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

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

Rosie Flewitt's notes from the OU Digital Literacy seminar

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


Emerging Themes

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


Implications for research, policy and practice


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


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


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


Consider post-humanist approaches to notions of agency and technology


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On being an academic and being a bidder

Warning - Dragon-enabled posting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital literacies across the sectors

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