The uses of multimedia

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

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.

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.

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.

How to be an education expert (and warrior)

This is by Mercurius Goldstein (what's in a name ... right!) posted over at Larvatus Prodeo. Keep it coming MG.

Mercurius says:

Well, here’s my review of “Dumbing Down”. Actually it’s a review I wrote for Dr D’s last book, but I’ve since found you can use to review everything he’s ever written. It’s a kind of meta-review.

HOW TO BE AN EDUCATION EXPERT

You too can enjoy the public acclaim and consultancy fees that come with being an education expert! Just follow this prescription for success and a government grant can’t be far behind…

1. There is a crisis in education - your business depends upon it. Take every opportunity you can to point out the crisis in education. Think of it as advertising.

2. Teachers are Marxists. Teachers who deny they are Marxists are postmodern Marxists, which is worse.

3. Postmodernism is a world-view that makes it impossible for people to see that you are right. Postmodernism causes teenagers to challenge authority and spell badly. Before postmodernism, these problems did not exist.

4. There aren’t enough men in teaching. And by men, I mean real men, not these postmodern Marxist nancy-boys you see flouncing about our public schools (there’s something suspicious about them…). Be careful not to make too much of this however, because men will demand the same salaries they can get in other professions.

5. Repeat after me: repetition works. Studies have shown that a claim becomes true if you say it over and over again without listening to any alternative suggestions. Studies have shown that a claim becomes true if you say it over and over again without listening to any alternative suggestions. Try to make your claims truer than everybody else’s.

6. Paying for private education is a noble act of self-sacrifice, made by parents without any thought for the future social or material benefits that may result. Parents who send their kids to private schools love their children more and are better people than public-school parents. If public-school parents only loved their children more, they would be able to afford a private education for them.

7. Public schools are not failing enough students, and are heartlessly providing them with nothing but support and encouragement. Fortunately, there is lots parents can do to balance things up. Start by telling your child every morning what a disappointment they are to you, and provide them with years of shaming and criticism. This will result in a happy, well-adjusted individual ready to negotiate in the modern workplace.

8. Teachers are to blame for teenage delinquency, moral relativism, greengrocers’ apostrophes, multicultural policy and Leo Sayer’s comeback. However, to give credit where it’s due, we should remember that when young Australians make great achievements, or grow up to be decent individuals holding down a job and raising a family, it is all thanks to their parents.

9. In the modern classroom, students don’t do any real work. Instead, they get given namby-pampy “assignments” where all they have to do is think of a topic, find research materials, form a logical argument based on the evidence and make a persuasive presentation to their classmates. But since they do all that without copying anything down from the blackboard, they haven’t really learnt anything, have they?

10. The golden rule: If you ever let anybody think that Australian education is doing well, they won’t give you any gold to fix it.

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.

TV blamed for rise in child-speech problems (again?)

We should thank Renee Switzer for reporting on this 'alarming modern trend' and in relying on Leonie Trimper's self acknowledged 'ancedotal evidence' from School Principals to support shoddy arguments and assertions like:

"Families aren't sitting around the dinner table any more every night talking about what's happened during the day and engaging with the children,"

"Children are sitting in front of televisions more and computers playing computer games. It's dinner in front of the television, video games after dinner, or parents both working and time poor — all those issues have to impact on children."

Also weighing in is 'Child psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg' who is always willing to offer his perspective on what young people are up to these days but less willing, it seems, to point to the specific 'good data' that he often uses to support his views:

"There is good data to show that the more often you sit around a dining room table and have a conversation around a meal, the better the language development of children," he said.

Thanks Doctor. You and Leonie may be interested in the increadibly large body of sociological, communication, literacy and educational research literature that gives a very different picture of the phenomena. Many of these studies show that young people engage with television, computer games and other forms of media culture in a range of rich and complex ways. Ways that strengthen and help develop their literacy skills.

It is far too easy to blame modern technologies for the ills and problems our young people face. Rather than create a panic or crisis, the likes of which Dr Kevin Donnelly would be proud, I would have thought educators and scientists such as yourself would be more interested in trying to communicate some of the complexity of the situation to the media?

Here is a brief selection of research that might be useful. Perhaps Dr Carr-Greg might want to clarify the 'good data' he refers to?

Bazalgette, Cary & Buckingham, David. (eds) (1995) In front on the children: Screen entertainment and young audiences. London: British Film Institute.

Buckingham, David. (1996) Moving images: Understanding children's emotional responses to television. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Buckingham, David. (2000) After the death of childhood: Growing up in the age of electronic media. Oxford, UK: Polity Press.

Buckingham, David & Willett, Rebekah. (2006) Digital generations: Children, young people, and the new media. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Calvert, Sandra L. (2002) Children in the digital age: Influences of electronic media on development. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Fisherkeller, J. (2002) Growing up with television: Everyday learning among young adolescents. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Gee, James Paul. (2002) Millenials and bobos, Blues Clues and Sesame Street: A story for our times. In D. E. Alvermann (ed.) Adolescents and literacies in a digital world (pp. 51-67). New York: Peter Lang

Gee, James Paul. (2003) What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillian.

Greenfield, P M & Cocking, R (eds) (1996) Mind and media: The effects of television, video games and computers. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Himmelweit, H T, Oppenheim, A N & Vince, P. (1958) Television and the child: An empirical study of the effect of television on the young. London; New York: Oxford University Press.

Jenkins, Henry. (1992) Textual poachers: Television fans & participatory culture. London: Routledge.

Kline, S. (1993) Out of the garden: toys, TV and children's culture in the age of marketing. London: Verso.

Lohr, P & Meyer, M (eds) (1999) Children, television and the new media. Luton: University of Luton Press.

Marsh, J (ed.) (2005) Popular culture, new media and digital literacy in early childhood. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Marsh, Jackie, Brooks, Greg, Hughes, Jane, Ritchie, Louise, Roberts, Samuel & Wright, Katy. (2005) Digital beginnings: Young children's use of popular culture, media and new technologies. Literacy Research Centre, University of Sheffield. Accessed Dec 2005, http://www.digitalbeginnings.shef.ac.uk/