digital language experience approach

check out Labbo's research on digital literacy in Kinder... fun!

oops, I mean, "rigorous play!"

(multimodal) composition

"One major consequence of the shift to digital is the addition of graphical, audio, and video elements to the written word. More profound, however, is the book's reinvention in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress." (Institute for the Future of the Book)

I love this idea of writing that is unfinished - like what Burn and Parker (2001) describe as "digital inscription... a kind of text-making that is highly plastic, fluid and reversible" (177). This new world of composition opportunities puts an interesting spin on my thinking over the semester about author-audience relationships. As these authors suggest, the 'interactive' nature of digital text makes any viewer a "potential remaker" and might shift the balance of power of between author, text, and audience in intersting ways (neat place to do more research...). I'm enjoying this sort of postmodern thinking about what a book is - moving from the individual to the collaborative, from the static to the constantly shifting, from one author to many.

Our readings on multimodal composition this week also invited me to question my own privileging of the traditional printed word. I might have realized sooner my own bias toward written pen and paper kinds of 'composition,' but never so much as I do as of late. It feels awkward in some ways to imagine that the kind of 'composition' I've spent my lifetime exploring is giving way to new modes with tremendous speed as digital technologies evolve. It is a new journey for me as a reader, writer, scholar to embrace the variety of semiotic sign systems we might use to represent ourselves (thanks, ELA friends, for the links to examples of Shipka's activity-based multimodal theory this week).

I notice that we seem to have gotten more comfortable and intricate in our digital compositions on our blogs over past two semesters. What's next? Digital dissertation?! Check out this article about Virginia Kuhn's multimodal dissertation, "Ways of Composing: Visual Literacy in the Digital Age." Apparently it made waves back in 2006 because it couldn't be printed in hard copy for inclusion on ProQuest.

Before you go, check out this online research presentation of some of Shipka's other research findings - a way to present academic content that respects the visual elements of her research AND makes it readily available (and easy to read quickly online). Smart!

Mental Detox Week

No, wait. Maybe you shouldn't be responding to my blog (nor me updating it) this week...
It's time for Mental Detox Week (formerly T.V. Turnoff Week).

I love new literacies and technology, but stepping back to question the 24-7 wired lived kinds of lives we lead seems like a good idea, too. Of course, shutting down would have disastrous effects for getting my homework done. Maybe we love this idea in THEORY!? Anyone want to practice?

Cybergirl Avatar

My second attempt at writing a succinct blog posting:

When I need to use an avatar (not often), this is the one I use...

I made her look like me,

down to the mole on her face.

Let the psychoanalysis begin...

Gender Meets New Literacy

I'll try to keep this blog on digital literacy succinct. Here's why:

Last night, I was typing an email - the kind you feel like you need to word carefully, very carefully. I read it to my husband who said,"That email is way too long. It doesn't have to be all flowery. People don't read email that way. They read the first few sentences. Keep it short."

Eureka. He was right. And now that I think of it, the emails I write are frequently longer than the emails I receive. I can spend hours answering emails. It's something of a writer's dream - daily opportunities to write to an audience who will respond. But writing these kinds of emails takes a lot time. And for that matter so does writing my blogs. Blogs seem designed to accomodate for short bursts of writing, right? Well, that's a challenge for me, too.

Reading Thomas' (2004) Digital Literacies of the Cybergirl, I started to wonder more about gender differences in digital writing. As Thomas notes, a girl's talk in virtual reality is like speech written down, only more refined. The refining seemed to serve identity formation: "[cybertalk] serves to empower her to thoughtfully shape the identity she reveals through text" (368).

I read a snippet in Newsweek last fall from a female executive who recommended that other female executives keep their emails short and to the point - like men's emails often are. Huh. One the one hand, then, I could stick to the facts and keep it short and perhaps be more in line with the brief sorts of communication that is typical of email. One the other hand, I could stick with my version of emailing and blogging - perhaps like the girls in the palace. We're making meaning over here and, according to Thomas, shaping identity, working on empowerment, originality, exploration, and reinvention. This takes time and (for me) a lot of words.

You can see I've got a long way to go if I'm decide to adapt to a medium that loves the brief burst kind of writing. Do you think online writing environments more conducive to the way men stereotypically write and think? Do you mom's emails look different than your dad's?

Stopping here. Have I been succinct?! Maybe next time... or never?!

If we took a holiday... Some time to celebrate...

Well, it wasn't quite a holiday weekend,

but it was a Halliday weekend.

Facets-Aquamarine's link to Halliday and social justice was the third time Halliday and I met up this weekend [don't tell my husband!]. Here's how it went down:

Friday, 9:30 p.m.: TGIF.

In bed reading Kamler's piece on Gender and Genre in Early Writing:

Kamler associates Halliday with systemic-functional linguistics. From a Hallidayian framework, she says, linguistic patterns reveal and construct social realities. Language gets its form by realizing particular social functions. For example, Kamler draws on Halliday when she starts in on the fine-grained analysis of clauses and labels the actor/goal/recipient parts. I'm not pretending to understand all of this. But, essentially, I understood that Halliday is used to look at how language functions.

Saturday, 9:10 a.m.

Sitting at the SALSA conference (with other friends from our class), it's not even 24 hours laters and here's James Gee talking about Halliday, too. Gee's talk (super interesting!) used linguistic analysis to examine what "academic language" reveals and conceals. From what I understood, Gee was referring to the Halliday camp as representing a functional perspective on language, contrasted with others in the field who take an ideological perspective on language. In the example of academic language he studied, Gee found it to be both functional and ideological. He suggested we do more studies of particular uses of academic language in classrooms, to see how it is functional or ideological or both, leaning toward interesting questions to consider about equity and social justice. Neat stuff. Anyway, this gave me the idea that Halliday fit in the "functional" camp.

Sunday, 7:00 p.m.

Reading F-A's blog, I'm struck by a new adjective: Hallidayian. Apparently, I just can't get enough Halliday this weekend. It is taking shape in my brain how much I appreciate sociolinguistic analysis for the light it can shed on who we are and what we value as individuals inside of social groups. I think this is why I like the Kamler piece - because it uses language to reveal what otherwise lies beneath the surface of our consciousness. As Kamler says, she makes "gender ideology visible so that it may be questioned, challenged, and resisted." And why I liked Gee's talk - asking us to consider the political and social issues that rest beneath the surface of langauge. Funny, that's what I liked last week, too, as we read Godley et al.'s critical discourse analysis - that same notion of examining how our language functions and then asking in whose interest it seems to function.

Good holiday/Halliday weekend.

Slowly sinking in (or, A new doc student sees the light)

Sometimes on the steep learning of becoming a doc student, there are things that don't quite fit in yet with your thinking. Things you haven't connected to other things yet. Terms you've heard but barely understood. I know you've been there, too, right?

Doing my reading at 2 a.m. on Friday night (like only a crazy doc student would), I had one of those a-ha! moments. Alas, the term "ethnography of communication" suddenly started to make sense...

The wheels in my brain starting turning as I find myself highlighting with abandon in Godly & Carpenter, and Werner's (2007) description of the methods they used to explore the classroom routine of Daily Oral Language ("I'll speak in in proper slang": Language ideologies in a daily editing activity," RRQ). Generally, this was an ethnography of how teachers and students understand language in this classroom. But, more specifically, it was concerned with describing pattern of language use that is considered appropriate communication in this particular context. For this reason, the authors consider this an "ethnography of communication." [I know you more experienced grad students might be laughing at me for not having figured this out sooner. Like, duh, right?] It's ethnography and discourse analysis all in one!

Who else is having flashbacks to sociolinguistics last semester? We did some reading in that course about "ethnography of communication." This brings me back to my first point. I didn't really having anything to connect that term when I first heard it, and I felt like it went over my head. So now, dragging out my binder, here's a review of what I didn't fully understand the first time around about:

* Dell Hymes extended sociolinguistics (what he called "ethnography of communication") to include the notion of communicative competence. He endeavored to understand the rules of speaking within a community. Thus, his analysis of speech communication analyzed speech situations, acts , and events. This was a really different methodology than the Chomsky-inspired linguistics that looked at isolated sentences. (see Jaworksi & Couplan, 1999)

* According to Hymes, ethnography of communication must investigate the use of language in the context of the situation. It must take as its context a community and investigate its communicative activities. Key ideas: look at ways of speaking, fluent speaker, speech situation, speech act, components of speech events and acts, rules of speaking, and functions of speech (see Hymes, 1994).

* This all has to do with how groups of speakers using language in socially and culturally appropriate ways (for their group).

Having at last read some ethnographies, it suddenly makes a lot more sense what "ethnography of communication" means. Neat.

But it gets better. Godley, Carpenter, & Werner (2007) also pull on Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the macrolevel context (social, cultural, historical). They say that combining ethnography of communication with examination of ideologies is a "recent trend." Wow. Talk about smart.

Other "ethnography of communication" pieces that I'm enamored with lately:

* Diane Downer Anderson's (2008) "The elementary persuasive letter: Two cases of situated competence, strategy, and agency." Research in the Teaching of English, 42(3), 270-314). This one also takes a sort of critical perspective. I'm still processing it all... Fantastic.

* Debbie Rowe's (1989) "Author/audience interaction in the preschool." This one documents social interaction around the preschool writing table and indicates what students learn about the roles of author and audience. Brilliant.

Can I grow up to be as smart as Debbie Rowe?
Will I ever be smart enough to do an "ethnography of communication"?

For now, I'll settle for understanding what it is. Let is slowly sink it...
For later, I'd like to figure out how to do it!