Anne Dunn wrote a story called “Red Dog” a few years ago for the PageTurners series of books for beginning adult readers. I don’t know why she’s not getting any royalties from the movie. Apparently someone else wrote the same story for a different audience.

Anyway, both books are based on the true-to-life story of a dog who travelled the highways of Western Australia for many years. This dog would hitch a ride quite regularly. This is one of my favourite PageTurners stories, and i’ve heard the movie is good too.

Technical web design gripe: The whole thing reminded me that i said i would try to find a way to automatically connect the PageTurners blog with the PageTurners website. Hm, so i tried Alan Levine’s old rss2js script (aka feed2js). But i couldn’t make it work for me this time.

Wouldn’t it be great if i could make any “Red Dog” stories from the blog appear as headlines automatically on the PageTurners Red Dog page. Ooooh yes. Even if i could make the latest headlines from the blog appear on the front page of the PageTurners website. That would be good.

But no, i’ve had to do it by hand. Unfortunately re-publishing RSS feeds is one of those irritatingly difficult things to do.

Related posts:

1. PageTurners, series 4 out now! Very exciting news! PageTurners series 4 has arrived. Anne Dunn, Chris Malakar and...
2. Wendell on Guided Reading with Adult Learners Interesting to read stories from an adult literacy worker in Canada. Wendell Dryden...

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.

Related posts:

1. digital literacies ..book arrives Very exciting news for me: a book landed on my doorstep. “Digital Literacies”...
2. facebook as multiple literacies Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s (L&K) own chapter in their book “digital literacies”...
3. e-Bay d/Discourses The other week, my review was published in VALBEC’s Fine Print Journal, reminding...
4. “Multimodality”, literacy and technology Have found the book i’ve been looking for: Carey Jewitt’s “Technology, Literacy and...
5. Digital Storytelling in the South Grampians Here at the Eureka! e-volutions in e-learning conference, Ballarat, Vic. an interesting presentation...

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

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(oops am i advertising amazon here? You can browse the contents on their site)

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  ;-]

Related posts:

1. Book reviewed!! (Digital Literacies by Lankshear & Knobel) Finally! i’ve ploughed my way through Lankshear & Knobel’s “Digital Literacies: concepts, policies...
2. facebook as multiple literacies Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s (L&K) own chapter in their book “digital literacies”...
3. Keystrokes to Literacy The last entry reminded me of a brilliant resource, now out of print...
4. e-Bay d/Discourses The other week, my review was published in VALBEC’s Fine Print Journal, reminding...
5. “Multimodality”, literacy and technology Have found the book i’ve been looking for: Carey Jewitt’s “Technology, Literacy and...