers to be written and read, and other reading and writing tasks that don't seem to get any less as the university gets more digital, then time not spent committing your words to the ether seems precious.

But, of course, there are dozens of very busy and very successful academics and other university professionals keeping very regular and very informative blogs. I'm currently exploring some of them for a talk I'm preparing on 'the rise of the academic blogger' at a seminar on academic literacies and ethnography at the open University on July 16. My idea is to take a few of their posts and see if they display any of the characteristics of written knowledge in their disciplines that writers like Bazerman and Hyland have identified.

In the meantime, on the assumption that it's only me that's reading these posts anyway, I'm just going to go ahead and send all the ones I've been mentally composing the last three weeks at the same time!

The first is another reflection on the problematics of new literacy practices brought into education from the wider world of the Internet - it occurred to me while I was updating the online study material for the OU course I work on, 'the elearning professional'. For the last three years we've included a link to a site belonging to an American university which was a field leader in ePortfolio practice. The link was to a page on Reflection- advice to students on writing reflectively in their ePortfolios, the value of it, how to do it etc. When I was checking the link recently I found it had disappeared. Not only that, the whole site about the university's ePortfolio system had been subsumed by a new site promoting individual student blogs. This is interesting enough in itself, as it bears out the intuition I'd already had that the complex monolithic ePortfolio system that was all the rage couple of years ago would find itself 'un-bundled' (to use a current buzzword) into its component parts: systems for storing, reflecting, showcasing etc.

But even more interesting was to find a video on the bit of the website that is about using the reflective blog element of the ePortfolio, flagged as 'an example of using the reflective blog element to establish yourself as a leading thinker in your field'.

How the noble art of reflection is fallen! From self-knowledge to self-promotion.

The Dragon's claws of clay

2010-06-08T00:37:00.000-07:00

I've found the catch with my friendly dragon speech recognition software -- it doesn't work properly on the extension monitor that I have plugged into my laptop at home.

It recognises dictation more or less okay, but it doesn't carry out menu commands properly. I say 'Edit' and the appropriate menu tab flashes but nothing happens. I say 'Page down' and it just stares back at me inscrutably.

I had a very long and very pleasant telephone conversation about it with a young man (well he sounded young) called Guillermo from Nuance, the supplier. Guillermo had never heard of this problem before and had to go away and talk to his supervisor. A couple of days later I got an e-mail informing me, shamefacedly, that 'this is a known issue of the program and there is no solution or a way to workaround it and it will be fixed in future versions of Dragon'.

So my brilliant idea of having a large wall mounted monitor that I can write on from my armchair stumbles over a lame dragon.

Nothing Is Perfect -- even in the digital age

Auditing our scholarly outputs

2010-06-07T13:25:00.000-07:00

I was at a meeting today where OU colleagues were discussing a proposed 'audit of scholarly outputs' to be carried out in our university towards the end of the year.

We are evidently serious about this scholarship business. The purpose is to build on our institutional experience of evaluating the outputs of individual researchers in the last RAE, to develop a way of identifying indicators of excellence in scholarly work which is not necessarily 'REF-able'. This would be to our benefit in terms of professional development (possible promotion based on it) and to the University's in that it would bring this, normally hidden, excellent work to the public gaze. The OU would like to be a sector leader in this enterprise., although we have apparently already been beaten to it in the production of statements of scholarly excellence by UCL .

We had a very interesting discussion about the kinds of things that individual academics might include in a submission that detailed their scholarly outputs (or outcomes -- another interesting discussion) over a four or five-year period. Suggestions included the kinds of contribution that people routinely make to the outputs (or outcomes) of others: critical reading, mentoring, organising reading groups and seminars, chairing meetings, reviewing, lending each other books. They also included digital activities of sometimes more doubtful scholarly provenance: blogging about one's personal research interests, contributions to e-mail lists, uploading mediocre work to institutional repositories etc.

Perhaps equally interesting were the suggestions for activities that might not be regarded as scholarship: ordinary teaching (as opposed to, for example, developing new curriculum areas), external examining, writing teaching material (unless it contains more than 60% 'new' knowledge), research administration!

To my mind, it is no surprise that the sample headings for such an audit that we were given to discuss were very strongly oriented towards what we already know as research. Scholarship in the literature is strongly associated with research in established disciplines. However, if this exercise is to throw any light on the role of the scholar in the knowledge age, then I think we have to move out of the familiar zone of research, research excellence, the RAE/REF etc, and think about the ways that teaching, and the production of teaching materials, and the development of pedagogies, are also scholarship, and their authors scholars.

The Red Queen and the Blue University

2010-05-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

An 'information alert' that has just come round our university from the strategy department likens UK Higher Education to the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, running as hard as she can in order to stay in the same place.

It argues that in the new socio-economic climate, characterised by 'seismic shifts', 'inexorable forces', 'irreversible changes', 'fundamental transformation', etc., universities need to ditch their outmoded (publicly funded) business model and adopt demand-led models that promise ' income earned through value delivered', like Amazon (the online bookshop not the jungle), 'the learning hotel', 'the umbrella' etc.

The Alert is a a digest of a report from PA consulting group on the 'new economics of higher education' which itself recycles ideas that have been doing the rounds in technology/business thinking about higher education for a few years now, for example Seely Brown and Adler's 'Minds on Fire, Anderson's 'The Long Tail' (and, not referenced but there in spirit, Katz's 'The Tower and the Cloud').

I'd like to do a critical discourse analysis job on the language of some of these alerts and reports on the future of higher education, and indeed on some of the scholarship on which they are based, but this is more properly the subject of an essay than a blog post. Suffice it to say here that there is another story also to be told about the purpose and sustainability of universities. The UK higher education budget for 2010 -- 2011 includes £5 billion for teaching, and £1.6 billion for research, paid for out of the income tax of 30 million people and intended to benefit up to 40% of their children over the next 12 months. This system, unfair as it undoubtedly is, outmoded as it may be, nevertheless reflects an embedded tradition of thinking about public responsibility and mass social benefits that can't simply be overturned by the mantras of demand-led economics.

Craig Calhoun explores some of the complexities of public and private benefit in university education in works such as 'The University and the Public Good' and his keynote talk ' Free Enquiry and Public Mission in the Research University' at the Open University Centre for Identities Citizenship and Governance last April. He argues that 'public' does not simply mean an aggregate of private interests, but has a larger reality critical to democracy.

Cowan et al 'Running the Marathon' analyse innovation as one of the public and private goods over which universities and other sectors compete. They show that the real contribution of the public university to the advance of knowledge is an educational one, to provide people who are capable of being innovative, not simply innovative ideas per se.

I put these sources forward as examples of thinking about higher education that engage with its public role from a different ideological position to that of the Red Queen authors. The different positions do not necessarily refute each other, but whereas Calhoun, Cowan, and other critical educational theorists recognise the role of ideology in the construction of their ideas, neo-liberal business theory seems to believe it is simply talking common sense. 'Escaping the Red Queen effect' employs Carrollian nonsense rhetorically to emphasise this, but that does not make its prescriptions (learning hotels and umbrella universities) necessarily any more sensible in the long run than the HEFCE grant settlement.

Dragon talk

2010-05-17T05:55:00.000-07:00

Dragon is the speech recognition software I'm using to try and combat my body's keyboard-phobia.

'Dragon talk' is the title of a collection of poems by Fleur Adcock the New Zealand writer. A review by Julian Stannard in the Guardian of May 15 includes a gem that reflects the complex relationship that Dragon users have with their assistive pal:

I wait for you to lash your tail
each time I swear at you.
But no: you listen meekly,
and print "f***ing moron".

(Apologies to Fleur Adcock for not having the courage to reproduce what she wrote exactly)

Borgman on digital scholarship - why it is a literacy matter

2010-05-11T02:56:00.000-07:00

Borgman, C. (2007) Scholarship in the digital age. Information, infrastructure and the Internet. Cambs: London:MIT press

(warning: this is a rather long post)

Borgman is one of two references which are the basis of current discussions about digital scholarship at the open University. The other is the article by Boyer written about 20 years ago (see Nick Pearce's blog). Borgman locates her work within the context of the mass digitisation of print and the computerisation of data which is a feature of the current literary, academic, and scientific research environment. She sets out to create a 'social framework for data' incorporating notions of open access and research data as 'public goods'. Whilst her idea of scholarship is shaped mainly by its relation to research (Boyer's 'discovery' function) the focus on data and on scholarly communication has implications for integration, application, and dissemination/teaching as well.

Borgman's most valuable contribution to our discussion of digital scholarship is probably in her recognition of the phenomenon as a sociotechnical system. (And thus researchable through existing theoretical and methodological frameworks such as: social shaping, actor network theory, the social construction of technology, work practices etc). A sociotechnical perspective connects scholarly activity with institutional, political, social, technical and economic infrastructures. For example: she refers to traditional scholarly communication as a 'gift exchange culture' wherein value of a non-economic kind is exchanged between researchers, authors, reviewers, readers, universities, funding agencies etc. enabled by technical communication systems that are free and easy-to-use. These relationships confer a kind of stability on the process of scholarly communication. She contrasts this, with scholarly publication, which she claims is highly unstable ('discontinuous' is the preferred term) as interests conflict amongst researchers, librarians, publishers and the public and corporate worlds, over ownership of data, technical communication systems, and what counts as documented knowledge.

Borgman summarises the functions of scholarly communication as: the legitimisation, dissemination, preservation and curation of knowledge. At the foundation of this set of functions she puts data. The basis of her book is a description and discussion of different ways in which digital technologies are impacting on the role of data in the pursuit of these functions. The focus on data distinguishes Borgman's approach to scholarship from that of Boyer, whose perspective is that of the individual academic and their role in the University as institution. One way to unite the Borgman and Boyer perspectives might be to accept the centrality of data in the business of scholarship and to explore its role in scholarly activity through each of Boyer's phases: discovery, integration, application, dissemination/teaching. (I suspect that this would show that Boyer's phases are neither linear nor discrete, as data is likely to have a similar form in the discovery and dissemination stages -- although it's ownership and control may be different -- whereas its role in integration is probably less marked. It's role in application and teaching could be a matter of some very interesting speculation.

One important aspect of the informal sociotechnical systems of scholarly communication that she highlights, is the research conference. In a section on different types of conferences in different disciplines she draws attention to the operation of good scholarly citizenship, including the reviewing of contributions, and the increasing requirement for contributors to attend the conference to deliver their own papers. (The notion of scholars as a community of citizens is an ancient one, but it continues to inform the discussion of scholarship at every level). Virtual online conferences are not part of the discussion, though it is clear that in some fields at least (learning technology being one of course) these are increasingly being seen as alternatives to face-to-face conferences. Whether the social and disciplinary function of an online conference is identical to that of its face-to-face counterpart, or different in some technologically determined way, is a question for future research. The same research might enquire whether digital scholarship still implies scholarly community, or whether it now defines processes that cross different communities. Borgman refers to the concept of 'invisible colleges', referring to the informal affiliation of scholars from many institutions, often in distinct geographic locations (p. 57), which would seem quite close to what we understand as an online community. Critics of the concept, however, question how far an invisible (or virtual) college can be said to be a structural entity, as opposed to just a description of the processes of communication of its members.

Another important concept she introduces is that of the 'value chain' of scholarship, which are those activities which add value to data by enhancing the flow of information. Publication for example. She gives the example of the way social science and humanities researchers mine the documentation that results from interpersonal conversations and other informal interactions taking place online (p. 125) as an example of an infrastructure that maintains links between data, publications, and interim communication. The prospect of developments in the mining process enabled by new technologies she constructs as 'possibilities for new forms of scholarship'.

(Paradoxically, however, she cites references that suggest that representations of conventional academic publication online are not currently conducive to academic reading. Scholarly readers apparently disaggregate the contents of articles, rather than read them linearly or through associational links. Borgman claims that this is the reason there has been little take-up of hypertextual tools by scholars to date).

Overall she argues that while scholars continue to be rewarded for publication rather than the documentation and management of data, the emergence of a new infrastructure for data is unlikely to occur. What is needed she argues is tools to simplify the capture and sharing of data and policies to encourage scholars to work with them. Her definition of scholarship remains focused on the (mainly natural scientific) researcher, but she considers data generally in terms of relationships within the scholarly communication system, including in the humanities and social sciences, which clearly involves others who may not consider themselves to be researchers directly. However, she believes that the gift exchange model is breaking down, and looks to open access as a replacement model. By open access she does not mean to exclude publishers, who she thinks are still necessary for both the validation of research and the reward of researchers. But she does think that authors, publishers and libraries 'need a new equilibrium'. She looks forward to a situation where 'open repository' is a fundamental component of the public research infrastructure. Also to commons-based approaches for scholarly and creative content, such as are currently being backed by bodies such as UNESCO and the OECD (p.242).

Other changes she envisages, associated with digital objects, include a shift from 'authorship' to 'statements of responsibility', which may involve agents who take responsibility for content without necessarily being credited with the creation of it. Borgman is convinced that digital content will become the primary form for scholarly discourse and that this will produce the need for new trust mechanisms. Trust which has previously been invested in fixity, knowing that a document has not been changed, will in future be sought from other sources, who may be responsible for selection (library, archive, publisher, blogger), or recommendation, as well as authorship.

Whilst some of my colleagues have found this book to be a bit short on discussion in the areas of scholarship that they find most interesting, for example the scholarship of teaching and learning, I thought it was very insightful, well researched, and a good example of scholarship in its own right. It has certainly set me to thinking about the kinds of orientation to knowledge that are implied by our use of the term scholarship. This, as I never get tired of saying, is very centrally a matter of digital literacy, as it combines issues of the modality of representation with those of its associated social capital. Whatever scholarship is now, and whatever it set to be, we can be sure that it will involve communication practices that are variably valued by the communities and institutions in which it takes place. As other, non-academic, communities and institutions encroach on the University, the traditional domain of the scholar, in its business of teaching and research, the literacy practices of scholarship are certain to change. And with them the rewards and status accorded to those who call themselves scholars.

Assistive technology 2: writing with speech

2010-05-07T03:24:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised by how accurate this software (Dragon) is with text. As long as I keep talking reasonably smoothly the program renders what I say reasonably correctly. If I hesitate, or change my mind in mid-utterance, things do start to go wrong a bit.

I'm doubly surprised, given that when I was training it on the texts provided the one I selected was by Dave Barry, who writes very funny articles for a Florida newspaper. Whilst I was supposed to be training program to recognise my voice I was in fact diddling and spluttering with laughter most of the time (aha caught it out with 'giggling' -- so I have just had to train it to recognise me saying ' giggling ', this is probably something to do with my bad pronunciation of the letters gl). Nevertheless, it has still managed to recognise and write down my words more or less as I intend.

I have noticed a tendency for it to leave out odd words like 'the' and 'fall' (that should have been 'for' -- my speech defect again). Maybe these unstressed words get treated as passing noise.

Most of the problems I've had have been navigational, moving the cursor around the text or between windows on my desktop. Theoretically, I can do everything from opening an application, scrolling or moving around in it, writing or searching in it, editing entering deleting, and saving and closing, without having to touch the keyboard with my hands. In practice it's quicker to resort to the keyboard from time to time. The net saving in stress on my neck and shoulders is considerable.

Perhaps most interesting will be the impact this new mode of authoring has on my writer's voice (cleverly it inserted 's without me asking it to, although now I have just spent several minutes trying to get it to write the word apostrophe rather than just do '). I anticipate a new fluency, but with it may well come a little less rigour, both because speaking is inherently less monitored and because the effort of editing with voice commands inclines me to do it less.

Overall my biggest bone of contention is with the printed instruction manual which is so badly glued that all the pages have now fallen out of the spine and I have to continually pick them up off the floor and reassemble them.
Otherwise the dragon is turning out to be an asset.

Assistive technologies for digital scholars

2010-04-29T00:14:00.000-07:00

This is the first post in a new thread in this blog, in which I'm going to report on my experiences with a bunch of new tools I've been given to tackle my RSI problems.

Literacy practices in digital contexts tend to depend pretty heavily on the use of keyboards, and keyboards cause RSI. The tools I've got include: Dragon speech recognition software; a digipad & software for recording and converting handwritten text; a dictaphone & software for recording and converting speech to text. I've also been offered 2 days training in using these tools but I haven't managed to arrange this yet. For the moment I'm seeing how I get on by trial and error.

Trial number 1: the digipad:

I used the digipad to write a page of handwritten text, including a freehand drawing. Here's what it looked like:

My handwriting is quite good (years of teaching with black & whiteboards) but I didn't really expect the software to be able to read it. However, this is how it rendered it in 'Graphics and text' mode:

Pretty good, I thought. The next step was to convert it into a Word document so that I could edit it. The software has an 'export to Word' function. This is what it produced:

Not so good. The text has been put in frames and arbitrarily laid out so that it overlaps the drawing. However, it's still recognisable, and with a bit of editing...

The problem is: how much time am I going to have to spend on the keyboard in order to make this presentable. Here are my track changes in Word:

Quite a few - and it took me about 10 minutes of typing and mouse-moving. Luckily I also have a new ergonomic keyboard which reduces some of the strain on my arms.

So - the end product:

Not bad. It took a bit longer than I would have liked, and I've lost the nose off my drawing, but overall it has been less time at the keyboard than if I had tried to do it in Word from the start and I suspect that the software will get better at recognising my handwriting and I'll start to find some short cuts. So this is definitely an option.

Now to get going with the speech recognition.

Issues for research on Literacy in the Digital University

2010-03-31T15:12:00.000-07:00

Participants at the first two LiDU seminars were asked to think about the kinds of research questions and agendas that might inform future research into literacy in the digital university. Some of them noted their ideas on feedback forms that we gave out for the purpose. This is a short summary of issues that have been flagged so far:

1. Focus at institutional and workplace level:

How can an awareness of digital literacies, particularly issues of power, subversion etc., engage with much narrower, technicist, university agendas?

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

Research into ‘authentic’ workplace practices, i.e: looking at literacies in real workplace compared to courses preparing for those workplaces.

2. Focus on academics & practitioners in higher and further education:

What kinds of digital environment do practitioners create and use? How do particular toolsets influence or reflect work practices, attitudes and beliefs?

Should digital literacies be the aim of professional development courses (e.g. PG certs) for new academic staff?

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?

3. Focus on learners and learning:

Production, assessment and practices in collaborative learning – how to consider e-discussions, collaborative writing projects (wikis), in educational contexts, or certification of what is learned/produced by whom?

Exploring notion of audience with literacy and technology. E.g: the public multiple audiences for students’ work implied by an ‘exhibition’ as opposed to essay or logbook.

Understanding the balance between context-specific & cross-context literacy development.

Assessment frameworks for digital assignments in HE, notions of the ‘essay’, and what counts as ‘criticality’ in digital writing?

‘Ownership’ of the goals of learning and assessment criteria.

Visuality and the assessment of multimodal texts.

4. General research issues:

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?

Further deconstructing the ‘digital native’.

The agenda for the 3rd seminar (at the Open University on October 14th & 15th), which is focusing on methodologies for research on literacy in the digital university, will be informed by our discussion of these issues over the next six months.

The Glasgow plenary - a microcosm of the question?

2010-03-02T01:50:00.000-08:00

When Eileen Scanlon said, halfway through yesterday's plenary session, "I'm confused - I don't know what digital literacy means any more!" she probably spoke for more than a few people in the room. Over the day we had seen the term used to refer to an increasingly broad range of learner capabilities and activities, and institutional competences and practices. "This is why we called our project 'learning literacies in a digital age', said Lou McGill, from the LLiDA project.

After the enthusiasm for the series topic that was generated at the Edinburgh seminar last October, this could have been a bit disillusioning, but in fact I think it brings us closer to one of the issues that motivated the idea of a seminar series on literacy in the digital university in the first place. Whilst some in the room may have been coming to the conclusion that 'literacy' is one of those humpty-dumpty words that means whatever the speaker wants it to mean, and should give way to some more pragmatic concept capable of being translated into pedagogical action, others had already demonstrated that it is capable of a precise interpretation.

Mary Hamilton and Candice Satchwell had shown, in their morning session, a framework which they had used in their 'literacies for learning' project to characterise the practices of the FE students they observed. It was quite detailed, and contained slots for attributes such as: audience, purpose, mode, technology, etc. (I'll hopefully get their slides up on the LIDU website before very long).

Their talk followed an equally principled one from Helen Betham, (utterly undiminished by having to be delivered from Devon, via Skype, with jet lag, in the aftermath of a car accident). In Helen's talk the concept of literacy was aligned with actions for developing lifelong learners: providing authentic tasks and contexts, making explicit community practices of meaning-making, using knowledge practices as resources for learning etc. (This quite detailed paper is already on the LIDU website).

Both these talks seemed to know pretty well what they meant by literacy. The difference between them, was in the way it was theorised: in one from a disciplinary perspective; and in the other from a practice perspective. The disciplinary approach, drawing on a tradition of research, is concerned with what is, or is not, meant when a term like 'literacy' is being applied to observations of communication practices. The practice perspective, drawing on a sensitivity to policy and the interests of stakeholders, is concerned with what is or is not justified by the use of the concept.

The same difference was occasionally detectable in the contributions of our discussants too: Allison MacKenzie making practice-informed points about the need to breach the boundaries between domains of professionalised 'learner support' (information literacy, writing, study skills etc.), and Caroline Haythornthwaite promoting a socio-technical understanding of the way that literacy practices evolve. (Also on the LIDU website soon!)

So we had at least two conversations going on at the same time, and this is is the microcosm of our over-arcing question that I'm referring to.
When we set out to develop a research agenda for literacy in the digital university we first face the question "how can we talk together - the people who think they know how practices work, and the people who think they know what kind of practices are needed?"

In the next seminar, in October in Milton Keynes we're going to approach this through the lens of methodology. By talking about how to observe, record, and make sense of practices we can hopefully start to talk about research that makes sense to all of us.

Materiality, literacy ...and my Glasgow seminar pack

2010-02-26T06:30:00.000-08:00

Whilst I was spending an hour (until 7.30pm) yesterday, putting papers into seminar packs for Monday's symposium in Glasgow, I fell to reflecting on two themes:

1) Is this what I'm being paid a senior lecturer's salary for?

2) why does a seminar on digital literacy need seminar packs?

On the first theme, suffice it to say that it seems to make sense in the odd logic of university finance that if there is not enough money in a budget to buy secretarial support then the work must be done by an academic paid at several times the same rate.

On the second theme, I think the answer is that we probably don't need seminar packs - the programme and all the papers are on the web and lots of the participants will have networked laptops with them and half of them probably prefer reading off the screen anyway. The truth is that I LIKE seminar packs and would probably have put one together for this event even if the ESRC had specifically told me not to.

What I like is the materiality of them: the shiny white cover, the feel of the A4 paper in my hand, the little inside pocket where the sheets fit, the stapling, the little cuts you get from the edges of the paper if you're not careful (well maybe not that last one). For me, the embodied nature of the literacy event (it is face-to-face after all) demands an appropriately materialised agenda. As a quote from Bolter that I found in an article on the Kairos website has it: the technology of writing = the sum of the technical and social interactions that constitute a writing system. The technical interactions constituting the 'writing system' that is our seminar (presentations, note-taking, tweets etc.) include giving each other pieces of paper (business cards, expenses forms, seminar packs) as well.

...and here is the seminar pack in question - what a pity you can't see it in all its materiality (come to the seminar!)

LLiDA presentation at next LiDU seminar

2010-02-22T01:21:00.000-08:00

Helen Beetham's paper for the 2nd LiDU seminar at Glasgow Caledonian on March 1st: 'Beyond Competence: digital literacies as knowledge practices, and implications for learner development' (co-writtten with Alison Littlejohn and Lou McGill) should serve as a kind of keynote for the day.

The paper, which draws on the work of the JISC-funded project 'Learning Literacies in a Digital Age' (LLiDA), picks up on a number of themes that other contributors will be elaborating on later in the day: the 'participative' multimodal and agentic literacy practices that characterise learners' everyday lives (Mary Hamilton and colleagues from the ESRC-funded 'Literacies for Learning in Further Education' project); the challenging of assessing student work developed through a range of media (Sian Bayne and Jenn Ross on Edinburgh University's MA in Elearning programme); the role of knowledge practices in the creation of academic identities (Mary Lea and myself from the OU); knowledge practices in employment contexts (presentations from Dane Lukic and Elena Golovushkina of GCU); and the role of competence frameworks for information literacy (Alison Mackenzie of SCONUL).

The day promises to give Alison and Caroline Haythornthwaite, the discussants, quite a bit to get their teeth into.

Details of venue, programme etc. can be found at: http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/lidu/p4_2.shtml#ou-content (please contact me r.goodfellow@open.ac.uk) if you are not already in our list and would like to attend.

Blogging the higher education leaders

2010-02-11T07:56:00.000-08:00

I found the task of maintaining a live blog of the conference physically difficult (low lighting, lots of room changes, occasional connection failures, my own RSI problems) and rhetorically perplexing (who was I doing it for, what was the purpose, how should I avoid doing exactly the same as the other 'official' bloggers?).

(If you look at the Cloudworks record of the conference in a new browser window the following will make more sense)

Patrick McAndrew's Extra Content is an account of what Martin Bean was saying. I was sitting next to Patrick typing pretty much the same, but I didn't post it directly because I could feel a critique coming on and wanted to interpose some comments of my own. There wasn't time to do this and get down what he was saying, at the same time, and maybe I wasn't supposed to be interpreting, just reporting. I wonder if there are experienced live bloggers skilled at doing both at the same time?). I wrote my account in a Word document, intending to copy/paste from it into the blog later. Patrick has not worried about correcting his typos (he might go back and do this later of course), whereas I was constantly backspacing to make corrections. At the end I decided not to bother to upload my version of the speech as content, but to save it for even later (and elsewhere), when I could use it to examine what MB was actually saying, behind the jokes and the rhetoric.

The Discussion boxes below the Extra Content are Patrick's record of the questions that the audience asked Martin. They look like a different type of content, but in fact they just ran on from the speech and it's simply the software that makes them look like a different kind of record. Again, I wrote much the same, only in the same Word doc that I used to record the speech.

At a later session, Patrick and I agreed to share roles. Have a look at the Dragon's Den session. I wrote a more detailed account (in the Extra Content space) of what the 'pitchers' were saying (and here I didn't feel a need to comment), and Patrick concentrated on using the Discussion boxes to record the questions the 'Dragons' and the audience put to each pitcher, and their answers. It makes slightly more sense in the way the page is laid out, because the session was a bit more interactive, following the pitches.

There's still an anomaly where both of us have recorded the vote, however, me in the content space where it is read before the Q & A account that preceded it. All this is assuming a reader would be going down the page in normal reading fashion of course.

We tried another approach for the final session - a talk by Susan Greenfield. Patrick recorded the talk in the Extra Content space, and I simultaneously made my own subjective comments in the Discussion boxes. The page that represents this does not, of course, capture the simultaneity, but it does at least represent 2 different styles of comment in the two differently formatted spaces.

So what? I'll have to think a bit more about this. I had a lot of questions about the point of this exercise, and I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who feels they can make any kind of textual or circumstancial sense about the event, out of reading what we produced. As a new academic literacy practice live blogging still needs to explain itself I think.

Other than that, though... here is a bit of visual representation produced by 2 artists who were working on a wall throughout conference...

The Renegade New Literacy Critic!

2010-02-11T02:34:00.000-08:00

Here I am at the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education summit in London, live blogging in blatant defiance of my own earlier critiques of this kind of intrusive practice! This event is being blogged officially by several people, so I'm using this space to record my unofficial views...

The conference is about agility in HE, symbolised like this (honestly - whose idea was that?):

...and Ewart Woodridge the host is being very agile in dealing with the continuing absence of keynote speaker Martin Bean, who is still stuck in a car somewhere. He has encouraged the audience of 260 to explore the blogging environment for themselves. (I've got some things to say in a future post about the confused role for blogging in the context of an event like this)

Now Martin Bean has arrived and given his usual dynamic (and funny) speech. His overall theme is that HE institutions will have to meet the needs of informal, critical, mobile and engaged learners who have the resoources of the world's experts, mentors, and free content providers, to select from. (See Patrick McAndrew's live blog of the speech - which he posted while I was busy making notes - most of which are the same as what he has written- so now I don't see any point in posting mine).

Now I'm in a breakout group discussing the relationship between research rigour and impact. Blogging it here. (..actually finding live blogging quite difficult - my instinct is to stop and think before I publish something - but my role is to produce a record of what is being said - and sometimes I just don't understand what someone has just said - and I find myself writing in disjointed phrases like this - and losing my concentration as I go back to correct typos etc...)

(here they are discussing the leadership implications of the rigour vs impact challenge while I work out how to upload images from from my new mobile phone...)

..now it's lunch

Seminar No.2 Glasgow March 1st

2010-02-07T01:19:00.000-08:00

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 .

Digital Scholarship – initial thoughts

2010-01-17T05:30:00.000-08:00

My interest in the ideas around Digital Scholarship has been prompted firstly by a debate on the subject that is going on within the Open University, and secondly by the apparent overlap this issue has with our ‘Literacy in the Digital University’ discussions.

The OU’s strategic interest in Scholarship in general reflects the new currency of a set of issues that Boyer (Scholarship Reconsidered) was discussing 20 years ago – about defining, valuing, managing and rewarding work that academic employees do that isn’t classifiable as ‘research’. The core problem is the subordination, both in the employment practices of institutions and the minds of scholars themselves, of teaching compared to research. Despite the rhetoric about valuing teaching, the experience of successive research assessment exercises has shown that research trumps teaching every time as far as rewards and academic status are concerned. We can make as much noise as we like about the necessary synergy between teaching and research, but in the current climate of financial famine, the prospects for parity don’t look good. As Durham’s VC Chris Higgins says ‘research-led teaching’ is ‘more expensive in terms of people and equipment’ and institutions that are research-led (like, er… Durham) clearly need a bigger share of available funds.

The OU is aware that it is primarily a ‘teaching university’ (although it is keen to cling to its mid-table position in the research championship with the hope of maybe elbowing its way into the playoffs for promotion to the premiership at the next REF). It takes the status of teaching staff seriously and recognises the importance of teaching-led research (known elsewhere as the ‘Scholarship of Teaching and Learning’) through its rewards and promotion systems. The importance of digital developments to pedagogy in a distance teaching institution is obvious, and ‘digital scholarship’ therefore figures quite prominently in the overall scholarship strategy. However, it’s not clear yet exactly what digital scholarship means, and whether it can legitimise activities that are digital but neither disciplinary ‘genesis research’ nor SOTL.

For example, there are a number of things that academic employees do that don’t class as either teaching or research. For example: reading around their subject area for personal enlightenment, organising and summarising literature, data, or other sources for ease of reference, writing articles in non-specialist publications, speaking to the media, blogging, working for public bodies, advising other organisations, being ‘public intellectuals’ in a variety of forums etc. Activities like these are regarded by many scholars as central to their academic roles and identities, and as key elements in the exercise of academic autonomy. In the past, in the OU, they were the kind of interests that we were given ‘study leave’ in order to pursue: academic work of our own choosing, geared to academic objectives of our own devising. However, in the more managed culture of today’s university, scrutiny is being brought to bear on the outputs of such scholarship, in an attempt to ensure that they conform to institutional priorities, as well as personal academic ones. Where such outputs contribute to research assessment, or where they relate to the production of teaching material, assurance is straightforward. But where they are primarily expressions of an individual scholar’s interest, and their fit to institutional strategy is not immediately apparent, they are suspect. They are not scholarship any more.

Unless, perhaps, they are digital. One sometimes feels, in a technology-dominated university, that all matters digital seem to be in line with institutional strategy, whereas some matters disciplinary or academic are not. And this is where I come to the overlap with the concerns of the LiDU seminars, because one of the points of applying a ‘literacies’ perspective to the university in a digital age is to try and unearth value systems underlying the communication practices that are being privileged. The issue of how digital scholarship will be recognised, and rewarded, and the capacity built for it across the higher education sector, also raises questions about the relation individual institutions will have to their scholars, to their disciplines, and to their teaching of the habits and practices of disciplinary scholarship to their students. For me, a key question is whether the term ‘scholar’ continues to define someone who has a particular kind of orientation to knowledge, or whether it will simply come to apply to anyone who is engaged in a given set of knowledge-related activities. If the former, then digital scholarship has a task on its hands – to assert a distinctively academic orientation to knowledge in a medium where any message is ‘susceptible to being ‘received and reprocessed in unexpected ways’, as Castells puts it, messages like ‘bottle[s] drifting in the ocean of global communication’ (2009 p.66)!

More in a future post, particularly drawing on Borgman’s Scholarship in the Digital Age . In the meantime, for anyone interested, my colleague Nick Pearce’s blog discusses Boyer’s categories of knowledge-building: ‘discovery’, ‘integration’, ‘application’, and ‘teaching’, in terms of implications for digital scholarship.

Curse you Blog! You've distracted me from my work again...

2009-12-17T06:39:00.000-08:00

This image is from Martin Weller's prezi on Digital Scholarship Research at: http://prezi.com/metj2aipx3iq/

I reckon he got the idea from our LiDU logo (see left).

Out of interest, and thinking about Helen's earlier comment about kids searching for images rather than documents, I was wondering if there is an application one can use to upload an image and get information about its provenance, eg: in case of the above, who the painter was, when it was done etc.

Someone asked the same Q on Yahoo Answers a year ago and got recommended this: http://tineye.com/login

It still exists but you have to register to use it, and I've already been distracted from this really interesting consultants' contract I'm supposed to be drafting quite long enough!

Problematic digital literacy practices: no.4

2009-12-07T04:07:00.000-08:00

I've written about (some might say whinged about!) certain aspects of digital communication activities that intersect unconfortably with more familiar academic practices several times before in this blog. For example, I described the impact of social reporting on my experience of a face-to-face seminar about personal trajectories of practice; I reported on the minor dispute around the use of Twitter amongst participants in the first LiDU seminar; and I bewailed the elevation of public blogs over private community spaces as fora for the discussion of teaching and learning-related issues.

I call these problematic digital literacy practices (PDLPs) because they disrupt my expectations of academic communication. And here is number 4 in the series:

A colleague (not the same one I fingered in the 'lessons from the chalk front' post, who I had to apologise to BTW - even though no-one else knows who he is) sent me an email saying there was a discussion about literacies and technologies going on in an environment called Cloudworks. When I went to see I found a strand entitled 'Literacy' with a few cryptic posts emanating from a discussion that a few people had apparently had somewhere else, which included a link to a slideshow that someone had done which also had 'Literacy'in the title, and some papers that mentioned 'Literacy', but nothing that looked to me like an actual discussion about Literacy and no references to any of the work that I recognise as being foundational to a discussion of literacy in digital environments. (Well there was one reference to Gunther Kress's well-known point that the English word 'Literacy' has no equivalent in most most European languages).

I sent a post to the discussion with a link to the LiDU website & blog and subsequently had a couple of exchanges with John Cook, followed by a series of email alerts containing lists of bullet points from people's slides some of which mentioned literacy but all of which were equally cryptic owing to the fact I wasn't actually part of the discussion, just getting a kind of echo from somewhere. It seems to have gone quiet now.

I want to be clear that I'm not criticising the discussion these colleagues were having. I'm sure it was highly principled - I might have criticised it if I had understood what they were talking about, but lurking around the edges getting glimpses of other people's slides is not good enough grounds for comment. My colleague said I should start my own 'cloud' about Literacy in that environment, but that's not the point. I was trying to join in a 'discussion' I had had my attention drawn to, but it wasn't a discussion, it was the remnants of someone else's interaction. Been and gone.

It was problematic for me as an academic because it left me with the sense that other people were appropriating the term 'Literacy' in a way that I was unable to call them to account for. That's as may be, and it's not a specifically digital issue, but what is specifically digital, is the aura of audience that these environments promote, even though there may be little of rhetorical substance actually being communicated. My colleague told me that Cloudworks has a user base of over 20,000 people internationally. But, even if that is so, why would I want to communicate with 20,000 people in bullet points, when the issue is one that demands sustained debate and the sharing of quite a lot of background knowledge? Crowds aren't wise just because they are crowds.

I would call this, and the other PDLPs, literacy issues, because they combine questions around the types of texts that are involved, with questions about the kinds of social values that these texts carry. Social media in academic settings support academic literacy practices to the extent that they promote argument and reflection on argument, not just by virtue of the number of people they claim to be able to engage.

Painful lessons from the digital chalk-front

2009-11-24T01:16:00.000-08:00

Following up some earlier musings about the relation between 'new' social media practices and 'old' academic practices. (I will stop referring to these as 'new' and 'old' from hereon as I fear it makes me look like a relic)....

A colleague just sent me an email drawing my attention to a twitterstream and blog involving students on a course I'm currently directing. Against my better judgement I went and looked to see what they are saying, and yes - it is critical and I wish I hadn't because it sent me home in a bad mood.

Why did my colleague think it a good idea to point out to me that students were complaining about the course in public social media arenas?

The kinds of things they were saying are the kinds of things that students quite often say when they are getting frustrated by feelings of lack of progress, lack of support, lack of peer participation etc. They criticise the course design, the activity (or apparent lack of) of tutors and course director, the university assessment regulations etc. I have a lot of symathy with them, and when these kinds of issues are raised in the course community spaces (discussion forums, emails) I always take them seriously and do my best to respond positively.

So, why do I feel so negative about about having someone outside the course community point out that these criticisms are going on out there in netspace as well? More to the point, why I am so absolutely disinclined to get in and answer the criticisms out there?

Because I guess I think of the course as a community, that inhabits a shared space, and of the public social networks as somehow outside that space. And I feel bitter that the work I put in inside that space somehow becomes insignificant as soon as someone else goes out there and makes our problems public, inviting (as I see it) casual comment and fleeting attention from people who may have nothing invested in solving the problems and every interest in enjoying any controversy that results from them.

This isn't what my colleague or the students who are blogging are doing, of course. They are engaged in generating a different kind of community. But why should this community be more significant, more worthy of attention than the one that the course has been developing over 4 years of quite intense negotiation amongst course developers, tutors and successive cohorts of students?

Is this a microcosm of the tension we have been discussing - between the academy (with its hidebound communities, fossilised values and restrictive practices) and the 'liberated' net-savvy learner with their fast-shifting focus and opportunistic grabbing of attention wherever they can find it?

Sian Bayne's uncanny talk at the Edinburgh seminar

2009-11-13T09:05:00.000-08:00

Sian's talk at the Edinburgh seminar 'Uncanny' Literacies - Assessing the new texts made me with my 'literacies perspective' feel a bit like an old-fashioned headless ghost roaming a deserted lecture room clanking its chains and going 'whoooo' at the data projector.

I've heard Sian talk quite convincingly about this notion of the 'uncanny' before, in the context of Second Life, which is a bit spooky and dreamlike (at least at first), here she seemed to be using the expression to refer in a more general way to feelings of unfamiliarity and uneasiness around certain digital communication practices, which I found a bit less convincing as a trope. In fact it was noticeable how readily people in the seminar subsequently took up and recycled the term in jokes and asides, whenever they wanted to allude to some general quality of unexpectedness in a situation or role, whether it was associated with real uneasiness or not. In the end I wasn't sure that the words 'uncanny' and 'literacies' added much to each other - in some ways they almost seemed to be in a kind of conceptual opposition, the one waving excitedly at an unknown space which is thrilling just because it is unknown, the other gravely summoning up the illusion of understanding and control.

On the other hand, I thought that where she took up the question of the 'spatial' metaphor for the internet, implied by our (Mary Lea and my) use of the term 'technologies as sites of practice', contrasting it with the notion of a 'lifestream' made up of flows of 'volatile texts', she opened up an important issue which I'm still trying to get my head round. The 'lifestream' idea was illustrated with examples from the course on digital culture that Sian and Jen Ross have been running as part of Edinburgh's MA in e-learning. I as understand it, a lifestream is an aggregation of digital sources relating to interests and activities that participants in the course have engaged in. Some of these sources may be 'fixed' (eg: blog posts) but others may be dynamic (eg: feeds from other sites that the participant regards as pertinent in some way). A lifestream is therefore subject to constant change, which Sian interprets as a constant re-making of the identity(ies) of the owner.

Aside from the questions Sian herself raised about how these volatile texts can be assessed (in the more mundane though crucial academic context of the course), issues are raised here about the kinds of social action that a lifestream and its re-making of identities might take part in. I guess this was probably the main point of Sian's talk as far as literacy is concerned, but I'm not sure at the moment where this takes my own thinking. She also raised taxing issues about the role of temporality in literacy practices, and about the 'image-like' nature of textual archives like twitterstreams, and implications for reading from them. At one point she said that the students didn't view twitter as 'scholarly', and there was no reason why they should, but I wonder whether that is always going to be the case? At another point in the course, students are engaged in what they call 'virtual ethnographies' of internet communities, which they can represent using an application of their choice. The scholarly and the informal surely are blended together here?

The other seminar participants were certainly engaged by Sian's talk, and the questions and discussion went on almost as long as the presentation itself. I was interested in questions raised about who is represented in a course population which is able and happy to take on the uncertainty and chaos of digital culture as a topic of study - and how lessons from this kind of brave and exciting experiment in pedagogy might be applicable to the more personally threatened learners often found in widening participation contexts.

'Why talk about texts'?

2009-11-13T00:12:00.000-08:00

This was blogged in response to Robin Goodfellow's post on the Literacies site and I hope can also be read there. I agree with Andy that new technologies bring forward new ways of expressing academic ideas – and maybe we need to use terms like critical, reflexive, evidence-based, rhetorical etc to describe what is valued about academic ideas, and/or acknowledge that traditions of how ideas are valued and validated can change as in the oral-to-written PhD. I think it will be in discipline and micro-discipline communities that new practices emerge, become visible, and come to be valued, i.e. become part of a social practice and historical tradition. I do also agree with Robin, though, that use of the term 'affordance' is not always helpful – again my personal preference would be to focus on knowledge practice. Ong, I think, talks about writing as both a technology and a practice. In this vein, 'text' is also a slippery term - it is used to mean both specifically written or printed communications (communications using a particular technology), and communication of many kinds viewed through a particular analytical lens (hence 'multimedia text').

To get back to the practices, the 2007 British Library report into the information behaviour of school-age researchers has this on p.46: 'About 40% of UK schools found content in the learning directory by using a Search engine image search... Further about half of US (47%) and EU universities (47%) accessed the learning directory using a Search engine image search.' This is not young people in their personal, social practice but engaged in formal learning contexts. And actually if you have some idea what you are looking for, selecting from images (even images of text) can be faster and more accurate.

There is absolutely no doubt that academic practices are changing - in fact text and what we can do with it is probably changing faster than other modes are being adopted - for me the question is how we reframe in the new knowledge media landscape what is valuable about academic modes of communication.

Next seminar - Glasgow March 1st 2010

2009-11-12T04:50:00.000-08:00

We've fixed the date and venue for the next seminar: Monday March 1st 2010 at Glasgow Caledonian University. Places are limited and some of the people who came to the Edinburgh seminar want to come again, so if anyone reading this would like to claim a place please contact me (Robin Goodfellow) at r.goodfellow@open.ac.uk.

We're still discussing the programme - when we've finalised it, I'll post details on our ordinary dull website (see Doug Clow's blog) at http://lidu.open.ac.uk/

'Literacies and Technologies' or 'Why I think we need to keep talking'

2009-11-06T07:42:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about the question Mary H raised about why literacies people should want to talk to technologies people. From a personal perspective, my own interest in literacies comes from a deeply held belief in the central nature of language in learning, particularly in HE contexts, where to be a successful student means engaging effectively in a range of highly nuanced literacy practices across different contexts. The social and contextual nature of language in use is fundamental to understanding literacy as a social practice. So why am I interested in technologies? In short, because any exploration of academic literacies always involves, at some level, an understanding of and possibly more detailed exploration of technologies. It’s probably true that we’ve never been able to understand literacies without looking at technologies e.g. pens, pencils, paper, blackboards, and indeed literacy theorists such as Brian Street and David Barton have, historically, paid attention to these. I’m not sure they named them as ‘technologies’ though and in addition older technologies often became ‘black-boxed’, so familiar to us that we didn’t even notice them as technologies at all. However, this doesn’t pertain to the present situation for two reasons. First, because a whole industry has grown up around the use of, let’s call it ICT in HE, driven at first largely by software companies looking for emerging markets. Second, because in tandem, new professional groups, broadly termed learning technologists are now involved in actively and visibly harnessing a range of technologies and applications for learning. You can no longer talk about learning in HE without paying attention to technologies. For people like me who are primarily interested in learning in institutional contexts, and take a literacies lens to do this, I cannot engage in literacies and learning without paying attention to technologies and the implications of their use for practice.

The question I am asking myself now though is, I think, a more empirical and /or methodological one. How is my literacies approach similar or different from my colleagues who are also examining issues of learning and the Net Generation /Digital Natives? This has been brought very much to the fore for me having read two papers recently, where the authors invited my comments. One was from Laura Czerniewicz from the University of Cape Town and the other was from our own Chris Jones (IET/OU). Laura and her colleagues are drawing on Bernstein and the notion of boundaries in their research on students’ experiences of using ICT. Chris and his group draw on sociological concepts of structure and agency, Actor Network Theory and Activity Theory in reporting on their research. In our publications from the Digital Literacies in Higher Education http://digital-literacies.open.ac.uk/research Sylvia Jones and I draw primarily on the literacies framing but also Actor Network theory and multi-modal theory. What is really interesting for me though is that through these different lens there are remarkable similarities in terms of our findings, even if the ways in which we choose to articulate them through our own theoretical and methodological lens are on the surface rather different. The commonality between our findings lies in the fact that we all highlight the significance of the institution in framing and understanding students’ practices around the use of technologies in learning contexts. As a literacies person I admit to feeling a bit troubled by this because I want to hold on to the literacies perspective and everything it buys me ideologically and epistemologically. I don’t want to lose the focus on textual practice and what that can tell us about issues of meaning making and power and authority in learning contexts. On the other hand I value this coming together with technologists and the different perspectives they bring. I hope they feel the same!

If Literacy is social practice why do we need to talk about Texts?

2009-11-05T02:26:00.000-08:00

I gave a talk at the OU yesterday called 'Literacy in the Digital University' (good title eh?) at which the audience was a mix of people from learning technologies and language & communication backgrounds. It was basically a development of the talk that Mary Lea and I did at the Edinburgh seminar - the slides and paper/notes are here (paper/notes) and (slides).

I took the opportunity to rehearse a critique of some of the discourses of transformation through technology that are prevalent in our university, through its distance learning practices and its connections to the wider 'learning 2.0' community. I tried to counterpose a discourse of academic values and the public mission of universities, using a 'literacies' perspective to look through the technological practices at the social relations which underlie them.

I used a slightly adapted version of Helen's 'Academic Values and Web cultures: points of rupture' table that she based a discussion on at the Edinburgh seminar (http://kn.open.ac.uk/LiDU/Seminar1/Beetham_text.doc) to point up how much we don't know about 'Net' communities, as opposed to 'Academy' ones, and how much we don't know about the potential impact of 'Net' cultures of knowledge on the historical mission of universities to educate in a broad, critical and ideologically-aware sense.

I was a bit surprised myself championing the rather conservative cause of preserving the Academy's practices against the radical (and youthful) iconoclasm of the Net - what would my 1968 self have thought about that I wonder?

But what gave me most cause for thought were some questions of Mary H's ontological kind (see previous post) that came at the end, chiefly from my Learning Technologist colleagues. In particular: If Literacy is 'social practice' why talk about Texts? Why not just talk about social practice?

I think people resist the notion that practices around learning with technologies can be adequately described in terms of textual practice. Partly this is a hangover from the intuitive idea that text really means print, but it also reflects the view that digital communication is real life interaction and can no more be encapsulated in its textual residues than a face to face meeting can be recreated in all its complex interactions from its minutes.

My answer at the time (helped by Mary L) was that we aren't just talking about social practice in general, because we are focusing on practices in the university, which are uniquely defined in terms of texts. This is what a Literacy perspective brings to the better understanding of teaching and learning in these contexts. But as Mary H points out - it is always going to be the case that what we currently call texts are what define practice in higher education? As HE gets more intermingled with other social fields (industry, commerce, the professions, popular culture - see Mandelson's 'Higher Ambitions' framework) and as practice-oriented communication becomes more mutimodal and time-shifted and otherwise dispersed won't the notion of text as a defining characteristic of university practice become less and less relevant?

Well - it will be interesting to see how the 'outputs' of digital scholarship shape up. My money says they'll look pretty textual, even if they are digital.

..and if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck..

More thoughts: Some Ontological Issues

2009-11-03T03:25:00.000-08:00

The seminar confronted me with some ontological issues about the nature of literacy texts and practices. I position myself as a scholar within the New Literacy Studies, with user knowledge of ICT but not research knowledge so this is the first time I have really sat down to think some of these things through. I am sure a lot of thinking has already been done so pointers and references would be welcome if I am going over old ground. But I would find it useful to have some explicit review of these issues even if there are good existing answers to them that people have thought through.

1 The virtual world often, paradoxically, points up features of the real, material world of print literacy that we have perhaps overlooked in the past rather than changing them. An example is the boundaries of a text (a paragraph, a page, a book, a set of volumes?); how texts change over time, their durability, stability, the contributions of multiple authors, the work they do within social (e.g. legal or medical) systems. How do new technologies change the nature and boundaries of what we have in the past called “the text” and are alternative labels like “document” or “artefact” more useful when we are talking across print and digital domains?

2 Is it misleading to try and apply old metaphors of communication to the new virtual environment such as writing/reading or speaking/listening… are these concepts tied to particular technologies and material circumstances e.g we say that a book “speaks” to us but it doesn’t really – unless it is audio taped. Do we need some new language terms to describe what we are doing in a virtual world (some are already developing – e.g. could you blog offline??)

3 I don't think is useful to characterise printed texts as inert and fixed in contrast to digital texts that are interactive, “speak back to us” and are changed by the machines we type them into. Rather might we think about the "virtuality" of printed texts as well - as objects that change and move and interact with the reader? In particular, are approaches from Science and Technology Studies, including Actor Network Theory, helpful in bridging our understandings of literacy and digital worlds? These emphasise distributed agency (and authorship) co-ordinated action through networks of things and people. This seems to fit easily with digital communication environments, but how about traditional print and oral interactions?

4 When we make comparisons between print and digital media perhaps we take quite contrasting genres as prototypical texts of each medium (e.g. the novel v the spreadsheet) in order to point up the differences. However, there are parallels with each of these genres in the other medium so may be there are more continuities than we think and it would be good to look across different genres and see how they are expressed as the same or different in print and digital environments.

Amy thoughts and comments welcome!!

Thoughts from the first seminar

2009-11-03T02:59:00.000-08:00

It has taken me a while to put these thoughts together and post them up but I hope the seminar is still recent enough that they will make sense. I have been following the other postings with interest.

First, I think we missed the opportunity at this first event to introduce ourselves properly and the different academic communities we identify with. I especially thought about this in relation to Gunther when he introduced himself as an “outsider” to both digital research and literacy studies. I understand this to mean that he identifies himself mainly as a social semiotician who is concerned with meaning making through a variety of media and representational systems – whether visual, sound, movement or number. Language based representations are just a sub-set of these and interact and co-exist with the others. We did not take up this challenge to think about multi-modality and how it operates within the academy, how different modes are privileged by different technologies of communication. This might be something we could pursue in subsequent events.

Second thought (raised by Gunther Kress) – it is important to keep in mind the top-down decisions in relation to universities and technologies that are driving the changes that we are documenting – global marketing of HE, changes in view of the role and mission of HE, integration of HE and FE in England etc. industrial pressures to develop new technologies and so on.

It is also important to keep checking our assumptions and making comparisons across settings, since technological conditions and affordances are very different in different contexts internationally. Even within the UK, the working, teaching and learning contexts of Further and Higher Education differ significantly from one another.

Finally, Sian’s presentation, in particular, highlighted for me the significance and challenge of developing forms of assessment that are appropriate to the technologies the students are now using.

I left the first seminar ruminating on the question of why we all would want an exchange of views between IT and literacy people? What do we each expect to get out of such an exchange? For Literacy Studies people I think it is to better understand how reading and writing are changing and what this means for the academy, not just in terms of practices but also academic and scholarly values because the idea of a university is so centrally bound up with traditional print literacy. For the technology people – the purpose might be to better understand the expectations, practices and associated identities that staff and students bring with them to new technological practices in the academy. Also the techniques of micro-analysis of practices and events that literacy people bring to the table could be of use.

Lit vs TEL - a response to Robin

2009-10-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

This is more or less copied from my own blog where I posted it several days ago, so apologies for duplication.

Robin makes some good points about the clash of the 'literacies in learning' and the 'technologies in learning' frameworks, and I'm always in favour of surfacing these tensions. We spend far too much time in e-learning trying to pretend it doesn't matter whether we're hardened instrumentalists or dyed in the wool social theorists, and it won't do.

However, I'm not sure ANY of the presentations I heard at the event, with the possible exception of (some bits of) Chris Jones' summing up (hope Chris is blogging this), fitted the charge that we 'simply utilised the term 'literacies' as a descriptor for different kinds of technical practices'. Personally I avoided the term 'literacy' as much as possible in that company, recognising that it has already been comprehensively theorised and to some extent therefore claimed by academics working in a very particular domain. I prefer to talk about knowledge practices, i.e the expression of some presumed personal capacities, preferences and habits in particular situations (I'm interested in the practices and situations, I'm not at all sure how one goes about accessing or even very usefully defining the personal capacities otherwise). By knowledge practice I do not at all mean 'signing up to follow someone's tweets' as a single action in a particular technology-enabled space, but I probably do mean the bundle of actions I perform using twitter and the meanings they have for me, and for others involved.

One problem may be that just as the literacy people are making certain assumptions about 'their' frameworks being widely shared, we too are making certain assumptions about 'our' technology being widely used. For example, putting a twitterstream live behind a speaker is for me so 'normal' that I didn't even stop to think that there might be sensibilities to consider. For any given f2f event of that kind I expect there to be an accompanying 'event' taking place on twitter (not a 'representation' of the 'real' event but another, parallel event). This 'other' is not even necessarily less interesting or engaging than the first (see http://www.daveswhiteboard.com/archives/2874 on the great keynote/harshtag debate - and twestivals, tweetmeets and flashmobs are examples of an originary twitter event breaking out into the 'real'). And bringing the two events into closer proximity through projection has evolved (I now realise) as a means of dealing with several social issues, e.g. exclusion (people not tweeting can at least take part vicariously in that event), respect (tweeting cannot take place behind anyone's back), interaction (questions can be taken from 'the floor' on a much broader basis), equality (people lacking the confidence to speak in public can tweet in public) etc etc.

I was frustrated in Edinburgh (for reasons not at all the fault of the University or our lovely hosts) that I couldn't get online to twitter, and so could not involve the many people outside of the physical situation who I knew were interested in it. In fact, to confess my own technology predelictions, I didn't feel properly 'there' as a result. Had I been tweeting I would not have been failing to engage properly in 'the real': on the contrary, I find tweeting an event for others at least as reflective as writing notes, with the added advantage of bringing other people's reactions and ideas into the live situation.

Before we have appropriated a technology to a personal and social practice, the technology itself seems to be the point (this is Robin's perspective). To the outsider, whether by choice or exclusion, the technology IS the practice. So for my 3-yr old writing is pens. To the insider, the technology is only visible when it becomes a problem (can't get online). The social practices that Robin found objectionable did need surfacing and exploring and negotiating, but to suggest that they were 'simply' technical practices, and that the technical was hijacking the social, is an equally one-sided perspective.

The great LiDU Twitter debate!

2009-10-23T08:01:00.001-07:00

Chris Jones put another spoke in the LiDU first seminar wheel (see post Tuesday, 20 October 2009) when he put the #LiDU twitterstream (http://twapperkeeper.com/lidu/) up on the projector at the beginning of the plenary session and claimed it was another kind of representation of the seminar. Some of the audience complained that it was not a representation of the seminar as they had experienced it and that it was distracting for those who were trying to have a discussion , which it was, as a debate then arose between those who were tweeting, and those who weren't and didn't see why such commenting had to be displayed for everyone else to read.

My own contribution to the debate was to point out that we had spent several minutes discussing a practice that was relatively peripheral to the ongoing discussion, and that this was a good illustration of the way new digital practices have a tendency to highjack educational agendas. However, I made the mistake of characterising the tweeters in our midst as 'digital natives' with the implication that the rest of us were their parents! This was not well received by at least one of the twitterati!

I've commented before on the way that 'social reporting' activities can disrupt face-to-face interactions and distort the relationships they afford (July 7th http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.com/2009/07/social-reporting-as-new-literacy.html). This seemed to me to be another, albeit less problematic, example of the same thing. Having said that I have to admit to being not totally displeased when we got an email from Laura Czerniewicz in Cape Town later saying she'd been reading the #LiDU tweets and wanted a copy of the paper that we referred to in our presentation! Clearly twitter has its uses, even for digital dinosaurs....

LIT meets TEL

2009-10-20T00:13:00.000-07:00

The LiDU seminars were funded in order to bring together people from different disciplinary orientations, specifically applied linguistics and educational technology, to consider the meaning of Literacy in educational contexts which are characterised by the use of digital technologies. In his contribution to the plenary session at the end of the Friday 16th seminar, Chris Jones asked people to identify themselves as 'literacy' or 'technology' - slightly more than half opted for literacy, with a number claiming both. Chris then went on to say that, for him, 'literacy' simply meant the capacity of people to engage in various social and cultural practices around texts and that his interest was in the broader questions around the use of technologies (such as 'network effects').

Needless to say, he was challenged on his association of literacy with individual competence - a number of people in the room had spent most of their academic careers trying to move the literacy and learning agenda beyond this. However, this 'commonsense' view of literacy as a kind of marker of educational achievement does seem to be deeply engrained, and I suppose, in retrospect, wasn't likely to be shifted in a single day, especially when the only actual discussion of the point had occurred very early, and rather cursorily, in the first presentation given by Mary Lea and myself. Thinking about the day now I realise that only ours, of the four formal presentations, drew on a theoretical perspective on literacy as a social phenomenon shaping the nature of practice in digital environments. The others simply utilised the term 'literacies' as a descriptor for different kinds of technical practices.

This is not a criticism of the other presentations. They all had their own theoretical orientations, and illuminating ones at that. But I mention it in order to highlight the challenge for the LITs when talking to the TELs (Technology-enhanced-learning-ites) during these seminars. To get beyond the assumption that everyone knows what literacy means and of course its important but why are talking about it when there are major questions about how people learn with technologies to be answered?

I don't think we (the LIT-ites) are going to get beyond this simply by constantly challenging the technology focus that IDA ("in a digital age") discussions always seem to have. Rather we need to make use of new and existing concepts that foreground the idea of the 'relations' that shape the networking, bookmarking, content-generating, mashing, tweeting, streaming, etc. and the impact that these practices have on the wider social and institutional contexts in which they occur. Relations like 'power' and concepts like 'identity' and 'meaning-making', which belong in literacy studies just as centrally as they do in social psychology, cultural studies, media and communication studies etc. I think that us LITS are going to have to be a lot more convincing about how we deploy them if we are to shift our TEL colleagues away from the idea that digital literacy is what you get the first time someone signs up to follow your tweets!

First seminar Friday 16th

2009-10-19T23:50:00.000-07:00

The series began on Friday (16th October) with a seminar at Edinburgh university. Most of the 32 people who had booked places turned up, which was encouraging as you always imagine rows of empty chairs and piles of uneaten sandwiches.

Inital responses also suggested that people found it an interesting and in some cases provocative set of discussions, with even a little controversy creeping in over the activities of the twitterati in our midst (see forthcoming blog post).

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be putting papers, presentations, audios and pictures on the LiDU website (http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/lidu/p4_1.shtml ) and reporting on some of the issues that were discussed here.

Academics writing as professionals

2009-10-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

Just come from a very interesting talk given by Mary (Lea) about her and Barry Steirer's CETL project on Academics' writing as professional practice.

The substance of what she was saying is reported in their article in Studies in Higher Education: basically that the idea that the writing that academics do can be classed as either 'teaching', 'research' or 'admin' needs to give way to a more nuanced appreciation of the enormous range of texts and genres that have to be dealt with, as part and parcel of academic professional identity.

The kinds of things their informants had talked about were, as well as research reports and teaching material: advice documents for public bodies, evidence for quality processes, audit trails for assessment, expert witness submissions, strategy reports, brochure texts, letters to students, newletters, examiners reports, references, recommendations, case summaries, learning outcomes tables etc.

Add to that a variety of digital media genres: emails, online forum contributions, powerpoint presentations, spreadsheets, online templates, reviewers forms etc.

And add to that again a number of more reflective-type texts that her informants didn't mention: appraisal forms, promotion cases, blogs, diaries etc.

One thing that struck me was their suggestion that the writing academics do is slowly coming to actually stand for the practice that it is supposed simply to represent. For example, the progress form written for a research student actually stands for their progress, for most intitutional purposes, rather than anything they might actually produce, such as a paper published or talk given.

This should be a familiar switch to 'inhabitants' of digital spaces - look at the way that hits on websites have come to stand for quality, electronic 'followers' and 'friends' have come to stand for popularity. Blogs and emails have come to stand for conversation!

Seminar 1: Programme

2009-09-14T08:53:00.000-07:00

The relation of new media practices to traditional literacy practices in the academy and the professions.

Friday October 16th 2009 10am-4,30pm
Room 1.26, Paterson's Land, Moray House, Edinburgh University

[map of Edinburgh campus]
[City map of Edinburgh

(university is No.7 on the central area map)]

Papers for the presentations will be available in advance on the Links and Documents page of this website.

Programme:

10.00 Coffee

10.15 Introduction: Robin Goodfellow (Open University)

10.30 Presentation + discussion: Academic Literacies in the Digital University : Mary Lea & Robin Goodfellow (Open University)

11.30 Presentation + discussion: 'Uncanny' Literacies - Assessing the new texts: Sian Bayne (Edinburgh University)

12.30 Parallel group discussion sessions:

i) Academic values and web cultures: points of rupture. Led by Alison Littlejohn, Lou McGill & Helen Beetham (Learning Literacies in a Digital Age project. Glasgow Caledonian University)

ii) Academics writing and new technologies. Led by David Barton, Mary Hamilton & Candice Satchwell (Literacies for Learning in Further Education project. Lancaster University)

1.30 Lunch

2.30 Presentation and discussion sessions from Edinburgh University research students:

i) Personal, professional and academic voices in online reflection: new literacies for new media practices. Jenn Ross

ii) In the hands of the user: the powerful voice of objects. Michela Clari

3.30 Plenary session: discussants Gunther Kress (Institute of Education) and Chris Jones (Open University)

4.15 Conclusion: Robin Goodfellow (Open University)

Digital Literacies in Higher Education report - sneak preview!

2009-08-26T07:39:00.000-07:00

Mary Lea promised to come back and report on the DLHE project (ESRC) in an earlier post, but I happen to know she's bogged down in lodging data from the project in various databanks at the moment, and as the official report is finished but hasn't appeared on ESRC Today yet I thought I would flag some of its highlights. (Link to follow when it's available).

Mary's report says the research was motivated by the fact that little is known about the digital texts that students encounter in their studies and wider personal lives. In fact quite a lot is thought to be known - they are blogging, facebooking, tweeting, YouTubing, MSNing, texting, and illegally downloading music and videos aren't they? This imagined activity is thought to pose a threat to their ability to carry out more traditional study activities like essay-writing. The project has taken the students side in setting out to discover what exactly they do do with technologies when they are being students - an approach owed to its Academic Literacies grounding, characterised by a vigourous resistance to 'deficit' models of student literateness.

The project has looked closely at the digital texts that students in higher education (and foundation degree bits of FE) negotiate and produce, and at the textual practices that surround their study behaviour, and has found that, by and large, they tend to start with what their teachers tell them to do, and then move on from there. They respond, in effect, to an 'institutional mandate' that is in the process of redefining how knowledge is conceptualised in the university. This foregrounds the digitally-mediated, the use of information from commercial and organisational sources, and personal and professional reflective knowing, alongside more traditional subject-based knowledge.

However, the scope and complexity of the practices that they are developing through their use of digital tools is not being fully represented in the products that they submit for marking. (Many of these assignments are still framed in terms of learning outcomes that have generally been associated with academic writing as it is conventionally thought of. In my own contribution to this research I have been exploring the embedding of academic values such as 'critical/logical thinking' and 'use of evidence' in the course descriptions and assignment rubrics that these students are responding to).

Not everything digital that is institutionally mandated is taken up. The project finds evidence of students resisting engagement with university virtual discussion environments, and sidestepping procedural aspects of academic acountability such as the competion of Personal Development templates.

The report concludes by highlighting the mutability of texts in digital form and the implications of this for approaches to teaching and learning that are still focused on the assessment of final, submitted, products. This emphasis on the textual dimensions of practice is contrasted with perspectives that focus on the technologies and the skills element of practice. The textual lens will remain robust even in the face of the inevitable changes in the tools and technical practices that institutions of higher education adopt as the digital age develops.

Teaching as interface authoring - a new literacy for course designers

2009-08-18T05:42:00.000-07:00

Reflecting on my activity as I hurriedly get on with preparing for the next presentation of the online MA course I run at the OU: 'The ELearning Professional' (due in 3 weeks) it occurs to me that authoring teaching material via a technical system like the one the OU uses amounts to a literacy practice in its own right.

Below is an impression of the screen I'm working with:

All the headings on the left are links to bits of text, other websites, tools like forums, blogs, wikis etc. Each has a row of little icons next to it allowing me to change, delete, hide, move, or group the item. I can set any item to become visible to whomsoever I please, whensoever I please. The dropdown listbox at the top lets me change the view - to see what a student might see, for example, or a tutor, or another editor. There are a number of other admin functions I can call on in the menu on the right, like setting 'standard outcomes', or grade reports. I can incorporate news threads, new forums, calendar settings, alerts and subscriptions.

Somewhere under all this are the texts that the students read in order to do the learning that the course offers (the conceptual/cognitive learning that is - there is a lot of practical and social learning to be done in the collaborative areas as well). I have to admit that in all the structuring, designing, editing and re-editing that goes on through this interface (and I'm not the only one manipulating this course material at any one moment - there are OU editors and learning technologists helping me as well) I sometimes lose sight of what the texts actually say! In deciding whether to move this activity from unit a (where it was last year) to unit b (where I think it would be better this year), and in changing the instructions for the online activity that goes with it, to try and ensure more participation, and in redesigning aspects of the interface to conform to new accessibility standards, and in updating external weblinks that have got broken (and most of them do, from year to year) and in doing a dozen other tasks involved in 'delivering' this course, made two years ago ,to a fresh batch unseen learners, it's quite possible that I will forget what it is we are trying to teach about.

Resolutions I made last year, whilst the course was going on, about arguments that need to be clarified, or information that needs to be updated, or voices that need to be heard, or critiques that need to brought out, somehow get sidelined. The more efficient our design becomes, it seems, the more our content fossilises, as we become more and more focused on the appearance of activity and less and less on its meaning.

Forms of Literacy - in School and University

2009-08-07T05:29:00.000-07:00

This is a thought I had whilst reading Victoria Carrington & Jackie Marsh, Forms of literacy,December 2008(http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/forms-of-literacy/). This document was commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab.

A colleague passed this paper on to me, with the comment that it is a useful resource for us even though it's school-based and has traces of celebratory rhetoric. By that they meant that it occasionally adopts the slightly breathless tone of the technological visionary – “Knowledge production will be a dominant trend in the decades ahead, fuelled by greater access to participatory networks in which a more diverse range of literacy texts and practices will be used in the construction/recontextualisation of knowledge.”

However, given that it is a report for Futurelab which is usually pretty media-savvy (its Chairman is David Puttnam, celebrated film producer and also Chancellor of the OU, and its cause has been championed in parliament by no less a rhetoricist than Susan Greenfield) most of the discussion is actually quite cautious, erring on the “it is not possible at this moment in time to make firm declarations about literacy in the period 2025-2050” side, rather than the “how curriculum and pedagogy need to be transformed” one.

Apart from the fact that it is a pretty good review of 'new literacy' issues seen from the multiliteracies perspective, what is of particular interest to me is the fact that it is school-based.

They are talking about ‘dissolving boundaries’ between formal and informal learning and between real/virtual and online/offline spaces, and about literacy practices across space and time leading to transformations of texts and practices and ‘challenges to current boundaries between semiotic domains’ just as we in the HE sector are. What occurs to me is that if these major changes to the communication landscape are shaping primary & secondary curricula, what is left for universities to do, in terms of new literacies? How are blurred semiotic domains at HE level different from those that schools are dealing with?
Carrington & Marsh make the customary nod to the critical dimension of literacy and the way texts are imbued with ideologies, but it seems to me that it is chiefly the operational and the cultural (mainly participatory) aspects of communicating with new technologies that the transformed school curriculum is expected to feature. So perhaps this is where literacy in the digital university might find its particular mission – in developing and championing critique and the continuing role of objectivity in the evaluation of knowledge that is produced in participatory networks?

Links for the 'social reporting as new literacy' post

2009-07-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

In case anyone is interested, here are the links to the sites created during the Etienne Wenger workshop that I described in my earlier 'Social reporting' post (below).

The workshop public wiki: http://oulop09.wikispaces.com/
Steve Hutchinson's (workshop organiser) workshop blog: http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/LetsTalkPractice/index.php

First seminar

2009-07-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

The date and venue for the first seminar has been finalised. It will be at Edinburgh University on Friday October 16th 2009.

The overall theme addressed in this seminar is: The relation of new media practices to traditional literacy practice in the academy and the professions.

Prospective papers and discussion topics include:

Academic Literacies in the Digital University (contributors from the Open University)
Academic values and web cultures: points of rupture (contributors from Glasgow Caledonian U)
Academics writing and new technologies (contributors from Lancaster U)
Assessing the new texts (contributors from Edinburgh)

Anyone who would like to attend, who is not already a member of the seminar group, should contact Janice Felce j.felce@open.ac.uk