electro-textual

That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing all my data…

How many times do i have to learn the lesson: don’t use your portable USB drive as your only backup option, even if it does have over 300Gb of space on it. This is the 3rd time in 2 years i’ve had a USB portable drive collapse under the pressure of.. ordinary daily use.

Windows tells me there’s a “read/write error” and suddenly that 160Gb of precious data is unavailable. Corrupt. Vanished. Collections of software, videos, backup data from various work projects.. plus many articles relating to digital literacies and e-learning.

Aaaagh.

Boo.

Time to send the disk off to a data recovery shop?

Reminds me of a double-page spread once featured in the Age Green Guide, where 3 writers told of their dramas with backup, lessons learned, and the software apps they’d decided to trust with their weekly backup shifts. They all recommended apple mac time machine, from memory.

The 4th article said basically, “Don’t worry about it, you’re going to lose all your data at some point, stop hoarding information, and stop being so attached to it.”

After the fact, that 4th article was the most useful with its Zen, non-technical approach.

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Post-script:

The other day my home windows machine refused to boot, so i loaded kubuntu Linux from a USB stick – which worked perfectly. Strangely enough, this operating system could see all the data on that portable USB drive that failed last year. The one that neither windows nor mac could read.

Hooray.

Recovery.

Thanks Ubuntu Linux!!

The other week, my review was published in VALBEC’s Fine Print Journal, reminding me that i promised to write more about some of the chapters in Lankshear & Knobel’s “Digital Literacies”. So..

Another chapter focusses on the global phenomenon that is e-Bay. i confess i know barely anything about e-bay. i am not an insider. The closest i’ve come to using it was in 2008 when the Reservoir literacy group went in to search for furniture, and one of the students tried to sell her hair extensions. That was an adventure!

In chapter 10, “Pay and Display – the digital literacies of online shoppers”,  Julia Davies examines the multiple literacies involved and talks about:

1. “insider-liness”,
2. identity work,
3. value construction, and
4. the multi-modal narratives of objects.

Davies states that authenticity of narrative and characterisation count a lot in e-Bay product descriptions, as sellers work toward making powerful texts. If you want to sell your goods, and maintain positive relationships (the reliability rating!) it’s crucial to have:

• a consistent tone,
• apparent honesty and
• a direct approach.

“Literacy is about more than accuracy” (spelling mistakes don’t really matter if you have the other elements, she implies). Being an insider is important for developing relationships and understanding the cultural values – the language of this place. Davies conducted group interviews with insiders for her research, and concluded that the values of e-Bay include: authenticity, trust, reputation and the notion of community.

There are social practices around the trading, which could be called “new literacies”. As literacy practices contain social aspects, their meanings are shaped by socio-cultural matters. Not only this, but ”texts are socio-cultural constructs”, and ”literacy is primarily something people do”.

Davies shows there are plenty of literacy skills required to participate (and provides a good and useful list, on p235).

Objects and Desires

This idea i found interesting, that: buying and selling is not only about the intrinsic value of the object, but also about “taking part in an unfolding dramatic narrative”. People purchase “the symbolic value of goods and involvement in narrative”, and material goods become semantically significant through their social history. By purchasing an item, you become part of the ongoing narrative.

Investigating the d/Discourses of the environment, Davies notes there are socially agreed “ways of being” – e-bay is a “specific discursive space, comprising multimodal discourses”: if you’re a “real eBayer” then you follow these discursive practices. This includes the importance of ratings and feedback.

discourse of Community

Community is claimed as a primary value by the marketers behind the corporation, it’s included in set of values where e-Bay addresses people as “you”, implying shared ownership. There are systems in place to support these values, eg discussion boards.

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That’s all i’ve got for now on this chapter.

i wonder if it’ll help me next time i need to help a student sell their hair extensions.. ?

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(PS: yes, Davies really gets into that academic distinction between discourse and Discourse, as set up by James Gee (?), where small d discourse is the language patterns and social practices, and Capital D Discourse is the entire social space and all the embodied literacies.)

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photo credit: (creative commons at flickr) Thanks: danielbroche, and lciewf too.

Whenever i glance over the shoulders of anyone on a computer in this place, i see red lines where they shouldn’t be.

Microsoft word telling people, “You’re wrong!”

“Neighbourhood House” gets a big red wiggly line.

Which for literacy students is frustrating, and for an anti-imperialist language purist like me is infuriating.

How hard is it for a tech department to set the default language to Local, ie Australian English??! Why should the tech department have to do it anyway.. microsoft knows everything about us, and we’ve told windows exactly where in the world the computer lives.

How hard is it for Word and Publisher to get this information automatically from Windoze??

Very very hard, it seems.

So how much more frustrating when i discover the same issue on my own computer.. and realise that i can’t even blame the tech department! It’s me who manages the errors on this machine.

Oops.

Now i genuinely can’t work out how to tell microsoft Publisher to set the default as Australian English.

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..and the other thing i hate (rant, rant, rant).. those green “grammar” lines. Some tech-head from microsoft telling our language and literacy students what good grammar is.

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Grrr.

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So how did your word processor irritate you today?

For the first stage of our project evaluation (the “flexivet” project for flexible delivery in ACE), we had paper-based evaluation forms. This was fine.. until i realised it meant i would be the one to input the data into a spreadsheet. Yawn.

So i’ve set up a form at google docs.. which inputs directly into the spreadsheet. We’ve embedded the form on the student wiki, and linked to it from all over the place.

Delightful!

Just a couple of problems..

1) Several students don’t realise they haven’t fully completed the form.. because the big red “You Haven’t Finished Yet” sign appears at the TOP of the form, a couple of scrolls up from where they submit. So all that feedback gets wasted.

Made a note near the “submit” button to let people know. Hope the language is accessible enough for English as a second language (ESL) learners.

2) Can’t seem to delete test responses from the hidden internal records that the google form is keeping in the background. Yes i’ve deleted test rows from the spreadsheet.. but they seem to stay in memory. Hmm.

Anyone have the answer to this one (2)?

English spelling is probably the worst nightmare of anyone involved in adult literacy – teachers and learners. The biggest challenge for any learner is to find out how they can learn: which strategies might work for each individual. i like spelling games, but i’ve yet to find the perfect example.

Recently Larry Ferlazzo reviewed a small program, “Take on the Teacher” ..it’s an interesting idea, with mixed results:

• => This one has a highly visual interface which is potentially engaging,
• => however it’s a strange characterisation of the teacher at the board (why pretend the visitor is challenging a teacher, when we are clearly taking on a computer program?)
• => and you’re right.. spelling programs need both audio and context (either visual or the classic “in a sentence”). Without context, words can have multiple meanings.. or be meaningless.

i was caught out on the word “baul”. i managed to select this word correctly as the incorrectly-spelled word.. but i was unsure if they wanted me to write “ball” or “bawl” as the correct version. Given that “tantrum” was in the list, i chose “bawl” (to cry loudly).

Wrong! Says the “teacher”. Surely a teacher would have more insight and flexibility than this machine script.

Dear reader, do you have any favourite screen-based spelling games? Applications that are less faulty than “take on the teacher”?

thanks and kind regards, michael

Links:

• Take on the Teacher Game, c/- someone in the UK (Scholastic? very hard to find their front page from this game)
• Larry Ferlazzo on “Learning Games“

Well the organisation may be upgrading to windos7 and MS office ‘07.. but i’m jumping ship.

Migrate to “The Ribbon“? Send people “docx” files that word’03 can’t open? i say no. (Ironically Open Office can open these word 2007 files, even though microsoft office 2003 cannot.)

• For operating system, i’ll try Linux and apple.
• For an office suite, i’ll continue to learn Open Office and google docs. Open Office has a portable version i can run from the USB drive.

Every time microsoft upgrades, they try to make life easier for newbies, and end up making things more annoying and difficult for people who know what we’re doing.

This can be liberating however, as i’m compelled to find alternatives.

For example, when i upgraded to microsoft office ‘03, the program disabled all my macros and keyboard shortcuts. Yes the company promised an easy conversion but it just didn’t work. So i’ve ended up switching all my “auto-text” shortcuts to “AutoHotkey“.. which means i can now use them in any windows program, on any windows PC. i have gained much freedom and power as a result.

Next step: find a way to export the list cross-platform so i can use them on apple mac and linux as well. Open office runs on all platforms.. maybe there’s a way to export AutoHotkey scripts too.

My ideal situation is not to be tied to any one physical computer, or any particular operating system.

However, i’m sure in time i’ll have to use windows 7 at work. And i suppose i’ll get used to it. i’ll probably learn to enjoy it.

Eyes Roll.

photo credit: Jason DeRusha

So we’re approaching the final sprint of this flexivet project for the e-learning innovations part of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework.

One of our major difficulties has been different versions of office software. Moreland Adult Education uses microsoft office 2007, while PRACE and Carlton NLC use 2003. On top of that, students at Carlton are primarily English as a second language (ESL).. with more urgent needs for simple and accessible language.

Great.

How do we build a shared resource when each organisation has such different needs? We decide to make or find screencasts for multiple versions of each skill set.

Then we find out – here at PRACE – that our tech department has decided to upgrade to microsoft office 2007 next year. Should have seen that coming, eh!! Now Soheir is caught between needing to make screencasts for her current students, and wanting to make resources that are useful into the future.

We’ve decided she’ll make the screencasts for office ‘07.. and we can use them to help staff make the adjustment too.

Okay good.

Then there’s the navigation issues.

On the student site, originally we had thought to organise by skill, and each page (eg how to print) could have multiple applications (eg word ‘03, word ‘07, Open Office etc). But people felt that students would get too confused. It’s hard enough for people just beginning to learn technology to navigate a web site.. we have to make it as simple as possible.

So now we’ve decided to organise the navigation by application.

Still on track, yes.. still getting things done (GTD).

Nervously looks at clock..