DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

My son uses the Internet for three things:

1. To use MSN with his friends. They all have mad names… he has ‘Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens’ and he used to have ‘there is no I in team, but if you look closely there is a me’.
2. To download games and play them.
3. To find jokey web sites.

Today he showed me these two sites:

1. A visual joke - with a cross cultural feel about it. It is called ‘Uncomfortable restrooms’.
2. This video which is a spoof of ‘Mortal Kombat’ a video game.

He used stumbleupon to find the sites.

If you have never stumbled online then you really ought to as it is a great way of browsing - you tell the search engine the kinds of site you like and it finds them for you. Try it.
Litrate told me about it and I have been having fun with it ever since.

So different people use the web for different things and my son and his friends mainly use it for fun and laughs. they tell each other new web sites to look up.

Really my son should be looking up info about where to go to university. But in fact I think he cannot believe he is old enough (neither can I).

Anyway, I found this on the web (hahahaha) …. hope you’re not scared of spiders:

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 see people take photos.
Lots of the people are taking pictures of themselves.
It is so common to see the self portraiters when you are out and about these days.
They seem to want to have pictures of themselves everywhere.
I think that partly they just like to use their gadgets.

They often share them and talk about them in groups, gathering round and looking at the little screens.

It is so easy to hold the technology and take your own photos in different places. VicCarrington talked recently about how she and her partner are pretty obsessed with this activity… and refuse help from kindly passers by who offer to take their photograph for them.

I am interested in the idea that we want to see ourseves positioned in spaces; the way we want to take control of the images. Berger talked of the ways in which women in particular view themselves as if through other’s eyes. This is becoming an obsession for everyone. But if we hold the camera it is as if we are taking control over other people’s gaze.

Putting the images on a website is taking one step further; viewing ourselves on the global stage. Look on Flickr and you will see so many self portraits. Under the tag ’self portrait’ or see the group ‘ of me’.There is something important going on which is to do with identity positioning.

I have never printed off photos taken by my digital camera.
I have 1,407 photos on Flickr. They have been viewed 29,856 times.
Wow.
(I have one self portrait.)

These are not the girl gamers. These are three excellent academics who were part of this conference last week.

And that conference, (as keen readers will know) was closely followed by this.

I am not going to repeat myself further but want to just mention that I went to an excellent seminar yesterday, which Catherine again presented, on girl gamers. It was called

‘Would the real girl gamers please stand up? Gender, LAN cafes and the reformation of the girlgamer’.

and evolved out of research done by her and Claire Charles. (The presentation was originally done by Catherine and Claire together) You can also see an associated paper in Discourse see here.

As if the funky title were not enough, the seminar had some really compeling data and an interesting story to tell about some girls and their involvement in gaming. The data was drawn from an Australian cafe and focused on a particular LAN cafe where some girsl of south east Asian background, were keen and expert gamers. In a setting where it is nearly all Australian white men who play these games, these girls were quite a contrast to the usual sort ogf gamers. Catherine was looking at issues around how and why these girls are involved and looking at issues around feminine identity etc. Most of the girls got drawn into the gaming via their boyfriends but ended up loving the games andthe action it offered. Catherine’s work looks at the tensions in playing the shoot em up game, for girls who were fashionable, petite and in the main, strongly identifying with their culture’s mainstream notions of identity. Fascinating stuff and I did see parallels with my own work as in this paper here and here about ‘Negotiating Femininities online’.

I was also really fascinated to hear how common Internet cafes are in Australia, and have also observed the same in Toulouse, Rome and Berlin. I have also heard Claudia Mitchell talk about girls in South Africa in Internet cafes. I am now wondering why UK youngsters do not go to Internet cafes to do their online gaming. Or do they? As far as I can see all the attempts at getting Internet cafes going in the UK (including Edinburgh) were either closed down, or just used by occasional individuals. Nothing like the kind of rush of boys queueing outside the cafes to go in, in Toulouse. Apparently they all gather to play team games on the web, so that they can collaborate over tactics (shouted across the cafe) and then play teams from elsewhere via the Internet. So does anyone know of Internet cafes like this in the UK? If not, why don’t they exist? Does anyone know?

Across all of the talks I have been to lately, I have been thinking about the way in which the local is being played out on a global stage. Something which Jennifer and Anne alluded to at UKLA.

I have not been blogging.
But I have not been watching BB or the football either.

Have been very busy and left you all to your own devices. Back from study leave after four hedonistic months of Flickr and blogging. Bound to make it hard settling back to work.

Critical Literacies Project has had a nice boost with a one day meeting last week. And today met the wonderful Mark again to discuss his bit of the work. He works here and has got the kids actually understanding what critical literacy is and using it to deconstruct the school as text. Yes. He has. He is well into it and has also agreed to work with me on introducing blogging and Flickr to his classes next year. I can’t wait now to go into school and visit again next Wednesday.

Have also been catching up with another project here where I have been looking with teachers at gender dynamics in classrooms and their impact on teaching and learning. We report to the full staff next Tuesday so that’s always a bit scary. (They don’t want to have their time wasted by nonsense.)

Also am preparing for giving a paper here - gonna be mainly about Flickr.

Play and Creativity online: A look at ways in which informal online connections enable learning and creativity. Drawing on research looking at a range of online activities, this paper will look at similarities and differences in the ways in which online activities are helping individuals to learn from others through their activities and liaisons. It looks at ways in which learning often happens through the exploration of content and through interpersonal connections, in unplanned and spontaneous ways.

THANK GOD I said something vague in the abstract. I have a few ideas I am gonna use:
probably the can project; a six word story; the travelling wig game; and something else.

Will use some play theory stuff including things from Avant game. And also from this new book by by Diane Carr, David Buckingham, Andrew Burn, and Gareth Schott.

So that’s it.

Am back on theblog ….

Playing in the garden with my macro lens.

I like this:

What you decide to call a photo can influence how people read it . Barthes called this ‘anchorage’. (His ideas are based on semiotics - the study of the system of signs - i.e. systems of meanings in text and other modes, such as images and music.)

Here is Chandler on the topic:

Roland Barthes introduced the concept of anchorage (Barthes 1977, 38ff). Linguistic elements can serve to ‘anchor’ (or constrain) the preferred readings of an image: ‘to fix the floating chain of signifieds’ (ibid., 39). Barthes introduced this concept of textual anchorage primarily in relation to advertisements, but it applies of course to other genres such as captioned photographs, maps, narrated television and film documentaries, and cartoons and comics (’comic books’ to North Americans) with their speech and thought ‘balloons’. Barthes argued that the principal function of anchorage was ideological (ibid., 40). This is perhaps most obvious when photographs are used in contexts such as newspapers. Photograph captions typically present themselves as neutral labels for what self-evidently exists in the depicted world whilst actually serving to define the terms of reference and point-of-view from which it is to be seen (Chaplin 1994, 270). For instance, ‘It is a very common practice for the captions to news photographs to tell us, in words, exactly how the subject’s expression ought to be read’ (Hall 1981, 229). You may check your daily newspaper to verify this claim. Such textual anchorages can have a more subversive function, however. For instance, in the 1970s, the photographer Victor Burgin exhibited posters in the form of images appropriated from print advertisements together with his own printed text which ran counter to the intended meaning of the original ads.

Kress is keen to see the image as more potent than that; he feels that neither language nor image are more important than the other. (If you go to my link on Kress you can see a video of him.)

I think that while the visual image has a very strong impact, it is hard to see alternative readings once you have been given a caption or title. The word ‘marriage’ draws attention to the ring. The word ‘marriage’ only brings attention to the ring if you decide that the ring symbolises that a wedding has taken place. The image is dominated by what seems to be blood. Thus we can read ‘blood’ and marriage vows as being closely associated. It is not made explicit, but this seems to be symbolic.
Cultural knowledge may make you think of religion or of Lady Macbeth. And of course cultural knowledge was needed to suggest the ring symbolised marriage. Many of the meanings are inscribed in the visual, rather than the linguistic; however the linguistic suggests which aspects of the image are significant. The visual meanings are as culturally defined as the words.

I wonder what alternative readings one could come up with?

Actually this is red food dye and TT was about to wash his hands and the plates after doing this:

(Putting two ice cubes on a plate. Coloured with red food dye.)

Click on the picture of spam to see the fabbiest camera ever - with explanatory notes.

Digigran mentioned that she would like me to try and get a decent shot of The Chrysler building. I did my best but when I got close to it, I had to put my head back and look up. No decent perspective at all. The best I could manage was to get its reflection in the building opposite:

I also went inside and took a quick pic of the fantastic art deco foyer. Perfectly symmetrical. See here.

Undaunted, I rose to the challenge though and made my way to the other side of the river, to Williamsburg with my NEW BEST FRIENDS, in an attempt to get a better shot.
Here we saw all sorts of stuff including the strange and weird post-holocaust scene, with NYC eerily peering above the gravel of the building site, rising like a phoenix from the dust.

We climbed up here and suddenly saw this vista:

But here IT is:

Mission accomplished.
It is a postcard shot.

We had to get through a little gap in this in order to see what we wanted to see.

Which all goes to prove that while you see NYC in films, the perspective you get is not always the one that is easy to get.
It is not always the perspective that the typical Manhattener gets everyday.

On our trip, I saw this, which I found kinda romantic:

But when I re-read it, I realised it is not romantic at all. In fact it is a bit mean.

Things are not always what they seem.

Am feeling guilty about not keeping up with the blog … longest pause EVER.
Oh well, I have been so busy liberating dudes, travelling the world, doing this; doing that.

Went to London today to Demos. That was very good. A seminar talking about the links that could be made between hone based informal online learning and the formal learning structures in schools. Was good. Keri Facer was there; I like her a lot. She talks sense. But no details on this today.

Today is the full Sugar Dude story.

I said to C-Monster that I wanted to go to the Sugar Dude Shop.
Moufle said, Yeah great idea.
C-Monster said she would take us.
And we could have Margaritas and a meal after, as the Dude Prison/Bakery was near THE RODEO BAR.

But then TT said …. out of the blue … ‘Let’s plan their escape!’

At this point of course this seemed like a genius plan!!

We plotted and agreed we needed to get the woman in the shop to put a little flag in one of the Dudes and that we would then put together the story.

I knew Jackie would be pleased as we recorded events as if it were an animation …

So this is the full Sugar Dude story here. (Watch as a slide show)

Here is the ‘behind the scenes footage’ of us making the story. (Watch as a slide show)

And here are the out takes … with the surviving Dude drinking himself into oblivion.

The unprecedented success of our mission meant that we were forced to start a Sugar Dude Flickr group here. Which led to massively flattering copycat behaviour. So the Dude thing goes global!!

And we have been blogged here.