LIDU final report

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.

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?

Third seminar in the series coming soon!

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.

Auditing our scholarly outputs

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.

Digital Scholarship – initial thoughts

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.