I wish I could have had a wireless laptop to live blog the conference because now that its over it feels rather odd doing a retrospective post. But as promised, here goes! Oh and a disclaimer: I was soo exhausted that I didn’t make as many sessions as I listed, and also, there was an unfortunate clash or two in the program which meant that I couldn’t listen to everybody I wanted to.
So, the first session I went to at the conference was Julia and Guy’s session about blogging:
Inside Out: academic blogging and new literacies, an autoethnography
Julia Davies and Guy Merchant
This was a fun session and I looooooved the aesthetics of the presentation, with gorgeous images and fun transitions. I was also cited, which was very flattering! I liked the way they moved quickly beyond the descriptive (how come so many conference presentations focussed on the descriptive only at the expense of theorisation and analysis???) and into the analysis of posts and comments, discussing theoretical issues and critiqueing notions of “affinity spaces” and “communities of practice” as far as they relate, and don’t relate, to the blogosphere. We had many casual conversations about blogs and identity and narrative after this presentation and I’ll be blogging more about those later! Anyway this was a great session and stimulated much discussion and thinking.
Next was our session:
Out of Bounds: Some social, psychological and pedagogical implications of new literacies for young people’s learning, lifeworlds and social futures.
Angela Thomas, Kevin Leander and Michele Knobel
I have already blogged about my talk, but the slides are here if you missed it.
Kevin Leander spoke about his study of girls in a girls school that had wireless technology. Essentially he critiqued the institutional use of technology and the low expectations of teachers when the students were able to work at a very sophisticated level.
Michele Knobel spoke about memes and ‘big L’ ‘little l’ L/literacies. It was a really fun talk too, but also stimulating as she spoke about counter-meming as a social critical literacy practice - and I liked the links to the work of Adbusters.com and the strategies for counter-meming outlined at memecentral.com/antidote.htm, and allyourbrand.org/why.htm - I need to look into these more at some time!
Our discussant was Cynthia Lewis:
Cynthia made some lovely remarks and raised questions about “what counts” as literacy as far as schooling is concerned. I thought Cynthis was very insightful!
Then we had Don Leu’s Presidential address:
New Literacies, Reading Research, and the Challenges of Change: a Deictic Perspective of our Research Worlds
Don Leu
I found Don Leu’s talk interesting but targetted to a) an audience who needed to be convinced about new literacies; and b) the American audience. So basically he said “new literacies are here to stay and we need to attend to them” and “Americans aren’t getting into new literacies as much as they should”. I thought he was very sweet and humble in acknowledging all of his colleagues and doctoral students in influencing his understandings about new literacies.
Wednesday evening was Julia’s birthday party as I already mentioned in my very quick post, and here is the birthday girl herself, looking gorgeous and glam:
Isn’t her necklace amazing!? Here’s a close-up:
and here’s some of her DIVINE birthday dessert:
I sat between Julia and Jennifer:
and across from the very animated Guy:
and Barbara:
Also at the table were:
Michele
Brian,
Margaret,
and several other people whose names I have embarrassingly forgotten (profuse apologies if you are one of them)!
Are we only up to Thursday!? On Thursday Julia and I snuck out at lunch time for a little shopping expedition, which she blogged about here.
Question: what is Julia doing here???
(Click here to find out!)
I also noticed Julia taking a photo of somebody taking a photo of somebody else so I thought I should take a photo of that and continue the chain:
Oh! And we also came across a guy that wrote our names on a single grain of rice! Now I didn’t really want one but purely because I’d seen one of the characters doing it from the digital fiction called The Strand, which I blogged about recently, I thought I had to have one! I think there is something to say there about feeling some sort of identification with a narrative or fictional character that you associate with it through its artefacts, but I am not sure what yet!
One of my favourite sessions was the afternoon session that followed our shopping expedition!
Social Constructions in New Literacy Environments
Chair(s) & Discussant(s): Charles K. Kinzer, Teachers College, Columbia University
With the rise of the concept of “new literacies,” literacy is increasingly acknowledged as including participation in broadly defined communities of practice. Concurrently, literacy has become influenced by new technologies, which incorporate their own social practices. The symposium examines the social literacies surrounding one of these electronic environments: video games.
1. Digital Literacies and Massively Multiplayer Online Games
Constance A. Steinkuehler, University of Wisconsin-Madison
2. Agency and Authority: Social Practices in Interactive Storytelling
Jessica Hammer, Teachers College, Columbia University
3. Playing the Digital Divide: Video-game-related literacy practices and SES
Gillian Andrews, Teachers College, Columbia University
Constance talked about her study of World of Warcraft. I enjoyed seeing the range of literacy practices involved and I liked the analysis of gaming practices as scientific habits of mind. I hadn’t actually heard the term “persistent virtual worlds” before to describe MMORPGs either, so that was interesting.
Jessica talked about agency in role-playing games. I thought Jessica’s talk was wonderfully theorised and enjoyed being taken in a different direction as far as role-playing and narrative construction is concerned. I think she focussed more on adult role-playing and more sophisticated narrative constructions, as the stuff I am looking at is much less pre-planned, so it’s given me lots of ideas! I liked the points she made about interactivity as giving the illusion of free will. It reminded me of when I was a teacher and used to trick kids into doing what I wanted by offering them choices and making the ideal choice so attractive that they had to select it!! (Ummm… I still do that with my undergrad students, but that is another story!)
Gillian (Gus) spoke about the types of games selected by different types of readers - she made some really useful links to Gee’s work and talked about self-as-avatar, which I would have loved to hear more about! (Who made these sessions limited to 20 minutes? Never enough time to take in everything!!)
I also went to Brian Street’s session:
Literacy Across Cultural Contexts: Implications for Pedagogy and Curriculum
Brian Street
Brian covered a lot of ground in this session (too much to remember!) but something he spoke about that was totally new to me was lowrider art as a literacy practice. He showed how this doodle-like art by young non-English speakers was used as a communicative literacy practice, and I’d like to find out more about this.
Thursday evening I collapsed in my room with exhaustion and tried to write some discussant comments for a session I was involved with the next day. It was very unfortunate for me as I missed out on a fun evening with Julia, Guy, Michele, Sarah, Dana, Rebecca and a heap of others *sniffle*.
So Friday morning was the session by Marion Fey:
Gender Issues in Post-Typographical Texts and Talk: Past, Present and Future
Marion Fey
Chair: Barbara Guzzetti
Discussants: Donna Alvermann, Suzanne Wade and Angela Thomas
Marion traced her extensive research into issues about gender and technology. Suzanne made some wonderful theoretical links between her work and Marions, and mentioned Susan Herring’s work. I also mentioned Susan Herring, Lois Scheidt, and colleagues in my response. I talked about: debates about language and gender, performativity of gender in online spaces and collaboration and social software.
Next was another FABULOUS session by the team from Teacher’s College:
Conceptions of Narrative in Non-Traditional Environments
New environments are redefining literacy and literacy practices. However, while non-traditional environments incorporate visual elements in traditional print materials, they still may be categorised as either narrative or expository. This symposium looks at various non-traditional environments to explore the question of narrative construction and definition.
1. Considering Narrative in New Environments
Charles K Kinzer
2. Examining Narrative as Sequential “Sense” in Comics
Jonathon Bresman
3. Narrative Strategies in Improvisational Storytelling
Jessica Hammer
Charles Kinzer spoke about Second Life - like most of the sessions I saw, I was left wanting more and with more questions than answers.
Jonathon spoke a lot about the role of transitions or break points in the narratives of comics (great stuff!),
and Jessica spoke about issues of narration, improvisation and collaboration in role-playing in general, as well as issues of continuity, consistency and coherence in narrative in particular.
Again, this team of researchers are really doing wonderful and innovative studies - I would loooove to work with them!!!
In fact, on Saturday morning I had a lovely meeting with Charles (Chuck) Kinzer:
and we talked about the possibility of some fun projects we can collaborate on!!
There were other lunches and dinners and coffees and drinks and the “New Literacies Bash” - in fact some of the most interesting and stimulating discussions were those that took place outside of the conference! I had a lovely talk with Guy over dinner on my last evening and we wondered “Are we like our blogs?” - which led to all sorts of fascinating thoughts about literacy, identity, narrative, projection, virtuality/reality and so on!
And, on my final day I had a minor crisis which I won’t go into here but I want to say a huge THANK YOU to Katina Zammit (my fellow Australian traveller) for being such an angel and rescuing me from a difficult situation!!
So, that was my overview of NRC - an interesting conference made fabulous because of the wonderful company - especially Julia, Guy and Michele!
Baby presents for most people usually mean booties or rattles or baby blankets. Not me. I give books! And this is the book I am taking to give 3 week old Samuel, a fabulous book about families camping in the Australian bush. Samuel is part Australian and part American, the son of my lovely childhood friend Sally-Ann, who went and married an American guy and now lives in Florida.
When Sally-Ann and I were in our teens we used to go camping at some river flats in Deloraine, Tasmania. We also went caving, bushwalking, kayaking, horse-riding, had sing-alongs around campfires, cooked hungis in holes in the ground, and all sorts of other amazing activites. Funnily enough, ALL of those activities and more are shown in this book, so when I saw it I simply HAD to get a copy - for Sally-Ann to read to Samuel and tell him stories about when we were younger, and what life was like growing up in Tasmania. This book made me so sentimental I had to buy two copies so I could keep one for myself!
Roland Harvey is a great children’s book illustrator/author and has won many Australian book awards. I suspect this one will be shortlisted for the next round of awards because it’s fabulous!!
I’ve been reading Margaret Mackey’s: Playing in the Phase Space: Contemporary Forms of Fictional Pleasure this morning (it’s an old article - 1999) and am wondering how come I haven’t seen it before!
Mackey explains the “phase space” (a term orginally borrowed from mathematics) as those spaces that are fictional ‘add-ons’ to a narrative - backstory, websites based on ther story, puzzles and info and games that are ‘extras’ to the story (the extra-diagetic world of the narrative) and, drawing from Pullman’s ideas, “the artistic potential of story-making”. She says that such spaces allow a certain kind of reader/writer play arouns the storyworld - imaginative, engaging. but not strictly part of the narrative itself.
She says teachers are always getting kids to play in the phase space - by writing book reports, doing dramatic work, writing parts of the narrative from other perspectives and so on. Authors and kids often create a parody of the original by inventing new versions (i.e. metafictive works, twisted tales) and this too is a form of playing within the phase space of a narrative. She also points out that some people creatively interpret narratives / films to produce their own versions (incidentally, those reinvented trailers of movies are like this - taking a romantic drama such as the movie Titanic, and editing a trailer to make it look like it comes from a completely differently genre such as horror - brilliant stuff!) - also playing in phase space. Anything that is outside of the actual story world but still within the story universe constitutes this phase space.
What is exciting is that she explores the way MUDs, MOOs, the elaborate and labyrinthian readings of a hypertext fiction universe, all constitute a phase space of a narrative. She claims that reading a narrative from beginning to end is really only one option to engage with text now. I like this because it ties in so nicely with the fan fiction universes created online, and opens up reading to so much more than reading in and of itself - it includes writing, communicating, drawing, arguing, role-playing and all those other literacy practices. It also allows for a multiplicity of readings and interpretations of text - a la critical literacy practice.
Here is the closing paragraph of her article:
Today, even very young children manifest a new ease with not knowing, a comfort with juxtaposed alternatives all of which are equally plausible. Such a response is part of the culture that nurtures them. Adults, particularly those who engage with young people’s reading and writing, can also benefit from exploring, extending, sometimes resisting and sometimes celebrating the enticements of the phase space. New forms of fiction resonate within the recreational lives of many young people today; the adults in their lives also need to start paying attention to these new narrative playgrounds
Mackey, M. (1999). Playing in the Phase Space: Contemporary Forms of Fictional Pleasure. Signal 88. January 1999. pp.16-33
Have you seen the new Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire trailer yet?
Just as interesting is that on the official website, you can download icons for your blog/journal/webpage to support your favourite wizard in the triwizard tournament! I think it’s great that the online fans are being so well recognised and catered for!
There are also some new “Coming Soon” posters which feature the other characters well:
Fleur looks a bit like a computer game avatar here don’t you think? How come her hair is billowing out behind her when she is standing still? It can’t be windy or Ron’s hair would be doing interesting things too. I like the fact that she is foregrounded here though!
Ooohh here is Viktor Krum!
In the background here is Cho Chang. I read that she had received a lot of hate male from female Daniel Radcliffe fans who were jealous that she got to kiss him!
And I really like this one because it is staged so perfectly that it will make it great to talk about elements of visual literacy and constructedness of images from this with my students!
I am looking forward to this movie - the book was my favourite of all so far.
(images, interviews and information from Veritaserum)
Jonathon Gray has a brilliant article about Critical Media Literacy in the recent publication of the journal, Critical Studies in Media Communication.
It’s especially relevant for us in Australia right now with the political backlash against critical literacy that’s going on (e.g: This little pig goes post modernist; Luke Slattery: Put literacy before ‘radical’ vanity; States deconstruct postmodern trend; and many more).
Gray makes the point that:
…while other debates balkanize both theorists and practitioners (Hobbs, 1998a), as Kubey notes (1998), a key line in media literacy education divides those who believe their primary mission is one of protection and demystification, and those who believe in a more participatory, student-centered approach.
Although he doesn’t mention critical literacy per se, the current Australian debates centre around the gross misunderstanding that critical literacy is about the former: that kids need to have texts demystified for them and that this in turn “spoils” the reading / viewing experience of them. Gray turns our attention to the other line which again relates to critical literacy, and he links it with media and cultural studies, saying:
A second, cultural studies camp more helpfully approaches students as active participants in the learning process and shows more respect for students’ mediated pleasures, rather than dismissing them outright as counter-productive and wholly dangerous (see Buckingham, 1998a, 1998b; Giroux, 1994; Kubey, 1998; Masterman, 1997). Cultural studies pedagogy regards the processes of interrogating, evaluating, and analyzing media production and consumption, and of relating them to lived experiences—hence contextualizing these experiences—as the goal of media literacy education in and of itself. As Masterman argues, students’ own responses to the media “need to be nurtured and taken seriously, and not simply subordinated to the teacher’s tastes, the text’s immanent meanings, or the dominant views of the majority” (1997, p. 26). Ultimately, a successful program of media literacy education will use students’ own experiences of and responses to media texts as a touchstone for education and discussion, and will aim to contextualize them within a larger framework of media structure, logic, style, and address. The point, as such, is not so much “protected” consumption as informed and savvy consumption.
It’s a fantastic article and I really liked what he had to say about humour and parody, since heaven forbid we give children anything FUN to study. Here’s a great quote about the power of laughter as a way into critical investigation:
…as Bakhtin’s work on laughter suggests, parody may inspire a more permanently critical disposition towards its targets. Laughter, he notes:
is a vital factor for laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically. As it draws an object to itself and makes it familiar, laughter delivers the object into the fearless hands of investigative experiment. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 23)
Empowerment is surely a goal of much teaching, and laughter can deliver: laughter gives the laugher a degree of confidence that can then be used to turn on and analyze a parodic target in more detail.
Fabulous writing! I am definitely going to include this article in my children’s literature course next year!
From: Gray, J. (2005). Television Teaching: Parody, The Simpsons, and Media Literacy Education.
Critical Studies in Media Communication. Vol. 22, No. 3, August 2005, pp. 223–238
The Last Resort is a really fun book illustrated by one of my favourites: Roberto Innocenti (who did Rose Blanche, one of my all time favourite children’s picture books). If you loved the Jolly Postman books by the Ahlbergs, then you’ll really love this, which blends some classic tales and famous images in an intertextual feast. Actually, its like a crossover fan fiction which blends several worlds and a mixed group of characters together as well as inserting the author (well, the illustrator in this instance) as the main character of the story. Stories and characters it draws from include Moby Dick, Emily Dickenson, The Little Mermaid, Huckleberry Finn, Antoine de Saint-Exupery and a number of others. Famous lines and verses from poetry are interwoven into the text, images and icons from favourite books overlap, and there’s even a videogame-like quality to the beginning which shows the petrol guage of a car being depleted over a series of images. The stlye of the images also varies slightly according to character, from photo-realistic to cartoon-ish. Low shots, high angle shots, framed images, silhouetted images, icons, and all manner of symbolism feature in the visuals.
I guess its very euro-centric in the tales it selects and the actual story is not meant to be taken seriously (lots of silly cliches), but its very po-mo and fun and I think you could do lots with it with older children.
Here’s a review from amazon.com:
When an artist’s imagination, “apparently angry at being ignored, took a holiday,” the artist goes after it, in Lewis’s (BoshBlobberBosh) unusual tale. Deposited by his red Renault (which “seemed to know the way”) at a seaside hotel, the artist is told “This here’s The Last Resort for folks who’ve lost a piece of mind.” There he encounters a strange parade of fellow guests, some of whom seem strangely familiar. The clues are legion; a few are easy to spot (such as Long John Silver, who “peglegs in here, signs the guestbook with crossbones”), others will keep even sophisticated readers guessing until the final pages on which their identities are revealed. The lineup includes poets, characters from novels (including Melville’s white whale), an actor who “had lost his range of emotions” (Peter Lorre) and more, all of whom eventually find their lost inspiration. Lewis’s colorful and imaginative prose (”blues and whites quilted the sky”) will keep readers’ attention, despite the meandering story line and occasionally affected tone (”The patrons of The Last Resort had shown me the road to self-discovery!”). Innocenti’s artwork consistently soars. His series of detailed, playful vignettes tweak perspective and brim with arch humor (as when he reveals the Little Mermaid’s identity in a page divided into four moonlit quadrants), and his spreads offer the kinds of details found in the illustrations of vintage Victorian children’s books. This elegantly designed volume will be most appreciated by bibliophiles and aesthetes: the artwork is spectacular. Ages 9-up.
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