i-Anya

IMing, Text Messaging, and Adolescent Social Networks is one of the articles in the latest issues of the Journal for Computer Mediated Communication (JCMC). Here’s the abstract:

Building on previous research in computer-mediated communication, social and communication networks, and adolescent development, this article raises three issues regarding adolescent use of socially interactive technologies (SITs) and their relationship to offline social networks: 1) whether adolescents are creating more, but weaker ties using SITs, 2) to what extent adolescent SIT-facilitated networks overlap with friendship networks, and 3) whether SIT relationships are important for adolescents who have fewer offline peer ties. In order to investigate these questions, network data collection and analysis were integrated with more traditional questionnaire methodology and statistical analysis. The results show that the adolescents in the study were not creating more ties using SITs, nor were they necessarily creating weaker SIT-based ties; that there was little overlap between SIT-facilitated and offline social networks; and that socially-isolated adolescents were less likely than other adolescents to use SITs.

It’s an interesting paper, and the literature cited as background was really useful, especially since some of the pieces are online and the paper has links to them too.

There are some other interesting looking pieces in the latest issue too but I haven’t had a chance to check them out yet.

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!

I think I want one of these:

A fragrance that is emitted every time you have an incoming call/email/message on your mobile. I especially love the description of it as an “epoch making mobile accessory”.

Wouldn’t it be funny if you could insert a foul odour into the accessory, give it to a friend for a present, then proceed to send them an onslaught of messages… or have I just been hanging around kids too much?

Interesting article in the Australian media yesterday: I Want Yr Text.

The main thrust of the article is about cyberdating and cyberaffairs but I do like this bit about liminal spaces:

Make no mistake: cyberspace (as William Gibson pointed out when he coined the term in his 1984 book, Neuromancer) is not the real world. Which is exactly its appeal for many online and mobile-phone users. This sense of being in a parallel universe (with its conveniently flexible moral boundaries) may explain why it seems appropriate to sign off with an affectionate “xx” - even when the recipient of said affection is someone we wouldn’t pucker up to in a million years. Kate Fox, co-director of Britain’s Social Issues Research Centre, describes cyber communications as occurring in a “liminal zone”, that is, a well-documented phenomenon “in which normal rules and social constructions are suspended”. Strange things happen in liminal zones: public nudity at Mardi Gras, self-mutilation during tribal initiation ceremonies and drunken revelry at Schoolies’ Week are some real-life examples. Yet to the individuals involved, their behaviour feels normal - because it’s acceptable within that zone. After interviewing 1000 people about their flirting habits, Fox found that all respondents, without exception, claimed they’d say things in cyberspace that they would never say face-to-face. “It’s a little bit like being drunk,” one person explained.

It’s interesting because different cyberspaces attract differrent types of identity play. Blogging breaks different types of rules than texting than chatrooms than forums etc etc… Maybe some liminal spaces can be sub-liminal?

From the weekend Australian comes this: Students Compare Keats to SMS:

In their final English exam yesterday Year 12 students were asked to compare an SMS message, “how r u pls 4giv me I luv u xoxoxo O:-)”, with a famous Keats love letter, “You fear, sometimes, I do not love you so much as you wish”.

And the 46,000 Victorian students who sat the three-hour VCE exam were also asked to analyse a Dilbert cartoon on the modern dilemma of email and write a letter to the editor of Woolworths magazine Australian Good Taste.

The test of English skills also included analysing more traditional texts from Shakespeare and Henry Lawson to Graham Greene.

But it also quizzed students on popular films such as sci-fi flick Gattaca, Australian drama Lantana and classic Breaker Morant.

Fabulous! Of course the article continues by saying this is DUMBING DOWN the English Curriculum. *groan* When will politicians stop privileging a) printed media only and b) the high culture literary canon? Students are analysing, critiquing, comparing and discussing the diverse range of texts which are significant to our time!!! Oh why do I bother moaning, is there any point?

Generation Txt? is an article by Crispin Thurlow I came across last week but didn’t have time to blog. It’s a linguistic analysis of sms text messaging and has some useful conclusions to make:

what is evident from the current study is just how blurred the boundary between computer-mediated communication and face-to-face communication really is; for participants, there certainly seems to be little sense in which their text-messaging necessarily replaces face-to-face communication but rather their text-messaging has come to be ‘folded into the warp and woof of life’ (Katz & Aakhus, 2002:12). What is more, just as new linguistic practices are often adaptive and additive rather than necessarily substractive, young text-messagers manipulate conventional discursive practices with linguistic creativity and communicative competence in their pursuit of intimacy and social intercourse.

I like these conclusions, I think they are spot on, and the comments throughout the rest of the paper are insightful too I think. One thing I find difficult these days though is linguistic analyses which aren’t grounded in sufficent contextual analysis. I’ve talked about this quite a bit with my systemic linguistics colleagues - papers are presented in seminars with wonderful linguistic analyses but no theorisation or discussion related to context. I end up thinking: so what? Where’s the big picture thinking here? How does knowing about the grammar help us understand the motivations and positioning of the people who’ve been involved with the text production/interpretation?

Here are the details and some of the entries so far. (Thanks Lucas!)

Are you interested in aspects of online identity? I am organising a special edition of E-Learning which focuses on this, and would welcome articles from any field about any aspects of online identity. Although the journal is called E-Learning, the focus is just as much about what educators can learn about online identity in general as it is about specific experiences giving insight to learning. Here is the CFP:

Special Edition of E-Learning Journal

Guest Editor:
Angela Thomas
University of Sydney
a.thomas@edfac.usyd.edu.au

Theme of the Issue: Digital Inter-Faces

Description:

The focus of this special edition of E-Learning is ‘Digital Inter-Faces’. The articles in the edition will examine the issue of identity in and around digital contexts. As our lives become increasingly more technologically inclusive, we face new opportunities to e-xplore, e-xamine, e-xtend, e-xperiment, and e-volve. Technology is changing the ways we think about the world and the ways we position ourselves in the world. Our involvement in and around digital contexts has opened up a place for living within a multiplicity of identities and through this, we can act out our fantasies, become the Other of our desire, and just as importantly, in the words of Eowyn, a 15 year old girl, “It’s not becoming your own hero that’s the point– it’s allowing what’s inside of you to show through”.

And yet online our selves can be conveniently edited, we can be kinder and funnier and more intelligent. In the same series of posts about her online life, Eowyn told me, “The person I show to others online is outgoing, different, and not afraid to be herself”, and Shadow, a 14 year old boy, revealed, “I am sort of a persona, me but minus the things I don’t like about myself”. Other children revealed to me that rather than edited selves, they become fused selves with their online role-playing characters. The faces shown to others online may be masks of other personae or characters, yet underneath are intimately fused with the self.

What are the consequences and implications of these new faces? The faces of our cyborg self, our edited self, our hybrid self, our fused and blended self into another character, and the Other of our desire. What can we actually learn in this masquerading of fragmentedness that has become a hallmark of post-modern identity? In this issue of E-Learning, our contributors discuss aspects of these issues, drawing from a range of theoretical, sociological and political perspectives. Thoughts about gender, race, youth, politics, power, trust, and authenticity are critically discussed with respect to the many faces and inter-faces of the digital world.

Submission Deadline: January 18th, 2006
Submit to: Angela Thomas, a.thomas@edfac.usyd.edu.au

Information about the journal and papers: http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/?.

The Guardian reports how mobile phones have changed our lives. I really like the link to identity - here’s an excerpt:

Yet as Proust observed: “The advance of civilisation enables people to display unsuspected qualities or fresh defects which make them dearer or more insupportable to their friends.” These new technologies not only change our world, they also change ourselves. The complexity and variety of modern personal technology is such that it enters our lives in ways we cannot anticipate.

It is comforting to learn, then, that the most popular use of a mobile phone, after talking and texting, is its most humble: the alarm clock. Because new technology is always being used, in ways we don’t expect, as a wakeup call.

Isn’t that funny - I use my mobile as an alarm clock too! I also use it to store my favourite photographs of family and friends so that I can easily access them and share them.

(via textually.org)

Wow! The Discovery Channel and Nokia phones have a series of lessons on Visual Grammar for would-be mobile phone film makers! In lesson 1, you can learn that: the higher the emotional content, the more close up the shot should be:

They have mobile film previews on the way, and a contest for first time film makers. I think there’s lots of potential for using these lessons with kids pretty much as they stand. I noticed blank storyboards can be printed out for planning the shot sequence too. Maybe I can twist one of my ex students’ arms to make a movie with their class!?

I’ve been viewing the mobile fiction sopa opera Random Place on the net from time to time and it’s really interesting to see the way it is constructed. Have a look:

This is what I have noticed so far:
- dominance of image over text
- close up intimate shots
- exaggerated facial expressions
- the inclusion of sponsored advertising

It’s actually hysterical to view because of the over-the-top exaggerated expressions - I am not so sure it is meant to be comical but I actually laugh out loud when viewing. Also, I am not sure who is writing the “sms” dialogue but it also seems to border on the ridiculous and to use expressions that don’t seem to resemble what I have seen of “teenspeak” sms. I think it would be very funny to use the images in the classroom, especially to explore aspects of visual grammar and to discuss what patterns are most predominant in the “mobile” context.

I suspect the experiment with a mobile soap opera has not been particularly successful because it is now being offered free to view. It’s hard to know though because there’s plenty of advertising going on which is typical of free-to-view television - I don’t really read it but it does clutter up the viewer which is aesthetically displeasing. I would be really interested to find out about the viewers/readers - I wonder how popular it actually is?