Digital literacies across the sectors

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

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

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

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)

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'

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'

[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 ...