Thursday 11 November 2010

Carey Jewitt's summary for Seminar 3

Carey graphically demonstrated the emergence of  shared concepts central to our discussions, through the use of a Wordle cloud generated from the abstracts of the all the sessions. She showed that the  'literacy v technology' dichotomy has given way to a common focus on practices, on learning, and on students.

One key issue that she surfaced (see the summary on the LIDU website for her slides), was the fact that most of the studies that people have been talking about during the seminar were looking below the radar of existing research (ie: focused on 'hidden' practices, the debunking of myths, uncovering phenomena etc.). [This has important implications for a future research agenda in this field - if we want funding we probably need to connect at some point with recognised agendas in both literacy and technology studies. Hopefully these seminars are helping us to see what these agendas are].

Carey analysed in some depth the 'alignment of methodologies' that is necessary to capture to capture 'the rich nuance of people’s situated digital literacy moments/events/practices'. She noted the importance of 
re-articulating approaches to researching textual practices in the context of the proliferation of multimodal digital resources, and the emergence of tensions (productive, but still tense!) between the 'creative appropriation' of these resources by learners, and on-going practices associated with teaching and assessment.

She drew our attention to the need to 'look beyond the snapshot', that is, to work with transition over time - between and across institutions, technologies and spaces. Working towards a better understanding of what the conceptual work of  ‘looking over time at change’ is focused on.

And she picked up on, and re-emphasised, the necessity for us as researchers to be reflexive - to put ourselves into the literacies frame and interrogate our own practices, across media and across time. Research in this field is a boundary-crossing activity [as MaryH and David have demonstrated in their workshops].

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