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.

Informing ourselves to death?

Been reading some classic Neil Postman stuff. This is from a speech given in 1990:

The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the computer for this? Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine. But it is presented to us, with trumpets blaring, as at this conference, as a technological messiah.

Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better -- best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it .... it is only a machine but a machine designed to manipulate and generate information. That is what computers do, and therefore they have an agenda and an unmistakable message.

There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.