DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

I have a very crap myspace account. I only opened it to see how it worked etc. I don’t pay much attention to it,
But looking at it today I discovered a new link to a site which lets you load in your photos to make slide shows. It is here.

This is what I did. Display of some street art.

In the meantime Flickr has added functionality to its site letting you make collections and letting you display your images differently on your home page, like this.

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

is where I went at the weekend.

An installation bt Anthony Gormley called ‘Another Place’.

It was VERY windy.

I took this photo for Guy:

He likes prints.

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.)

Well there’s the caterpillars in my garden:

(Hundreds of the buggers) . They make me go ‘Hmmm’

Then there’s streetart and how fantastic and generous the artists are to put it out there for all to see (even though some people just walk past).

And isn’t it amazing that some people can concetrate so hard that they can read a small screen for hours in the middle of New York’s Chinatown:

Then there is the range of cakes available in Starbucks:

But also there is the difficult pithy problem of trying to sort out what digital literacies are.

I think that if you come at the definition from technology based disciplines and epistomologies, digital literacies are skills and knowledge needed in order to make technology work It is about ‘how do you use the web?’ Or ‘what can I make my mobile phone do?’ ‘What is the best way to use Google?’ or ‘ What is better, Google or Yahoo?’ (etc.) Or ‘how do I do a podcast?’

Whereas if you come at it from the angle of a literacy/language specialist, , you are thinking about
‘What kind of text does technology produce?’ and ‘How does this affect the message?’
‘How do texts change when we have more technology available?’
Do readers respond diffrently to digital texts?
What do we need to learn?
What are the social implications?
How does the meaning change?
How do the different modal properties work together?
What are the affordances and constraints?

If we have a broad definition of text, does that mean that we need to broaden our notion of literacy? I am happy to think about speech as spoken text and I am happy to analyse speech in context and therefore take into account the range of modes that contribute to the meaning of that text … e.g. what people are wearing; where and why the speech event takes place (etc.) But I do not think this is literacy.

I think literacy involves writing/reading. But I also think that because context contributes to meaning, that literacy is never JUST about writing. So we have to think wide. But not too wide. Just because something is digital does not mean it is literacy. Just because something is communicating meaning, does not mean it is literacy. This does not mean I value the written word more than other types of communication. It is just that literacy is something in particular.

You have heard of web 2.0.
Now, is the debut of the next big thing…
So here is a film, of Jesus 2.0 in the making and of its journey to, and installation onto, the streets.

Funky business.

OK so here is an interesting thing. It is from here.

So it is an image; it is sewing - a patchwork; it is written text; it is poetry; it is a wall hanging; it is a picture in Flickr; it is on a blog. Very multi layered. It is a muliti modal text.

I joined this group on classroom displays about eighteen months ago and it only had about twelve pictures for a-a-a-a–ages. Now it has a healthy 268 - and a blog and some good discussions. A sign of the times, because Flickr now has in excess of two million members. It is hardly a surprise that teachers are using it to network.

It turns out there are so many groups for teachers on Flickr and quite a few of the groups have associated blogs.

This one (of course) appeals to me - the New York City Writing Project. If you look in the discussion forums you will see they meet in real space and are really getting to support each other in exciting work. Fab.

David farmer’s drama blog gives this useful link today to a FREE BOOK about blogging.

Like ‘Anon’, I have done two posts today.

By the way …. referring to my title of this post …. This is how Jennifer defines multimodality:

in NYC a week or so ago was so exciting. That is to say, there were people that I was in contact with on the Flickr website who I met in meat space NYC while on my week there.
What I found really amazing about meeting the people was HOW RIGHT we were (TT and I) in thinking we would get on well. We had felt pretty confident, as we had seen people’s photos and been talking with them online about their stuff and ours for a number of months. Photos are pretty revealing about people’s lives and values and interests even if they are not intimate or in domestic/ personal settings.

But what was amazing was exactly how similar we are … our expectations were surpassed. We were people who were all interested in ideas, in education, in writing. We did not know what anyone’s job was before we went, but we met teachers and journalists (and other writers) , social workers and people who were in careers advice. So similar to the work we both do. Of course we do not use such crude criteria for assessing whether we like people or not, but we were amazed at how somehow, we had managed to sift through all the possibilities on Flickr and use our social knowledge and habits and lingiuistic rituals to find ‘people like us’ with similar values and life expectancies and lifestyles. It made me realise how much unconscious work we do all the time with our antennae detecting who we will talk with and who we will pass by. They were people who go to the theatre and visit photography and art exhibitions … but somehow it was more than this. We ‘clicked’.

When we talked about this we agreed that on Flickr we like to communicate with people whose photos we like; who make ‘good comments’ and who respond to remarks, who reciprocated similar behaviours. I am sure it is the quality of the comments that were key - Niznoz said for example that he liked witty, clever comments. I think that humour is something that we use to convey our values - what we like, dislike etc. There are linguistic rituals I think we take part in that help us make judgements. I need to look into this. Want to think about this more. We have fun on Flickr and really sift through the people.

We were looked after by people who gave up whole days to take us round their favourite bits of the city, or to show us things they thought we would be interested in. Other days we spent on our own. The shots I took below reflect interests I have newly developed since going on Flickr - looking at streetart is not something I was previously interested in. But the habit of walking round with my camera all the time has made me aware of the things in cities I used to ignore. And what was once the background, has become foregrounded in my eyes as I walk the streets. I am developing a wider range of perspectives to look at the world through…. My world is changing so tyhat what was at the back is now at the front …

The first work here is from SWOON, who does really elaborate murals, paste ups with incredible detail. (Look at the skill in the detail, in the art.) This one is on chinese newspaper:

These are details of the girl’s face and hand:

There is so much stuff hidden about in spaces as here:

Look behind the bars: (hatemail)

I saw so omuch unconventional art that when I came across this I did not know if it was an urban street installation, or just a bike(!):

This kind of thing really amused me - Jesus with a cup of tea (or is a mocha?) next to surveillance cameras and a light. I like to think that the three are connected somehow under the title of ‘enlightenment’ or ‘all seeing’.

More photos are here.

I will continue to upload what I have got - but in the meantime life goes on and I accumulate pictures daily of what is happening here.

I belong to so many Flickr groups now, and I like to keep involved with them all. Life online feels so busy and it is all becoming very complex now that even more of it is merging so much with every aother aspect of my world.

Does everyone else feel the same? So many blogs to read; pictures to see. Things to write and respond to.

Then there’s the day job.

I need to be much more selective, that’s for sure. And THAT is a thing we have to teach about all this online stuff. Select and pick a way through.