This talk considers the processes and outcomes of an ESRC-funded seminar series, held between October 2009 and April 2011.
The series brought together researchers and practitioners involved in four research projects that were focused, in different ways, on literacy, tertiary education, and digital communication (LIDU 2010).
The seminars set out to develop an agenda for new research, drawing on the range of conceptual, methodological, pedagogical, and political approaches brought to the discussions by participants from the different projects. But bringing these disparate people and approaches together was one thing -- ensuring coherent outcomes was quite another! In this talk I will review some of the problems we ran into, and the lessons we learned, trying to find common ground amongst linguists, social theorists, and learning technologists, talking about texts, practices and technologies.
I will describe how we eventually overcame most of these problems, and identified three major themes around which to propose future literacy-oriented research: ‘digital scholarship’, ‘post-human pedagogies’, and ‘the borderless university’. These themes are further explicated in an edited book called ‘Literacy in the Digital University’ to be published by Routledge in 2013, which I will plug shamelessly during the talk.
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