electro-textual

At the recent ACE e-showcase, Michael Gwyther from YUM productions gave a great account of how they have used web2 technologies in one of their multimedia courses. Here’s the list of tools they’ve used:

1. Blog
2. Social Bookmarks (delicious)
3. RSS Feeds
4. Podomatic
5. Slideshare
6. Flickr
7. Video
8. RSS Feed reader! (Bloglines)

The key for Michael is RSS feeds. As multiple students post their course reflections and assignments to their blog, he is able to read the updates from a single place .. his RSS feed reader.

For a feed reader, i like google reader, but michael prefers bloglines. (There are so many options.)

Whatever works for you and your learners is the best choice!

i liked michael’s comment that when most people hear the word “feed” they think oats and hay.

Here are some of the web addresses michael handed out:

• Class blog: c2mm.blogspot.com
• Gwyther social bookmarks delicious.com/mgwyther
• Class podcast: elearn.podomatic.com

Plus (mildly related):

• here’s my own “shared items” from google reader,
• and my “social” bookmarks on delicious (which isn’t really very social).

PS: What exactly is RSS? => i have some notes over on my wikispace.
This video from Common Craft is also one of the best explanations around:

PS i’m sorry i refuse to say web 2.0. It’s a waste of time. We’re not getting web 2.1, so for me it’s just web2. Okay?

photo credit: Colleen AF Venable

Interesting to read stories from an adult literacy worker in Canada. Wendell Dryden is “a poet, painter, literacy worker .. writing in Saint John, New Brunswick.” He’s written a few times now about using the Page Turners easy reader series in his adult literacy classroom.

Just now he’s posted an interesting piece about “guided reading” .. or finding the right book for the adult learner at the right time. A good overview of which texts he uses for each level, eg:

• Grass Roots (canada) and Page Turners for the real beginners, then
• Macmillan and Heinemann readers for people,
• Janet Dailey romance and New Readers press,
• Grass Roots press biographies,
• Saddleback classics .. and then
• people might be ready for actual books – that haven’t been especially re-written for learners.

Interesting because at PRACE, there’s a few teachers who’ve put considerable effort into maintaining a student library (box of books); and who would have a similar knowledge about which books for which learners.

Wendell writes a few posts about Page Turners:

• Guided reading with adult literacy learners
• Reading is not a card game
• More Page Turners
• The Beach

The POV wearable computers in my earlier post had me thinking about how technologies might be integrated more closely with human bodies in future. Not only portable, but wearable.

i stumbled upon a TED talks video which demonstrates a new wearable computer-like device. Camera and projector work together with your phone to create touch screens anywhere, linked in with the “hive mind” (portable projection).

.. or you can download it yourself from their site.

Fantasy and technology continue to converge.

In this charming “World Builder” video, a man builds a world out of nothing, using controls that pop up magically in his hands. (It’s worth watching til the end.) Could this be how we control technologies in the (not-too-distant) future?

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

i found the World Builder via Sean Fitzgerald, a brilliant e-learning leader and podcaster who loves games like Open Sim and Civilisation (i think).

.. also referred to by Stephen who focusses on the extraordinary levels of creativity enabled by “portability, diversity, sharing, and expression” (which are in turn enabled by emerging technologies).

Reminds me also of the amazing new touch screen technology from Jeff Han (also on TED) .. which is now more a part of everyday life thanks to the iPod Touch and its many relatives.

I wrote about that one on my b.log in ’07. Here’s the video again if you haven’t seen it.

More and more, we’re moving away from the limited understanding of a computer interface being keyboard + mouse at a desk.

Can’t wait.

Great initiative via Leigh Blackall over in Otago, NZ. He and Michael and Alex have been experimenting with a wild new concept known as the Point of View (POV) camera. Worn on glasses, or on a head torch, the gadget allows you to video exactly what you’re doing, hands-free.

Not sure whether it has audio recording built in yet. (Check: yes it does.)

What also caught my eye (and my similarity radar) was an article on Wired, where the law enforcement agencies are investigating similar options .. a wearable computer, with head-mounted video camera. This gadget is a full computer, running Linux, with enough disk space to store all the video from one day. (double check that, eh?)

Given the Wired headline, “Don’t Tape me Bro“, i’m including the mashup video from ’07: “Don’t Tase me Bro” .. a classic multimedia news remix.

ooh. $590. Perhaps not this week.

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Extra Link: speaking of mashups: an earlier session: Jo Kay on the MashUp.

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Just had a great meeting with the one and only Lynne Gibb from Coonara House. We started out in the new Access ACE Victorian elluminate room .. moved across to a new wiki near the e-showcase ACFE wiki .. and then realised we couldn’t edit the same wiki page at the same time.

So moved over to google docs, where it was easier to collaborate, because the system is set up to auto-save the work of all people editing. Really great to watch someone else typing as they talk you through the changes .. or rather to see the text arrive in the document at the same time. Good to know that when i save, i won’t accidentally overwrite Lynne’s words.

At the end we decided that we hadn’t really needed the Elluminate session (although it was a good place to start), but could have used Skype + Google docs to talk each other through the collaborative editing process.

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image and photo credits: licensed under creative commons at flickr: Thanks very much: martianmermaid

Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s (L&K) own chapter in their book “digital literacies” investigates the social networking site Facebook in the light of multiple literacies. Within that environment, literacies have a strong tendency to be “relational” rather than informational.

Hence the “super-poke” is all about connecting with a friend or colleague rather than transmitting any particular information. Membership in “groups” signals identity, but may not involve any actual communication or participation within the group.

Previous studies into social networking include: network theory, signaling theory, human geography theory, social contract theory, and the sociology of groups. Not much on literacies. Except Dan Perkel who examines MySpace usage from a “socio-technical” perspective. For him, “new representational forms” where people re-use many different kinds of media, signal “a deep shift” in the way we interact with each other.

L&K aim to bring their “sociocultural lens” into the investigation ..  as they highlight how people’s identities are constructed as members of Discourses “through the medium of encoded text”. Via boyd & Ellison, the authors note that social networking sites represent shift in way that online communications are organised: “around people not interests”. Online fora of the 80′s & 90′s tended to focus on issues or common topics .. now “the individual is at the center (sic) of their own community”.

So they examine Facebook in this light. Multiple literacies involve:

a) socially recognised ways of “generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content as members of Discourses through the medium of encoded tetxs.” Drawing on Scribner and Cole (’81): “literacy as social practice”: ie:

• “socially developed and patterned ways of using technology and knowledge to accomplish tasks”
• pursuing “socially recognised goals” (collecting facebook friends, connecting with people)
• making use of “shared technology and knowledge system” (status updates, applications)

b) meaningful content

• “if there is no text there is no literacy” (Dang who thought up that idea.)
• loose approach to “meaningful content” .. “much weight on the complexity and richness of the relationship between (new) literacies and “ways of being together in the world”"

eg on a blog, meaning is intricately related to our perception of the writer’s identity.

• A text could be understood as expressing the writer’s desire to feel connected .. not as literal information.
• The meaning could be completely relational .. “expressing solidarity or affinity”

c) encoded texts

• meaning: texts freed from context and origin .. “frozen or captured” .. where the text can exist independently of its human creator.
• literacy goes beyond alphabetic symbols .. and can include eg photoshopping an image without text (!!)

d) participation in Discourses
The underlying meaning .. where people are “situated selves”, in socio-cultural context .. of life. Our social, physical, mental behaviours .. as we interact with “non-human elements” like tools, vehicles, buildings, institutions etc

“Meaning-making draws on knowledge of Discourses; that is, on insider perspectives, and meaning-making thus often goes beyond what is “literally” in the sign.” (p257) In this way, facebook represents a giant Discourse, a socio-cultural environment for insiders to connect.

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“Textual life of networks”
They go on to examine 2 people’s social networking practices, and the “textual life of networks”.

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Phew! it wasn’t such a struggle to make sense of the “theorisation” of Facebook, was it!
There is more to this chapter, but i’m exhausted and had to take a break.

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photo credit: John Swords