electro-textual

Very exciting news!
PageTurners series 4 has arrived.

Anne Dunn, Chris Malakar and Moira Hanrahan have done it again, produced a delightful collection of funny and engaging stories for beginning adult readers all around the world.

pageturners.prace.vic.edu.au

My personal favourite stories in the new series 4 are:

• Can you read this? – about a woman returning to learning,
• Tooth Fairy – about a woman in a retirement home who loves to be helpful, and
• Red Dog – a true story about a wandering dog in Western Australia.

The fun part for me is that i got to do the layout on one of the books this time, which means learning about scanning images for print (black and white not greyscale, i discovered after the first draft). Yes i got to publish Moira’s book about the Tooth Fairy, which is hilarious!

i’m also working on editing the website and the audio books, which will be up next week sometime. The style sheets on the website need some tweaking because it’s all a bit grey at the moment, whereas the books themselves are very lively and colourful.

i always forget how finicky and time-consuming the whole web development thing can be, when you’re editing CSS style sheets, PHP includes, Dreamweaver templates etc etc, and constantly uploading and re-uploading to try and get things exactly right. But the perfectionist in me loves that repetitious kind of thoroughness. i bet there’s a few mistakes in there still.

We also need a shopping cart of some kind, because it’s ridiculous asking people to print and fax PDF documents in this day and age! It’s the shopping cart that could be most challenging i think, although there are plenty of open source options around.

Anne’s keen to have a blog on the site for regular updates, so we’ve installed wordpress.. but haven’t published that section to the world  yet. And one of the books is now out of print, so we’re talking about making that an online multimedia / audio book instead.

Have you ordered your copies of PageTurners series 4 yet?

Certificate of General Education for Adults (CGEA) level 3 is considered “foundation level training”, under the new regime.

However, Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) Intermediate is considered “Skills Creation”, and comes under a different set of funding criteria.

The fact that i’m struggling with here is that intermediate VCAL is based on CGEA level 3. In many respects they are the same.

If you already have a Certificate 2 in Anything, the Victorian government will fund your study of the CGEA 3.. but they will not fund you to study the VCAL intermediate. Apparently.

i’m confused.

i’m not alone in that.

i’ve heard that the briefing meetings are full of officials who say things like, “i’ll have to take that question on notice”, because even they can’t find their way around the morass of contradictory regulations.

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The real catch with this new “demand-driven” policy framework is that the government will fund their demanding citizens to study only one course at any certificate level above “foundation” (ie above certificate 2). If you have done a certificate 2 in horticulture, you will not be funded to re-train in hospitality, unless you can start at certificate level 3.

Even if you can only get 2 days work gardening and you need to supplement with some evening bar work, and your gardening income is all going on the massive Melbourne rental rates, or you’re living in a boarding house where the operators are taking all your invalid pension and more.

One bite of the cherry.

No more life-long learning.

User pays. And pays. Or is left at the bottom of the heap.

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For those who don’t already know, the Victorian adult education sector is grappling with a new funding regime. Adult Community and Further Education (ACFE) has been quartered (its funding reduced to 25%), and Adult Community Education (ACE) organisations must now go through “Skills Victoria” to fund their accredited programs (the ones that lead to official “competency-based” certificates recognised by official training boards).

For many years, ACFE has pushed the ACE sector toward accredited training, away from the non-accredited programs* – now known as “pre-accredited” training. Now they’re pushing the other way, because it’s the only kind of training they’re allowed to fund.

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Good on the Victorian government for attempting to change the sector. Change can be really good when it’s informed by compassion, understanding and the need for balance. Maybe there is a need for change here:

• Maybe there are some unscrupulous education providers who take the money and don’t deliver. [They're in the minority.]
• Perhaps some Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutes smudge the funding a little, by packing classes so full that people withdraw, but still taking the money for all who enrolled.
• Perhaps some ACE providers need to think about expanding their funding options, and increasing their full-fee-paying loads.
• Perhaps some students keep studying for years without returning to work, because they’re lazy and incompetent. [Most are struggling with our "post-capitalistic" economy which is increasingly weighted against people with low-level education.]

However this set of changes is giving every impression of being a massively foul bungled operation, with rules that exist only inside the heads of whichever operative you ask at the time.

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(*Non-accredited programs have traditionally been denigrated by economic hard-heads in blue suits as airy fairy macrame and water aerobics for middle class retired citizens.. however these pre-accredited programs are accurately recognised by community development workers and adult literacy and basic education (ALBE) teachers as vital to strengthening community cohesion and providing a means for disadvantaged and marginalised people to re-connect with community, employment options, as well as their own ability to learn.)

[These statements do not reflect the opinions of my employer or any of my colleagues. i wouldn’t want to suggest for a moment that the ACE sector is seething with rage.

In fact the Victorian ACE sector is well versed in responding to change and adversity with an extraordinary level of level-headed creativity and flexibility.

Some people have said that this could be a time of great opportunity for organisations prepared to be creative and flexible.

Okay fine the glass is half full.

But why is the glass locked in a glass cabinet?

..and who set the glass on fire?

Links:

• AceVic response to the initial reform proposals
• Skills Victoria, formerly known as OTFE or office of training and further education
• Adult Community and Further Education (ACFE)
• (ACFE is now part of the former Department of Victorian communities (DVC), currently known as Dept of Planning and community development (DPCD))
• The AQF is the Australian qualifications framework, from which we derive all the information about certificate levels: (a) direct link (b) on wikipedia
• Photo credits: (creative commons at flickr) Thanks:  photo credit: roberthuffstutter,  photo credit: Jeremy Brooks, photo credit: ?ellie?

Wendell the Canadian adult literacy blogger recently had me thinking about the nature of hope, and also hopelessness.

He wrote recently, in “Pedagogies for the Oppressed” about how the adult literacy learners in his classroom became interested in public affairs, during the Obama Hope campaign, and enthusiastically studied the stories of the US civil rights movement. However now that enthusiasm has faded and been replaced by a more familiar apathy or even cynicism.

In my experience, adult literacy learners often have a sense of helplessness in the face of public affairs (don’t we all!) This usually expresses itself in a lack of interest. It’s one of the ironies of modern democracy, that most people wind up feeling disempowered and apathetic.

What was amazing to me was the way Obama’s election stirred so much positive regard around the world, and yes the US civil rights movement became like a beacon of possibility.

It’s inspiring that Wendell’s learners were so interested at the time.

He’s right though, over time, unless people are actively involved in some local community action.. they’ll start to see that high-level politicking as out of their reach and irrelevant once again. Paulo Freire was very much about using literacy to get people actively involved in taking local action for change.

i’ve never found it easy to inspire learners into community action.

But back in the days when the “employability skills” were known as the General curriculum options (GCO) of the Certificate of General Education for Adults (CGEA).. learning activities based around community action could be matched to the certificates reasonably well. Community action could be relevant not only in people’s lives, but also to their accreditation and literacy learning processes.

i wonder if that’s still the case..

One thing i found inspiring about the ‘08 US campaign was the way that Obama’s people trained about 11,000 local community activists in the ways of taking action. So that the election win would not be just about change in Washington, but also enabling local change in communities across the nation.

(Or am i imagining that? i can find no reference to it among the anti-socialist bile washing through the US internet airwaves.)

You’re so right Wendell, pinning your hopes on a distant leader won’t wash in the long run.

People need to get active in their community to feel really empowered.

So, how do we make that happen..?

Links:

• Wendell’s Qualities Literacies Communities blogspot
• His post on “Pedagogies and the Oppressed“
• photo credit: JSmith Photo
• photo credit: JSmith Photo

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)?