My most recent attempt to create a visual artefact uses Flickr and is called Attachments. I’m happier with it than I have been with the videos or the PDF in spite of my reservations about its personal content.

I’m trying to explore some of the characteristics of digital texts that Merchant identifies.

Merchant argues that the production and consumption of digital texts is very different to that of print-based texts. He lists the following characteristics:

1. A move from the fixed to the fluid: the text is no longer contained between the covers or by the limits of the page.
2. Texts become interwoven in more complex ways through the use of hyperlinks.
3. Texts can be easily revised, updated, added to and appended.
4. Genres borrow freely, hybridise and mutate.
5. Texts can become collaborative and multivocal, with replies, links, posted comments and borrowing – the roles of readers and writers overlap.
6. Reading and writing paths are often non-linear.
7. Texts become more densely multimodal (as multimedia allows for a rich interplay of modes).
8. Roles of readers and writers overlap.
9. The communicative space is shared and location diminishes in significance as the local fuses with the global.
10. The impression of co-presence and synchronous engagement increases.
11. Boundaries begin to blur (work/leisure; public/private; serious/frivolous).(Merchant 2007: 243)

I think I agree with Merchant on these characteristics but with a couple of biggish reservations.

Firstly, because digital texts can do all these things (e.g. enable collaborative authoring, revision, blur generic boundaries etc.) does it mean that this is how they are actually being used? In essence, is Merchant describing actual manifestations of digital texts or suggesting some of the directions digital texts might possibly take?

Secondly, I think that on a more sophisticated level, printed texts (books) have never been contained by their physical limitations and have always been interwoven and multivocal. Here’s Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes ( I should probably cite Julia Kristeva too) on this:

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network… The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands… Its unity is variable and relative. (Foucault 1974: 23)

[text is] … woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?) antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the ’sources’, the ‘influences’ of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas (Barthes 1977: 160)

Do digital texts reveal more explictly the ways in which all texts are constructed? Is the really fantastic thing about digital texts the ways they expose how all texts are produced?

References

Barthes, R. (1977). Image – Music – Text. London : Fontana.

Foucault, M. (1974). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock.

Merchant, G. (2007). Mind the Gap(s): discourses and discontinity in digital literacies. E-Learning, 4(3): 241-255

I’ve been having a go at doing visual artefacts this week: a couple of rough videos – one made on my iPhone another on my Mac from iPhone pictures; a makingsenseofimages PDF on a Flickr photo and I’m also going to have a go at Prezi (a tool I already dislike).

It made me realise that I’m not very good at the visual. I think I’m not a ‘visual person’. Before anyone jumps on me for naive essentialism, I want to say that I think being a ‘visual person’ is something that gets developed – or not – over time.  Here’s an illustration one of my contacts in our Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture  did in 30 mins to use in the publicity materials for the then new digitisation service:

I thought it was a pretty neat  visual explanation of the service – pages of a book taking flight like birds. It made me think of the Craig Raine poem about the ‘Caxtons’ – an association that reinforces my perception of myself as someone happier making things with words than with images.

I’m going to have to block in some time to summarise and comment on some of the interesting reflections that have emerged as a result of our MSc Twitter experiment.

There have been a few comments about 140 characters being insufficient. I wonder if this isn’t missing the point of Twitter though? Maybe Twitter’s strength is the way it enables what I’m going to call “ambient collegiality”.

This idea is partially based on Leisa Reichelt’s notion of ambient intimacy:

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight. (Reichelt 2007)

More recently, Guy Merchant has contested the view that Twitter’s function is only phatic and coined the phrase ‘ambient sociablity’:

Ambience seems to catch the sense of lightweight contact that typifies microblogging, and sociability leaves it open to both the level of friendship and the sort of exchanges that are transacted. (Merchant 2009)

In the context of a course like this, or of my use of Twitter for professional networking, I like the idea of ambient collegiality: being able to know what my peers are reading, writing about, reflecting on in nearly-now, almost real-time. They can share conference calls for papers, invitations for project funding, jobs, new software, relevant news. It’s a distributed senior common room without coffee.

References

Merchant, G. (2009). Ambient sociability. My Vedana. Retrieved May 20, 2009, from http://myvedana.blogspot.com/2009/05/ambient-sociability.html

Reichelt, L. (2007). Ambient Intimacy. Disambiguity. Retrieved October 8 2009, from http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/

I think this post covers some of the themes discussed in the last two weeks (utopian and dystopian discourses) as well as this week (new literacies, visuality).

One minor variant of dystopian discourse around technology has focussed on the negative impact of PowerPoint on lectures and other presentations. Here are some examples:

PowerPoint, the favoured tool of presentation for the unimaginative. All right, perhaps that is unfair, but I am suffering the after-effects of a surfeit of lifeless, list-full PowerPoint presentations that frequently served as a barrier to meaningful engagement between tutor, student and learning [...] It all became so routine, so anodyne, so dull. (Ward 2003 n.p.)

… the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. (Tufte 2003: 7)

… foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, an intensely hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organising every type of content, breaking up narratives and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous chartjunk and PP Phluff, branding of slides with logotypes, a preoccupation with format not content, incompetent designs for data graphics and tables, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch and presenters into marketeers. (Tufte 2006: 4)

Such discourse reeks of technological determinism: lectures are tedious because of a piece of software; human agency is denied. PowerPoint in constructed as a malevolent presence reducing its users to helpless zombies,  banging out bullet point after bullet point, slide after slide.

Personally, my take on PowerPoint is closer to Ian Kinchin:

… what PowerPoint is actually doing is to make explicit the taken-for-granted assumptions and implicit epistemological leanings of lecturers who are using it. The stereotypic teacher-centred, noninteractive mode of lecturing … is simply clarified and amplified by the use of PowerPoint. (Kinchin 2006 : 647)

Ok, perhaps this reeks a little of crude instrumentalism (it ain’t the tool but how you use it) but it has the merit of acknowledging agency and the often unacknowledged beliefs and habits we bring with us in our encounters with technology. We shape the technology as much as it shapes us.

And what of Prezi? Is it credible alternative to PowerPoint and the tyranny of linearity and sequentiality (one damn bullet point, one damn slide after another) that PowerPoint embodies?

The jury’s out but my initial thoughts are that it repackages linearity and sequentiality, dressing it up as something different through the admittedly neat visual trope of a canvas whose sections one clicks on to zoom into a detailed view. But users can – and do – create ‘paths’ or lines that connect one piece of content – some text or an image – with another piece of content placed on the canvas. Is this so very different to a PowerPoint slide? Could we see the text or media we place on the Prezi canvas as akin to the text or media we add to each individual PowerPoint slide?

Prezi might be a cool tool that helps us think about what a presentation is or might be. It might make us more mindful of the possibilities of a more media-rich presentation. But it also might just be a tool that bored PowerPoint users – and hey, aren’t we all bored of it? – use for novelty value and because of the attraction of its much slicker interface.

I think a lot of ed techies – me included – like to deride PowerPoint as part of our professional identity performance as technology connoisseurs. We show our mastery of the chronically mutating technoscape by our embrace of the New (Twitter, Google Wave etc.) and our displays of bored indifference to mainstream technologies (pretty much anything Microsoft Office).

PowerPoint is soooooo last century; Prezi where it’s at today.

But I’m just not so sure …

References

Kinchin, I. (2006). Developing PowerPoint Handouts to support meaningful learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 37(4): 647-650

Tufte, E. (2003). ‘PowerPoint Is Evil’. Wired. Issue 11.09. Accessed 12 March 2007, from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

Tufte, E. (2006 2nd ed.). The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. Cheshire Connecticut: Graphics Press LLC.

Ward, T. (2003, May 20). I watched in dumb horror. The Guardian. Retrieved March 12, 2007, from http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,9828,959242,00.html

I’ve recently become and Apple computer user (I’ve been an iPod user for 5-6 years) and have yet to get to grips with Garageband etc.. Here’s a first go using images taken from my iPhone over the last 12 months:

Quite a thought-provoking article but a couple of claims earlier on got me going:

I contend that distinctions between academic and popular culture literacy practices are being similarly eroded within electronic environments. [...] Still, popular culture literacies are usually posited as being potentially (or already) at odds with the literacies present in and valued by the academy. Although I do not completely disagree, I believe that computer technologies are impacting literacy practices and both popular culture and academic contexts. [...] Universities operate within the same convergence culture as any other institution. (Carpenter 2009: 139)

Ok, I think I’m with Rick Christopher on most of the article (e.g. idea that literacies are plural, need to address dissonance between formal and informal literacy practices etc) but the above claims sound awfully like wishful thinking.

I think there’s a real opposition between academic literacies – and by that I mean the types of student text production deemed appropriate within HE ‐ and the sorts of text production enabled by new and emerging technologies that we might call vernacular literacies.

I contend that digital text‐making practices are de‐privileged within an HE system that remains wedded to a fixed genre set of primarily text‐based assessment activities such as the essay. There’s been patchy engagement with digital tools and environments and the possibilities for new forms of text production they offer.

Although we have seen, over the last decade, significant investment in ICT infrastructure and a sector‐wide adoption of VLEs, very few academics/tutors have thought through the implications of new and emerging technologies – and the types of text‐making practices they enable – to the production of academic work. Although most forms of assessed work are now produced using computer software such as Word and increasingly submitted online using ‘digital dropbox’ or assignment upload features of Virtual Learning Environments ‐ their underlying logic is essentially analogue. The word‐processed essays delivered to us via Blackboard or Moodle are minor variants of types of writing that are decades, if not centuries, old.

HE has embraced VLEs; it has not embraced the digital. The dominant mindset in HE is analogue – we’re not really engaging with the digital – with the exceptions of a few pockets of innovation (inc. this MSc).

I see no evidence for the claim that the distinction between academic (imposed, top-down) and vernacular (user-generated, bottom up) literacies is being eroded. On the contrary, I see quite a lot of boundary policing and resistance to ‘convergence culture’.. One example would be the recent Faculty Focus report on Twitter use in US universities. What was significant about the findings were the reservations many expressed about Twitter’s suitability in higher education.

For example, the perception of triviality persists: “It seems to be a stupid time-eating worthless pursuit”, “I think it’s mostly a waste of time and energy”,  “I have enough other ways to waste time, none of which are as silly as this one” and “It’s beneath my dignity” (Faculty Focus 2009: 5) as does the perceived deleterious influence of Twitter on students’ academic literacy practices: “logical arguments cannot well be delivered in short bursts”, “[Twitter] [p]erpetuates poor written and oral communication skills”  “[m]ost of the discussion is worthless and unrelated to the academic enterprise” and, more categorically, “I am sick of student writing that is unprofessional. I am also tired of receiving student work that has incomplete sentences, fragments, subject-verb agreement mistakes, point of view mistakes, tense mistakes. Students need to learn how to write on at least a 13th grade level and on-line discussions, twitter, texting, etc. does not help them. NO! I will not use this in my classes!” (Faculty Focus 2009: 6).

Please, please comment on this post with a case study showing me I’m wrong!

References

Faculty Focus (2009). Twitter in Higher Education: Usage Habits and Trends of Today’s College Faculty. Retrieved October 5, 2009, from http://www.facultyfocus.com/free-report/twitter-in-higher-education-usage-habits-and-trends-of-todays-college-faculty/

I think in week 3 we’ll start to explore the visual. I’m looking forward to it but looking back has made me think just how textual my interactions have been to date.

Today is the start of a more multimodal lifestream:

My intention is to make – or to share – some images or videos this week which I’ll use to make some kind of comment about digital culture and my participation in it. Thinking about Jen and Sian’s curating metaphor got me thinking about a book I love by Jon McGregor called So many ways to begin. The main character’s a curator and each chapter has, almost as epigraph, the decription of some object of significance. In one chapter, for example, it’s the torn photograph of a father recently returned from the war, which speaks of the family disturbances of this ’stranger’ re-entering the settled dynamic of family life after 2-3 years on the field.

I want to find or make something that plays a similar role in illustrating or opening up wider issues about the digital. Today’s example – a quick video made on my phone about a bowl made of an old vinyl LP – sort of hints at what I want to do. Records, and the physical gestures associated with then – e.g removing record from sleeve, reading sleeve notes, placing on turntable and lowering arm and stylus onto the vinyl – have now pretty much passed into history. They were a big part of my memories of being a teenager and the bands I loved when younger, first girlfriends etc.. Now it’s just a novelty item playing on my own sentimental nostalgia.

An interesting post from Jen and Sian on the lifestream earlier this week but I’m not sure I accept either of the two metaphors used.

I tend to view curating as a purposeful assemblage of contextualised artefacts for an audience. Use of the Eduspaces (Elgg) presentation tool for collating blog posts for IDEL a year or so back seemed a better example of curatorial activity (retrospective sense making, selection and organisation).

As for automatic writing, I still see it as a surrealist experiment with accessing/making public the unconscious – ça parle (the id speaks) . However quickly composed, I don’t think anyone’s Twitter feeds constitute écriture automatique in the sense that Breton, Man Ray and assorted misogynist 30s pranksters would understand it.

So, how do I see the lifestream? More mixed metaphors coming up as I think we engage with the digital in laminated or layered ways and we leave a trace or residue of that engagement which is partially visible and can be made more so.

For example, I’ve engaged with the digital as a consumer; in the two weeks of this course I’ve shopped online (the new Lorrie Moore novel and Alekander Hemon stories from Amazon; some Richard Hawley songs and a series of Peep Show from iTunes). I’ve also purchased digital games for my children (FIFA10 for my 10-year old son). I don’t feel like adding them to my lifestream for others to see as I don’t think they add to intellectual debate (or boost my image as hip 40 something!).

I’ve operated within the digital to contact my partner – currently in Chicago – emailing photos of our children who I know she’s missing. I’m going to upload some videos of them to YouTube later and email or txt her the link. Phone calls are expensive but media-rich content uploaded and accessed online costs nothing (well nearly). I see technology as helping be ‘more human’, in this case, going soe way to meet the emotional need for connection with absent loved ones (hence my irritation with Social Network for 2’s platitudes).

Another layer of my digital engagement is as an HE professional, I’ve sent emails, collaborated on Google docs, advised colleagues on various technologies – including Twitter. Part of my professional interaction with peers is conducted online – often using my @anthonymcneill Twitter account or other services like Cloudworks. I’ve been a bit of a consumer here too, buying iPod Touches and Twitter apps for colleagues as part of my LearnHigher Twitter project.

Finally. I’ve been engaging with the digital – as theme and as platform – as a postgraduate student on this course; using WordPress to blog, a second Twitter account (@digitialanthony) to tweet. These two technologies have provided the bulk of my lifestream to date but I think this will change as the course moves to consider the multimodal.