DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

Henry Jenkins is producing a series of excellent videos which will be just great for the new online MA in New Literacies.

Here is Henry Jenkins talking about his project:

See here for example the series on video blogging - how to do it and why….

Anya mentioned the PEW website where I have discovered a LOAD of useful papers, research based stuff, plenty of quantitaive data, that will be invaluable for my presentation in Swansea later this month…

Anyway … time for a smoothie … mango and raspberry

Sarah has this about a new blog she has set up for a new class. Also on her blog is a link to something she is reading at the moment on pedagogy and space. I have copied and ordered it too.
I have aalso ordered the book Kate is interested in on second hand stuff. (So by reading two blog posts I have managed to spend nearly fifty squid.)
I can’t believe that Sarah has been doing a Masters as well as a PhD… and teaching. Wow.

Both these books will help with what I am doing on Flickr and representations of domesticity. This is the abstract at the moment:

Public Displays of the Domestic: online presentations and readings of ‘the everyday’

Drawing on a study of a photo-sharing website (Flickr.com), this paper explores ways in which domestic life is represented and talked about through online screen based images, in an online space where traditional boundaries between the public and private spheres are being extended, challenged or eroded. The paper reflects on the presentation and subjects of the images; the narratives around them, and the affordances and practices which are impacting on the ways in which we see and represent our ‘everyday selves and lives’. The paper considers the impact of new technologies on the ways in which we are representing our identities and lives in online spaces. The paper views the interactions on Flickr as instantiating literacy as a social practice (REF) using the notion of multi-literacies, which is inclusive of a range of modes within its conceptualisation of literacy (REF). Thus, a multimodal approach to the analysis of images is adopted, following the work of Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996; 2001, and Van Leeuwen and Jewitt (2001) as well as Pink’s work on Visual Ethnography (2001 and Hine’s work on Virtual Ethnography (DATE). It also draws on the work of cultural theorists of the everyday (de Certeau, 1988) and of photographic representations of the everyday, such as Kuhn (1985) and Hirsh (2002). Third space theory (Soja, 1996) is invoked to explore aspects of the global/local practices on Flickr, and to reflect on the processes of online social learning, with particular reference to our reconfigurations of the domestic.

So I am interested in space as a metaphor to describe something like the development of shared meanings in spaces where collaborative social learning takes place - but especially the idea that a space gets created through the shared meanings.

Something else to say … I think the RAE is a pain.
We have all had to highlight the four publications we want to be counted in the RAE and these have been graded by an external assessor as a practice RAE from 1 - 4 with 4 as the highest. One of mine gets a 2, which frankly, is rather crap. Yet this paper is one that has been downloaded the most since last July in the journal it is in.. see here. Does this mean that the people who download are only after mediocre work? Does it mean they are all bad judges? Does it mean the RAE reader is wrong and should think again? Does it mean the criteria for assessment in the RAE are not useful? What does it mean?

Finally, just when you think you are clever, this can happen:

One guy fell asleep on the subway and so his friend gleefully took photos of him on his ‘cell phone’. He happily texted these pix around the place and kept looking at fellow passengers for approval.

What he did not know was that we were the clever ones, shooting him. (Did anyone shoot us?)

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?)

If I were a teacher in school I would use Flickr a lot. (CB has been doing stuff with his kids - see here.)

At first I might have to make photos accessible only to those who were part of the class - and maybe their parents, to get them ‘on side’. In fact I think I would have a Flickr evening to show them how to do it all). That’s for starting off when people are scared and go on about weird stuff like having your identity/soul stolen.

For some projects I would invite a teacher from elsewhere to involve her class - and then do a joint project on say - ‘places I like to go’ or ‘interesting angles of everyday life and objects’ or ‘guess what this is?’ type stuff. Or whatever. They could then all be ‘friends and family’ and see the photos but others may not. (This would be in the run up to going totally public with the photos.) This activity would be great as a way of making tentative online links etc but mainly just fun and would make the kids look more carefully at the images if they were from another class.

Eventually my projects would all be public and we would see if we got comments from everywhere. (But I would tell other teachers to have a look and see if I could get their kids involved in commenting. A bit of off line coercian in other words.)

I would be interested in doing things like:

1. Getting the kids to produce a narrative with five separate shots.
2. Asking the kids to look at different pages on Flickr to get ideas for groups and sets. Ask them to set up sets themselves which the whole class could try to contribute to. Talk with them about the affect of bringing together lots of photos with similarities. I would ask them ‘ What are we learning about people?’ ‘What can we learn about ourselves?'’What choices do people make when they take a photo`?’ ‘What do we think about the choices people make?’ (Cultural stuff; stuff to do with visuals).
3. Use the notes function to get kids to label stuff in a photo a bit like this. The kids from another class could look at them and could be encouraged to comment (nicely of course.) on the stuff each other is showing. They can ask questions; describe; offer information. Guy did a project where kids brought in stuff from home in shoeboxes. That would be good to get them to photograph a shoebox of their stuff and label it. I can’t find his article (where is it Guy?) but this is another similar thing I guess:
   
   

   Boxing clever: using shoeboxes to support home-school knowledge exchange by Greenhough, Pamela - Scanlan, Mary - Feiler, Anthony - Johnson, David - Yee, Wan
   Ching - Andrews, Jane - Price, Alison - Smithson, Maggie - Hughes, Martin (from here.)

4. Get kids to look at titles across the Flickr site and give their own photos titles. Ask pupils to make suggestions through the comments facility for new titles for all the photos. The owner of the photo decides which is the best title and why.
5. Introduce them to tags. Show them the Flickr tag cloud and how you can search for photos. We could discuss what is popular and what is not. Get them to tag their own photos and to find particular tags. Make cultural comparisons about ‘weddings‘, and even things like ‘reading’ .
6. Get kids to be photographers on sports day (yukky) and on trips out etc. They can then comment in captions giving recollections and memories.
7. Get kids to be photographers showing positive images of the school to show everyday life there.
8. Sets of photos showing a ‘typical day’ in their school life. Make comparisons. Get the kids to caption these and to comment on each others.
9. Gather photos of current events across the world or important places that may be relevant to other classroom work.
10. Look carefully at composition and framing. In a drama lesson get kids to produce freeze frames. Take photos from a range of angles and think about how the meanings may change.
11. Get them to look at Flickr toys and produce magazine covers of the magazine they would like to read themselves.
12. I would get them to look at the ‘interestingness‘ pages and see if they agree that the photos are interesting.
13. We would have lots of conversations about images and what is missing from them (sound, moveent, words) and what you get ‘extra’ - opportunity to look again, see in detail, see in greater relief, use of different effects (photoshop).

I see here that Brooks and others have beaten me to a list like this, and I really like this bit on Edu-gadget:

Mister teacher has got a lot of excellent ideas here in his technorati stream.