Friday, April 30, 2010

The importance of LOLing with, rather than LOLing at


We're at ROFLcon II and already loving it.

Just listened to the wonderful Ethan Zuckerman speak about the importance of sharing memes--and laughter--across geopolitical regions and borders. I wish everyone could here this presentation--it was fast-paced and covered such an enormous amount of terrain. Basically, the heart of his talk was: Weird can lead to Wide. that is, memes can help us to understand other countries more at the human level through shared jokes and "insider knowledge" (e.g., Chinese bloggers finding their way around the censors by developing shared language for talking about censorship that doesn't get censored).

Ethan has a long-held interest in how digital technologies are being taken up in ways that can potentially work in economically sustaining ways for people who are among the poorest in the world. He used the example of William Kamkwamba, who created a wind-powered power generator for his village (to seriously and grossly over-summarise the incredible feat that this was--the book about William's achievement and "Won't say no" attitude is a must read!). Ethan is interested interested in what happens when people like William have a chance to be brilliant in front of the whole world.

We're not going to do justice to Ethan's presentation, but here are some of the important things he covered:


For Ethan, viral ideas are pretty much the only thing that can save the world.

And what Ethan's Kenyan friends want more than anything else, is to have people pay attention to them via their Makmende meme. they want to draw attention to the fact that Kenya does>does have excellent graphic designers, excellent humourists, super savvy internet folk, and more. So head on over to Makmende.com and help spread the LOLs!

Sunday, April 11, 2010

New book! Adolescents' Online Literacies


Enormous congrats to Donna Alvermann (editrix) and contributing authors for Adolescents' Online Literacies: Connecting Classrooms, & Popular Culture! From the back cover:
[This book] is a compilation of new work that makes concrete connections between what the research literature portrays and what teachers, school librarians, and media specialists know to be the case in their own situations. The authors (educators and researchers who span three continents) focus on ways to incorporate and use the digital literacies that young people bring to school.

Topics, age level foci, research contexts are richly varied and speak directly to the diversity of new literacies research:
Introduction
Donna E. Alvermann, University of Georgia, Athens, USA

Chapter 1 - Multimodal Pedagogies: Playing, Teaching and Learning with Adolescents’ Digital Literacies
Lalitha Vasudevan, Tiffany DeJaynes & Stephanie Schmier, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, USA

Chapter 2 - Webkinz, Blogs, and Avatars: Lessons Learned from Young Adolescents
Janie Cowan, Teacher Librarian, Settles Bridge School, Suwanee, Georgia, USA

Chapter 3 - View My Profile(s)
Guy Merchant, Faculty of Development and Society, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

Chapter 4 - 4 Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide/When Social Networking Was Enuf: A Black Feminist Perspective on Literacy Online
David E. Kirkland, New York University, New York City, USA

Chapter 5 - Textual Play, Satire and Counter Discourses of Street Youth ‘Zining Practices
Theresa Rogers, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Chapter 6 - Digital Literacies and Hip Hop Texts: The Potential for Pedagogy
Jairus Joaquin, University of Georgia, Athens, USA

Chapter 7 - Digital Media Literacy: Connecting Young People’s Identities, Creative Production and Learning about Video Games
Michael Dezuanni, Film and Media Curriculum, School of Cultural and Language Studies in Education, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

Chapter 8 - ‘Experts on the Field': Redefining Literacy Boundaries
Amanda Gutierrez, Australian Catholic University & Catherine Beavis, Griffith University, Australia

Chapter 9 - "I Think They’re Being Wired Differently": Secondary Teachers’ Cultural Models of Adolescents and Their Online Literacies
Kelly Chandler-Olcott, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA & Elizabeth Lewis, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, USA

Chapter 10 - Minding the Gaps: Teachers’ Cultures, Students’ Cultures
Andrew Burn, David Buckingham, Becky Parry, and Mandy Powell, Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media, Institute of Education, University of London, UK

Afterword
Kevin Leander, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Congrats again to Donna and her colleagues for producing such an engaging and timely book that is set to make a really significant contribution to bridging in-school and out-of-school literacy practices within classroom contexts!

Thursday, April 08, 2010

Vale Malcolm McLaren



It's wrecked my day, which was otherwise pretty good, to read of Malcolm McLaren's death. I've enjoyed his maverick ways for so long it's sad to think there'll be no more. For sure I'll never forget the night, long ago, when the NZ television show Radio with Pictures aired the rump of the Pistols performing "No one is innocent" in Rio, with Ronnie Biggs doing a pretty fair (by punk standards) job of the vocals. As nihilist moments go, that one was pretty funny.

Johnny Rotten, who missed the Rio gig having quit the band just days before, says "Above all else [Malcolm McLaren] was an entertainer and I will miss him, and so should you".

I will, Johnny, I will.

Feed it heaps on the other side, Malcolm. You did crazy just fine down here.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Reliving some old tech



We are currently working on a book comprising a selection of our essays and chapters from 1985 to 2010. Some of the early stuff does not exist in electronic form and so it needs scanning. But our only copies of some of the early stuff are in Coatepec, Mexico, and the only scanner we have ever set up here is a Primax 98. It is hooked up to a 1999 model e-Machine running Windows 98 and with Word 97 installed.

I decided to bite the bullet tonight and see if there were or were not any missing links in our evolutionary chain.

Turns out there aren't. The Primax has scanned to Word 97 with scarcely an error. I saved the files from a 1985 paper on ideas of functional literacy to a floppy disk, which I have fed into a wee floppy disk drive that Michele got recently to run on my Dell. We are actually quite well endowed here because I chose to use the new drive over putting the floppy into the external A drive in a 1998 Thinkpad which graces the downstairs office and is a printing slave pooter for a lovely early Samsung laser printer that objects to running on anything after XP service pack 1.

So, it has been an evening of reliving what it was like to do this kind of work more than a decade ago. I had forgotten the noise of the A drive clicking in.

And the neat thing is that there are still 2 or 3 more items to scan from material that we only have copies of here. So there'll be at least a couple more evenings of reliving these past charms. Apart from anything else it's a nice low key way of working up to digitising a couple of hundred vinyl albums down in the lounge. I could doubtless buy most of it in digitally re-mastered form on Amazon, but it wouldn't be the same. One of the things I'll enjoy about the book when it comes out is recalling evenings like tonight when I could revel in the recently reclaimed luxury of having the time to slow back down to 1998.

Mind you, I doubt that in 1998 I'd have relished the opportunity to have slowed back down to the IBM golf ball electric typewriter of the early 80s.

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