The uses of multimedia

Video from seminar at CCI - Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation

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.

Nine in 10 US babies watch TV

About 90 per cent of US children under age 2 and as many as 40 per cent of infants under three months are regular watchers of television, DVDs and videos, researchers said on Monday.

They said the number of young kids watching TV was much greater than expected.

"We don't know from the study whether it is good or bad. What we know is that it is big," said Frederick Zimmerman of the University of Washington, whose research appears in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

A second study suggested excessive TV viewing could lead to attention and learning problems down the road.

The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that children in the United States watch about four hours of television every day. They recommend that children under age 2 should not watch any and older children should watch no more than 2 hours a day of quality programming.

But 29 per cent of parents surveyed by Zimmerman and colleagues believed baby-oriented TV and DVD programs offered educational benefits.

"Parents are getting the message loud and clear from marketers of TV and videos that this is good for their kids. That it will help their brain development ... None of this stuff has ever been proven," Zimmerman said in a telephone interview.

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.

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.

New call to 'teach basics'

More of the same from Dr Ken Rowe. Here he is speaking with an Age education writer, Caroline Milburn, who seems to enjoy reporting Ken's research and press releases. Dr Rowe, research director at the Australian Council for Education Research, has conducted a study investigating the connection between teaching methods, (or teacher inputs), and students learning (or student outputs). Here the teaching methods are systemtic, explicit phonics, referred to as 'extreme phonics' by other researchers.

After giving the teachers a crash course in back to basics teaching, Dr Rowe 'was suprised by the results' and found that the kids 'took off like rockets'. This kind of rocketing seems to be connected to Dr Rowe's ideal of Singaporean spelling success: '110,000 kids in year 6 in Singapore are significantly better spellers than a comparative group in NSW.'

Are there other measures of success for year 6 students? Other important abilities and skills that might be work talking about?

From the description of the research project, one wonders if Dr Rowe considered whether the improvement in student results might have occured despite his program intervention where teachers where taught how to teach the basics.

The simple act of telling teachers that you (as a researcher) are interested in seeing whether students results improve after you (the researcher) have taught the teachers some new (or old) method/content, is likely to have a variety of effects on the way teachers respond and go about their normal daily work.

A classic case of the Hawthorne effect? Or perhaps the Rowe effect?