United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) 2005 Research Day - Digital Literacies

The United Kingdom Literacy Association's 41st Annual Conference takes place July 8-10 in Bath. Already, a great programme is emerging which includes speakers such as Barbara Comber, Eve Gregory, Suaib Meacham and Eve Bearne.

Of particular interest to those of us researching and teaching in the field of digital literacies is the 2005 Research Day preceding the conference on the 7th July. This is titled "Digital Literacies" and will include as speakers - Mizuko Ito, Keri Facer, Carey Jewitt, Julian Sefton-Green and Valerie Walkdine. Each of these speakers is researching at the cutting edge of the implications of digital technologies for identity and literate practices. Registration and further information can be found at www.ukla.org

Looking forward to seeing you there in 2005.

Online games, digital literacy and identity

Digital texts and their particular affordances are fascinating. This is a screen capture of an online game called "Mucha Lucha" which is based on a hugely popular (but admittedly strange) Warner Brothers masked wrestling themed animation of the same name. While amusing, it is at the same time instructive of the ways in which young people can now understand themselves and their access to the world outside home, school and local community.

To play this small online game, one goes to the site, constructs a wrestler (in the same way that any avatar is constructed from a limited range of stylistic options) and then waits for someone else to enter the arena and agree to a wrestling match.

Out in the world beyond the computer screen, another person has also constructed a wrestler and chosen to enter the online wrestling arena. Although this person is anonymous and known only by their avatar and self-chosen wrestling name (i am known to my fans as "The Tick" -- a name sure to create terror in all adversaries) s/he represents a living, breathing person somewhere else in the world with which I can interact in a shared virtual space and shared enterprise. Suddenly, i am no longer limited to my loungroom or neighbourhood. I am a citizen of a wider world who shares skills, knowledge and practices with others outside my immediate sphere.

One of the consequences of the rapid shift to digital technologies has been the ways in which children and young people are increasingly able to gain access to other people across the world. Issues of time, distance and economic capacity are no longer the same kinds of limiting factors they once were. Children in Australia are able to engage with the young (and not so young) in Poland, Singapore, Ukraine, America and many places in between. This kind and speed of access was unimaginable even ten years ago.

This seemingly simple shift, represented here in this one online game, has profound implications for literacy educators, particulary those of us who work in primary and early childhood settings. Where once, childhood texts were easily monitored and regulated and interactions with those outside home and school were limited, this is no longer the case for increasing numbers of children. These children have new skill sets, new views of themselves as active participants in a range of virtual and physical social sites, and new expectations of how and why they might manipulate text. As educators, how are we to respond? The debates are ongoing.

Call for Papers - Digital Literacies

Digital technologies are increasingly of interest to those of us working in education, particulary those with an interest in young people and literacy. The journal "Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education" (Taylor & Francis) is publishing a special edition to foreground the best research, theoretical work and classroom practice related to digital literacies.

Here's the Call for Papers. If you're working in this area, you should consider submitting a paper. Note that the deadline for submission is the 21st December 2004.

Video Games in the Classroom?

Video/Computer games, and those who play them, are increasingly a topic of research across a range of academic fields including media studies, sociology and education. It is no longer automatically assumed that gamers are the stereotypical 80s male teenager, sitting alone in the dark. As well, it is no longer assumed that games require a limited set of hand-eye coordinations and rapid response skills. Instead, there is a rich and growing knowledge base around the complex blends of skills, knowledge and social practices involved in interactions with video/computer games. This growing awareness and interest can be seen in this online discussion run by The Chronicle.

New textual landscapes - Victoria Carrington

In the 1950s, Harold Innes (1950, 1951) noted that changes in communicationstechnologies alter the structure of thoughts, the character of symbols and the nature of community. That is, changes in the ways in which we are able to communicateimpact what we think about, the tools we use to think, and the context in which we do this thinking, in effect changes how we see ourselves in the world and the waysin which that world operates. Importantly, Innes (1951) also described a link between the emergence of new communications technologies and the capacity forindividuals and groups to engage with and potentially reshape dominant discourses. In this chapter, I suggest that these shifts and the challenges created bythem are not the exclusive domain of adults. In fact, the more far-reaching consequences of changes in communications technologies are to be seen in theirimpact on children.

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Texts and literacies of the Shi Jinrui - Victoria Carrington

In post-industrial societies saturated with the multimodal texts of consumer culture--film, computer games, interactive toys, SMS, email, the internet, television, DVDs—young people are developing literacy skills and knowledge in and for a worldsignificantly changed from that of their parents and educators. Given this context, this paper seeks to demonstrate the necessity of rethinking and extending traditionalnotions of text and literacy and, considering the social and cultural implications of such a shift.

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"I'm in a bad mood. Let's go shopping" - Victoria Carrington

This article examines the significance of Diva Starz, a new line of interactive dolls aimed at young girls between 6 and 11 years for current models of literacy. It argues that these dolls have much to tell us about the construction of children as consumers, our views about 'childhood', and the models of literacy instruction most appropriate for giving children the skills and knowledge needed to deal with the complex pedagogic texts characteristic of childhood in contemporary consumer culture.

Published in Journal of Early Childhood Literacy Volume 03 Issue 01 - Publication Date: 04/2003

Reading, Homes and Families: From Postmodern to Modern? - Carrington & Luke

New economic, social and cultural conditions have begun to alter the patterns of home/school transitions in two ways: first, by shifting the normative definitions of family in postindustrial communities and economies; and second, by shifting the basis of preschool linguistic and literate socialization from longstanding print culture to emergent, complex blendings of multiliteracies that engage digital and media texts. Our claim here is that for many children the normative site for storybook reading–the family–is changing, that the texts and discourses of home and community-based literacy practices are changing, and therefore, that the background knowledge, expertise, and habitus that children bring from home to school are also in transition. The cases we describe model new patterns of identity and practice at work in the early childhood classroom–patterns for which a generation of print-trained and acculturated teachers have limited explanatory schemata other than those related to "deficit."

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Troubling Practice - Victoria Carrington, Jane Mitchell, Shaun Rawolle and Agli Zavros (eds)

For many, the contemporary era is troubling. To find one's way in these challenging times is increasingly complex and requires new ways of thinking about academe, culture, society, methodology, ourselves. Researchers and theorists find they must transcend traditional boundaries as they attempt to account for and respond to these challenges. The papers in this collection reflect these issues as they set out to analyse, interrogate, describe, examine, 'unpack', disturb, and explain the practice of educational research and/or the educational practices under investigation.

Published by Post Pressed

Globalisation, literacy, curriculum practice - Luke & Carrington

What is the relationship between economic and cultural globalisation and everyday literacy practices for teachers and students in the stolid 20th century institution, the state primary school? What happens when the very institution that was designed for the propagation of print literacy, for the transmission of encyclopedic knowledge, for the inculcation of industrial behaviours, for the development of the postwar citizen, for the domestication of diversity into monocultural identity — the technology of the modern state par excellence — faces the borderless flows and ‘scapes’ of information and image, bodies and capital? And, no less important, what might happen if we engage in a momentary suspension of belief in current policy-driven preoccupations with pedagogical method, with decoding and basic skills — and ask a larger curriculum question: Within the existing walls and wires, capillaries and conventions of the school how might we construct a literacy education that addresses new economic and cultural formations?

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