Loud and clear - community youth arts project

Loud and clear arts project

Schoolboys plotted massacre online

Language and Education - Vol 21:3, 2007

Exciting news. A special issue of Language and Education has just been published: Young people's engagement with digital literacies in marginal contexts in a globalised world'.

To all my colleagues, congratulations. It's a great, stimulating read.

Sue and I have a paper in this issue called:

Negotiating digital literacy practices across school and home: Case studies of young people in Australia

ABSTRACT In this paper, we suggest a view of young people’s digital technology use as negotiated social and literate practice. Rather than emphasising the boundedness of school and home spaces and literacy practices, we argue that young people’s practices that develop around their use of digital technologies flow across these spaces, making simple distinctions and binaries about use in each domain problematic. To help illustrate, we present ethnographic case study snapshots of 15–16-year-olds from contrasting schools in and around Melbourne, Australia. In our thinking, we bring together insights from a range of work in the hope of prompting a reframing and rethinking of the relationship between home and school and the other spaces young people inhabit and create. We use Bakhtin’s ideas about ‘dialogic negotiation’ and Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to suggest that texts, meanings and practices do not emerge wholly from one social/physical domain but are traced and sourced from the whole life world of experience. In this framing, young people’s engagement with language, learning and technology might be characterised as a dialogic negotiation of a complex range of texts and practices that flow across and between school, home and other spaces.

If you want a copy and can't get it from the website let me know.

Brave new world or virtual pedophile paradise? Second Life falls foul of law

Sick, seedy stuff on SL.

Reminds me of something Pippa Norris says in her book Digital Divide: Civic engagement, information poverty, and the internet worldwide (CUP). Not the divide stuff, the key point about internet as 'real world' mirror, utopia or something else?

‘Even if the basic digital divide shrinks gradually over time, it is naive to believe that the virtual world can overturn fundamental inequalities of social stratification that are endemic throughout post-industrial societies’ (2001: 17).

The text of Norris' book is here.

Thanks, Pippa.

Teacher fury at rating website, or ...

student's get some much needed payback?

Have those teachers who are complaining about websites such as ratemyteachers forgotten that they are in the business of passing partial, half-formed, and powerful ratings on their students?

This whole beat up is a good example of how many 'grown ups' just don't get (understand) how young people interact with each other and new media.

Robert Marley sang, 'Slave driver the tables have turned ... catch-a-fire you're gonna get burned'

Bring on ratemypolitician

Xavier pupils suspended after bullying caught on film

um?

US Federal Study Finds No Edge for Students Using Technology-Based Reading and Math Products

umm ... duh!

see also

Andrews, Richard. (ed.) (2004) The impact of ICT on literacy education. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

This book is basically a collection of the studies listed below. If you don't want to buy the book, get the reports online at the EPPI centre.

Burn, Andrew, and Leach, J. (2004) A systematic review of the impact of ICT on the learning of literacies associated with moving image texts in English, 5-16. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education.

Locke, Terry, and Andrews, Richard. (2004) A systematic review of the impact of ICT on literature-related literacies in English 5-16. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education.

Low, Gordon, and Beverton, Sue. (2004) A systematic review of the impact of ICT in literacy learning in English for learners between 5 and 16, for whom English is a second or additional language. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education.

Torgerson, C, and Zhu, D. (2003) A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effectiveness of ICT on literacy learning in English, 5-16. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education.

Andrews, Richard, Burn, Andrew, Leach, J, Locke, Terry, Low, G, and Torgerson, C. (2002) A systematic review of the impact of networked ICT on 5-16 year olds' literacy in English. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education.

Tech threatens family bonding: study

A study conducted by Australian Telco, AAPT, has investigated a range of parental attitudes towards young people's use of technologies. 1000 parents were 'surveyed'.

About 40 per cent of Australian parents believe their children's fixation with technology is robbing the family of precious face-to-face time, a study has found.

The research by telco AAPT has revealed that 16 to 20-year-olds spend an average of 3.2 hours a day using technology.

This compares with just two hours of face-to-face communication spent with parents.

Almost half of the 1000 parents surveyed believed two hours was not enough time and would prefer about seven hours of face-to-face time with their children throughout the day.

Despite this, almost 80 per cent believe technology has dramatically helped their family to stay in contact.

Interesting stuff of course. I recall something about studies done on the very low average time most fathers spend interacting with their teenage children each day: less than a minute.

It seems to me that here again, in research such as this where parents are interviewed about the 'problems' associated with their children's technology use, the responses are inevitably negative, with undercurrents that appeal to fears about alienation, social fragmention, addiction, youth deviance etc while at the same time finding that people also recognise the ways communication technologies have enabled broader family interactions.

While these two different 'findings' seem to be in contradiction, they are fairly normal findings. One one hand you have a kind of moral discourse about what good or normal adolescence should be with behaviours which fall outside of this being seen as a problem. The problem is of course technology, or violent computer games or internet addiction, or some other technological deterministic view of the power of technology to influence social behaviour of itself, as if technologies have some power to take over humans, or to influence those with less moral fibre or less will power to resist the urges to give in to it.

On the other hand, the discourse of technological advanncement suggests that communication technologies have radically altered social behaviours and allowed us to do things that were not possible in the past.

I guess in the end these two different discourses are not that different.

Research like this taps into such discourses, fears, insecurities, hype and hope, and rather than offer anything new, tends to perpetuate the same kind of simplistic view of young people's use of technologies: as dupes, deviates or cyberkids.

Click here to give 'em the flick

Danah Boyd is part of Mimi Ito's (yes and a whole bunch of others) Informal Learning project and here writes about relationships and myspace. I'm sure I have some data on this as well.

14-year-old girl in jail for shoving teacher's aide

This is almost too much to take. I have to read it twice. Is there something the paper is not reporting?

A 14 year old student shoves a teacher aide, is found guilty of 'assault on a public servant' and jailed till she is 21!

This cannot be right. This is an April Fools gag right?

Walking the streets of Cyberia

A perspective from Robyn Treyvaud, a former teacher, who is a consultant to the Centre for Strategic Education. The CSE is headed up by Tony Mackay. Some interesting representation on the CES board.

This piece makes interesting reading next to my own views to be published in ACER's Teacher Magazine in the next couple of months, which you can also find here.

Students use web to diss teachers

More rate your teacher huff and puff from the Brisbane Times.