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

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!)

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

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

Traditional literacy

Digital Literacy

Carmen Lee's talk at Seminar 3

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

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

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?