electro-textual

Finally!

i’ve ploughed my way through Lankshear & Knobel’s “Digital Literacies: concepts, policies and practices.” (2008)

Yes i’ve been reading it all year, but the final onslaught took me 4 days of sitting inside, during my holiday from work.. when the springtime sun was shining outside. How do i always manage to forget that academic reading can be horribly difficult!! If you’re out of practice, you need to diligently take notes on every page.. or you may as well not have read it.

Anyway, it’s done now, handed over to Tricia the Editor of Fine Print at Valbec (Victorian Adult Literacy and Basic Education Council).. where it will hopefully appear in the Spring 2009 edition (Spring ‘09 Vol 32 No. 3).

..and in spite of the painstaking nature of wading through Academic Guff, some interesting ideas in the book, particularly:

• Allan Martin on “digital literacy & the digital society” (ch7)
• Julie Davies on eBay: “Pay and Display – the digital literacies of online shoppers” (ch10);
• Colin and Michele the editors on Facebook: “Digital Literacy and Participation in Online Social Networking Spaces”, which i’ve written about already on this site (ch11);

Okay, back to work now.

Ann H, one of the amazing ACE e-learning practitioners on the research circles adventure, wrote that she had had some progress with blogs and wikis in her classroom. But the learners weren’t so happy with the look of a wiki, they wanted something more like a print-style magazine.

A couple of ideas emerged for someone wanting the “look and feel” of a magazine.

1) the visual book (“MyEbook“)that Dale looked at a few weeks back
2) a site called Issuu gets good reviews: example showing optical illusions.

(That second review is worth a look, as it asks the question, “how web2 is an on-screen magazine?”)

You need to upload PDF files into Issuu, but you can turn any document into a PDF via the pdfCreator printer driver.

What about going for a digital story approach: use the images and voiceover to accompany the (separate) text version – make the web and print versions different and complementary (?). Alan Levine has 50 ways to tell a story using web2.

Some other “flip-book” or apps for embedding magazine-style documents include:

=> scribd can embed many different kinds of documents into a wiki (first upload into scribd, then paste the “embed code” onto your wiki page),
=> slideshare turns different kinds of presentation slides (eg powerpoint, openoffice impress, osx keynote) into web-based presentations .. and you can also add voiceovers! Here’s an example:

Remember Delia’s brilliant session at the e-showcase, “The power of e” ..?

good luck, michael

photo credit: cammy?claudia

Very exciting news for me: a book landed on my doorstep.

“Digital Literacies” edited by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel. Lynne and Sarah from Valbec’s “Fine Print” very kindly asked me to review it.

The introduction sets out their agenda: Colin and Michele were looking for writers who would expound upon the notion of digital literacies as social practice, because:

• there is a huge diversity of understandings of “digital literacy”, which has an impact on policy around digital literacy;
• socio-cultural perspectives on “literacy as practice” are strong and useful, in their conception of literacies in the plural, and therefore we are better off to conceive of digital literacies in the plural; and
• it will be beneficial to adopt an “expansive view of digital literacies” in the frame of educational learning (p2).

Already it looks an interesting read, especially (for me) the chapters on Mashup and social networking cultures, eg the editors’ own chapter which focuses on the social practices of the world of facebook.

Links:

• The Book on the Peter Lang publisher site;
• The Book on Amazon;
• Fine Print at the Victorian Adult Literacy and Basic Education Council (VALBEC);
• michael’s wishlist on Amazon  ;-]