DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

Originally uploaded by iz*source.

Oh how lovely on Valentine’s day …

But there is no need for us to forget what we are REALLY here for … the lurve of WEb 2.0

You Tube is NOT just videos of people at weddings . It is a rich resourrce for info of all kinds. Here are two useful bits about web 2.0

I really like this one:

This one is a bit less funky but a bit more controversial.

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)

Details of the course here.

Go on … have a look.

You get to use web 2.0 and learn about it at the same time. You get to research things that you are doing in your own professional practice.

I am a bit behind on reporting this but Demos has recently  (beginning of January) brought out a new publication (authors Celia Hannon and Hannah Green) called Their Space.

You can download the article for free as a pdf ..

It does what it says on the  tin and more:

Their Space: Education for a digital generation draws on qualitative research with children and polling of parents to counter the myths obscuring the true value of digital media.

 Approaching technology from the perspective of children, it tells positive stories about how they use online space to build relationships and create original content. It argues that the skills children are developing through these activities, such as creativity, communication and collaboration, are those that will enable them to succeed in a globally networked, knowledge-driven economy

I think it’s really good and Hannah and Celia talk about it here on the radio.

MMMmm nice. I like this online magazine about the most ‘contagious’ ideas, gadgets and inventions… it comes out quarterly and  is really intended for people in marketing, but it’s fascinating for cultural researchers too. 

But here is a wonderful new wiki … a media literacy site perfect for teachers into new literacies and digital technology. You can simply read about new ideas, see examples of projects or be more pro-active and add to the site.

Check out the page on digital storytelling resources.

Excellent.

It is great to see that the spirit of the Information Commons is still alive and kicking, seeing the launch last week of the Open Learning resource bank online.

This seems extremely generous hearted and is most timely, co-inciding with the development of Sheffield’s new MA in New Literacies, launching in October 2007.

I will be interested in looking in more detail at the unit on the use of digital video for Media Studies type work in schools.

Also of great interest is the one on Reading visual images which is JUST the ticket.

A whole generation (and more) of kids look at their hands like this … a lot.
they know how to hold and control the console; they learn to be dextrous - in the same way that I learned to be dextrous with a pencil, then a pen when I learned to write.
When I watch my son I see he looks at the screen and instinctively moves his hands, reacting so that he changes the on-screen text, making it do what he wants it to do, without thinking about the mechanical process of moving his hands (as I do when I write.)

This hand position links game players into texts in a way that I have never yet experienced.
I have not given the hours of time that my son has, to becoming accomplished at interacting with digital narratives which invite his participation.
My son often derides the stories in the games he plays but finds other things to enjoy beyond repetitive plot or shallow character (often in the games he plays). He enjoys the escapism, the thrill of the chase, the ability to replay exciting moments that he influenced, and to ‘drive’ a car impossibly fast, using skills he has acquired, over hours (in fact days and weeks) of practice.

This litle hand set allows players to move through texts in multiple ways, reading complex screens, assimilaing information that is useful not just for that game, but for countless others.

He reads the images, the charts on screen (how much energy has he eft? What weapons as he got? etc.) and can also read or hear dialogue. These screen based digital texts require full engagement of te mind and body.

Can kids of today concentrate on something for more than a few minutes at a time? You bet.

Just motivate them.

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…

Really great yesterday going into one of my research schools and seeing a teacher working wth his class on the critical lieracies project. Fantastic to see the kids so into it and working so hard. They have a formular PEE - make a POINT, provide the EVIDENCE, and give an EXPLANATION. And they are learning to ask questions to help them unpick the ideologies within texts.

Lovely to see the notices round Mark’s classroom and to see someone so talented and clever in action. The kids were really getting so much out of what was going on. RESPECT is a key thing in that place:

Ths was the text for the starter activity:

the kids were well into it and loving looking at the ‘rip off ad’ at the top of the page. they were really interested in discussing the business side and I think maybe that is a direction to take up next.

Or maybe Mark will be interested in looking at streetart and asking questions about that using a critical literacy frame….

Whose voices do we hear on the street?
What is streetart trying to do?
Where is the power?

Look at this pupil’s folder:

Do you think it belongs to a girl or a boy? (Why do you think that? Who is the folder aimed to please? What is it trying to do? What does it assume about the audience?)

Next I went to a City Learning Centre and heard Judy Robertson from Glasgow Caledonian University talking about developing kids’ storytelling skills through computer game design. She gets kids making ther own pc games and then looks at ways in which teachers can build on the skills the kids are developing.
She uses Never winternights. which I am going to buy and have a go.

Interesting that out of the 8 people who attended the seminar, one was a teacher advisor; one was me; one was the person who arranged it; two were PhD students; then there were three teachers. Two of the teachers said they did not think they would be able to use the ideas; one was already trying it at an after school club. This is going to be a long struggle to get people to be brave enough to use this stuff in school and to see that not all skills are listed on the National Curriculum. It is so hard for teachers these days as they hae to justify everything they do in terms of hitting pre-set targets - set by a givernment interested in developing literacy of the past century, but using technology from the current one.

In the meantime … I am going to watch BB tonight. All eyes are watching….

Looking It Over

Originally uploaded by jerry56.

This image is from Jerry who, with his wife Sheryl, took TT and I to Brooklyn Park Blossom festival a few weeks ago. I like seeing this sharing of technology in public places.
The photo shows two men looking at a digital photo on the camera, just after the shot had been taken. I like the intimacy - looking at a small image they lean in close. They are sharing a particular view. They are looking at an image of something, able to refer back immediately to the ‘reality’it represents simultaneously. They can look back and forth. Or maybe it was a fleeting mment captured and they look again at the things that were one way a moment ago, and now are not.
It interests me the way technology paves the way for new social opportunities. People talk about events as they are happening as well as after. I think it’s great!! I think people are drawn into experiencing things in additional ways - having conversations about things as they happen. And this makes us all more AWARE I think.

Digital cameras have the potential to make photography more democratic. If we want to, we can share the images taken of our subjects straight away. If we want we can ask them if the photo is OK - we can delete it at their request. (We don’t have to of course; but this is now possible.) So it is possible for photographers to immediately relinquish some of their power over the image if they wish.
This ability to look straight away at the image also allows us to review things as they are going on - so that we both participate in something, but also step outside it at the same time - we are all becoming researchers, collecting data. (So much bloody data.)

Yesterday I went into a Sheffield school to film a teacher who loads of kids reported to be really good. It was their history teacher who they liked so much and their views were passed on to me by their form teacher.

I have been thinking for a while about the inadequacy of my PhD work and how in focussing just on spoken language in the classroom, I had missed all sorts of crucial information about the communicative process. (My PhD looks at spoken language, learning and gender). Aaaaanyway, influenced by Gunther Kress , Carey Jewitt et al, I decided to take in 2 video cameras to the school and had one trained on the pupils and the other on the really good teacher. I wanted to look at what things he seemed to be doing that so engaged the kids.

I am so pleased with the quality of the recordings - visually and sound wise. For the teacher I used my new Sony DVD recorder with a bluetooth microphone. The microphone was excellent. But diappointingly the mini DVD only records half an hour, so that I had to change it half way through. AND then you have to put the recording onto a bigger DVD if you want to use it with most playback machines. So TRY before you buy. (Unlike me.)

The fsacinating thing is that the kids’ favoutrite teacher keeps them under PERFECT control, is very traditional (suit and tie) and makes no jokes. It has to be said (counter-intuitively) that he is an excellent teacher and held the kids spellbound for much of the lesson. They seemed to REALLY learn. It is going to be so good doing a mulit-modal analysis of all the data.

Later I went for a research conversation at The University … and as is so often at these things, it triggered off things in my mind about my work and I was able to scribble down ideas about how learning takes place when affinities form online. I was thinking about how (as in off line situations) shared jokes emerge; shared phrases; how people joke around with those; how those shared jokes sometimes work through visuals; through sound; through moving image (e.g through You tube.) . And I was thinking about how this stuff is a magnification of the learning through language stuff I wrote about in my PhD. How through using language, through talk especially, kids ‘come to know’. (Vygotsky’s stuff.) This is the way as groups of people we blend our ideas together and create third spaces. I wanted to use the word ‘culture jamming’ for this, but that term is already taken. It is some kind of jamming process though. It is ‘SOMETHING jamming. Anyway I was thinking also how these things happen off line of course and that in fact it is these things which a multi modal analysis in the classroom can look at. I realised how looking at things online, sometimes makes more explicit for me, things that are going on off line. (Does that make sense?)