This new website lets you upload documents and pdfs to your hearts content so you can publish all your articles yourself.
There is one in the eye for mean editors who refuse to publish your work!! But anyway, just to test out how it works, I have uploaded an article that is already published in elearning. It’s about Flickr. I wrote it, but is it against the rules for me to put this online? Does anyone know? Is it mine to put up? (I know I should know the answer to this question.)
So anyway I like the idea of being able to make all my writing (including chapters etc) online. But I am unsure about coptright rules if the stuff is laready published.
So many useful online resources… including The New Literacies Sampler. which Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel just put up.
The book came out a few weeks ago but people can download ity to use if they wish. Thank goodness for that as it has SO MANY excellent chapters by wonderful people. (It was great to be allowed in to publish with this bunch of brainies. It is really great that Colin and Michele managed to make a deal with the publishers to put the whole thing online. (Wonder how they diod that??)
Here is the list of contents…
Chapter 1: Sampling “the New” in New Literacies
Colin Lankshear & Michele Knobel
Chapter 2: “You Won’t Be Needing Your Laptops Today”: Wired Bodies in the Wireless Classroom
Kevin M. Leander
Chapter 3: Popular Websites in Adolescents’ Out-of-School Lives: Critical Lessons on Literacy
Jennifer C. Stone
Chapter 4: Agency and Authority in Role-Playing “Texts”
Jessica Hammer
Chapter 5: Pleasure, Learning, Video Games, and Life: The Projective Stance
James Paul Gee
Chapter 6: Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction
Rebecca W. Black
Chapter 7: Blurring and Breaking through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and
Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction
Angela Thomas
Chapter 8: Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy
Julia Davies and Guy Merchant
Chapter 9: Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production
Michele Knobel & Colin Lankshear
Chapter 10: New Literacies
Cynthia Lewis
Often the covers of text books are really awful but this one is divine as is the one Jackie Marsh and Eve Bearne also (who took the picture of the street art at the front of her book whilst on holiday.)
Although social inclusion has been high on government agendas for some years, there have been few attempts at policy level to examine the issues relating to literacy education. Many social and cultural groups feel alienated from traditional models of literacy education and some learners continue to underachieve. This book develops insights into how to address these challenges.
Terms such as social inclusion and social exclusion are defined, explored and related to literacy education by contributors who are renowned in the field. They deal with issues of literacy and social class, race, gender, language and sexuality. They offer insights into current concerns in these areas, and they outline curricula and pedagogical approaches which aim to address underachievement and disaffection. The book challenges traditional deficit notions of at risk communities and argues that the onus for change needs instead to be at policy level.
The contributors are Viv Bird, Victoria Carrington, Barbara Comber, Julia Davies, Eve Gregory, Amanda Hatton, Kate Pahl and Mark Vicars.
You can get a MASTERS degree without ever leaving your home!!
It is for people working in literacy education - maybe teachers; maybe advisors; maybe in the community; in a policy capacity; in learning centres … or something else.
You can do the course all purely online and it will be led by the most FUN people.
(Who can also be serious)
It has just been so HARD this term. I think I haver never worked so hard in all my life. Is anyone else feeling this?
At the risk of getting CONTROVERSIAL… how is it that the harder you work, the more there seems to be to do, and the more your boss tells you that the department is losing money? This is a great mystery of life. I think I need some sort of New Year’s Resolution that is based around improving the quality of my work/life balance as in fact it is not the case that workload decreases with the more you do, but the opposite. There will never be a point where we cannot see more to do. (Yes. It has taken me this long to realise that.)
And how oh how did I end up with more administrative work again this term??
So, yes I have still been thinking about narratives and identity and I love this by Riessman (2003):
‘We ‘become’ the stories through which we tell our live ..Telling stories configures the ’self that I might be.’
I
Where does that leave the blogger?? Well it means that I have to get back into blogging so that I can make myself become what I write and become more the academic I want to become and LESS like the administrator I have fallen into being.
I understand (from watching trash films) that sometimes private detectives look through other people’s bins to find out stuff.
Well today I decided to do something similar. To look through my own email trash can to see if I could find out anything about myself.
We could see it as a bt of self-psycho-analysis. (Freud would have a good day with that concept.)
Aaaanyway, I found in my bin a number of emails from people I don’t know. This first one is from Adam Burt (thanks Adam) who sent me a link to his blog telling me how to podcast onto my blog using a photocopier… YES REALLY. Look here at the video.
I had an email from someone else who I never heard of and it had a link to his blog. The blog had a blog post with a hilarious video of some girl dancing.
I had gerzillions of emails about blogging in secondary schools - so much so that my inbox went nto the SCARY RED ZONE.
An extract of the mail is this:
We have 300 children in school. Up until this year it has really only
been my class who blogged although I did some whole-class-blogging
with younger children.
This session we are trying 2 children from each of our 2 primary 6
and 2 primary 7 classes being bloggers each day. This should mean
each child in these classes blogs every couple of weeks or so. Mainly
just writing about what they have learned, the quality of the posts
is variable, but hopefully will improve as the children get the hang
of the tech and can focus on learning
Oh and then there was all the mail about ethics reviews which I chucked … after doing the reviews of course. But what if someone finds that trash??
In one of the emails labelled
SPAM
it said:
If Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows box crashed…
…Oh, wait a minute, he already does.
Actually, on second thoughts, it is really BORING going through my own trash can.
Ok, so now the analysis…
I found out this about me … I get a lot of emails. I deleted 80 today, which is a bout avearage. I don’t read about half of what I delete. And some of it, I now see, is QUITE interesting but I just don’t have enough time to read it all.
And finally …. nearly in my trash can is an email from someone I do not know, asking for advice on who to have as her referees when she applies to another university to get on a teaching course (????!!!) Weird. The e mail is full of spelling errors. She has also sent me her personal statement to look through. I don’t know her and this is CRAZY!! But I am going to help her.
Some people are getting all excited about ZOOMR
This is a fabulous new photosharing site which is much much speedier (zoomier) than Flickr.
I think Flickr peeps may be scared, especially as so much stuff from Flickr is duplicated here. And it is multilingual.
But I am not sure that a move away from Flickr would be worth it as I would now want to leave all my lovely new friends behind.
I also cannot see any real interactivity happening on Zoomr yet…. but it is like a school disco I spose … everyone else is wondering who will dance first.
At the moment everyone is still standing round the walls.
I joined to check it out and here is one of my photos … just to be a rebel it is a shot of someone on a recent Sheffield Flickrmeet!!
Flickr meet Hosted on Zooomr
Meanwhile ianya tells us all about mediaed.org
Here you can get all sorts of info and resources as well as free video downloads.
An interesting mix of promo videos (to entice you to buy videos) and pdf downloads, the site offers a mix of takes on media education issues. … so I am not quite so keen on the message in this video here that advertsing is propaganda…
Quite a goldmine anyway for anyone thinking of running an online course soon….
(Cheers to Katiew)
In fact not to get tanked up on the stuff is foolish; it prolongs your life and makes you thin!! Look here.
Cool.
Perhaps more cool is that Tim Berners Lee wants to get together a research team, including social scientists to look at the social networking side of things.
The Research Assesment Exercise (RAE) is carried out across all UK universities every five to seven years. It is supposed to be a way of measuring the quality of research carried out in each university, in each department. It is supposed to be about quality assurance and universities are given points and put in a rank order and money is dished out according to how well (or not) you do.
The RAE drives everyone batty and we all have to have our work graded and assessed by our institutions before it is then passed on to the proper thing. We are currently preparing for the mock RAE. We have to also hand in a list of ‘markers of esteem’ about ourselves … e.g. offices held; prizes won, etc.
Funnily enough, meanwhile in the lovely jubbly cuddly online world, we are forever rank ordering and grading ourselves there. People give each other grades and comments on ebay such as ‘Great ebayer!!!! A +++++’ - you can get that just for paying for something. It is a marvellous confidence boost.The feedback comes quick and clear. On Flickr we have comments and numbers of views that we can happily tot up (see here the info under each image) and we even enter mad competitions.
In myspace you can notch up kudos by having loads of friends and people who come into yourspace on myspace; on blogs you might appear on other people’s blogrolls (esteem factor); or you may even get listed on blogger’s interesting blogs list.
And it is wondefful if you can get a photo into interestingness. What a reward. It gets the punters coming back everytime.
If you are really into the whole Flickr hing you can go to fd’s gadgets and find out how many of your photos are n the interestingness group at anytime. As I am feeling in a very self-disclosing mood, I will tell you I have the page bookmarked.
Today I am very excited as one of my photos seems to be getting a whole stream of popolos . Hopefully I will do well and will have to move my pic to popfabulous!!
And I made a new poster of my photos which are in interestingness ….which is here:
What I was wondering, is ‘Can I list this in my RAE esteem factors list?’
Will I get put in RAEfabulous?
And is it fun in RAE fabulous?
For a company that has been going for 10 months and hasn’t made a profit
“YouTube figured out what Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and all the others in the marketplace didn’t,” she said. “It’s not about the video. It’s about creating a community around the video.”
Well so there you have it… social networking is THE thing … and just to think, it was in 2003 that I wrote my article about tweenies online,I ended it by saying:
The girls who use the web sites in order to communicate with others are using roles
to express themselves in a range of ways; sometimes speaking as ‘themselves’ and
sometimes as mothers or as employers (etc). Their interaction is both public and
private, conformist and rebellious and forms just a small segment of a much longer
international, historical conversation where women and girls continue to grapple with
a range of definitions of what it means to be feminine. In doing so, they form crucial
links with each other and seek above all, to stay in contact.
The article is ‘Negotiating Femininities Online’ in Gender and Education Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2004.
I am quite pleased with this as I wrote it before people were talking of Web 2.0 and ’social networking’. (It took 2 years for them to publish it as one reviewer kept it for more than a year!!)
I have just found a new group on Flickr - ‘Educational Bloggers’ which is a gathering of people involved in education and who blog and who go on Flickr. (It is of course a bit counter intuitive to have this gathering on Flickr. And in fact they have already found that Flickr will not keep displaying things that are not photographs ..but anyway they are a gathering and they talk.) I think it works as a good links/address database of edu bloggers.
It is weird how often the same names turn up. Some of these people I have met in New York and some in Sheffield, and some, well I just know from their blogs. Like Mrteacher.
Another one, Josie, is the person who tell s me about edublog conferences - which I have not managed to get to yet. But will do.
And you should definitely see this here from Frances Bell which has a thing in today about getting student teachers blogging.
Another person I am interested in is ChristinA who sometimes comments on my blog … she is from Australia but I don’t think I know her from anywhere apart from the blogosphere…
