PhD Blog (dot) Net

Having negotiated some of the most complex graphics, multimedia and programming software known to mankind, nothing quite gives me a headache like Microsoft Word. Since I only recently learnt to use styles, I have become obsessively protective of my revised template and annoyed with anything that corrupts it. Sick of copying and pasting unwanted formatted text between documents and from the Web, a quick Google search reveals I am not alone. Numerous blogposts and forums show consensus in thinking that Word should, by default, paste text unformatted (instead of having to go through several unnecessary clicks to get to ‘paste special’ > ‘as unformatted text’). There’s no easy option to change this; instead you have to delve into the exciting world of Visual Basic. Here’s a step-by-step guide from Paul Spoerry. Really, life’s too short.

The open access imprint Bloomsbury Academic have released Lawrence Lessig‘s new book, Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy through Creative Commons. The book is available as a free pdf download along with a NPR audio interview with the author. Lessig explores emergent cultural activities on the web, arguing outmoded forms of copyright need to be radically updated as the copying, remixing and redistribution of creative and informational content become increasingly criminalised. It seems like they are doing just that in New Zealand.

I have finally got round to adding my name (and dodgy photo) to academia.edu, a global directory of academics which uses a tree-mapping display categorised by university and department. Whilst this merely replicates aggregated HE administrative structures, its real effectiveness may lie in the potential inter-institutional and inter-disciplinary connections made through its user-generated research interests.

However a recent e-mail from the developers reveals a growing concern over the proliferation of these interests, suggesting users become actively involved in merging and re-appropriating them according to hiearchical values. This apparent messiness is indicative of user-generated classification systems not constrained by predetermined structures. I was intrigued to see someone had put skateboarding down as one of their research interests! I can appreciate the value of standardising terms to facilitate searching for like-minded colleagues, but by imposing a structured taxonomy, are the developers enforcing traditional disciplinary and theoretical hierarchies and classifications which might otherwise be challenged? It will be interesting to see how things develop.

My academia.edu page is here.

In the latest edition of Analysis on BBC Radio 4 (available as a podcast for the next seven days), Kenan Malik explores the rise of the digital generation and the question of whether new technologies are actually ‘rewiring’ the brains of young people.

Author Don Tapscott is typically optimistic about the effect of new technologies, and their capacity to encourage new ways of thinking, problem solving and collaborating. Yet Tara Brabazon, Professor of Media Studies at Brighton University, is damning of the dumbing down effect of technologies which encourages the ‘grazing’ or ‘skimming’ of information resources, arguing it prevents higher education students developing deeper processes of enquiry which question and challenge.

This is largely backed up by Professor David Nicholas from University College London, who questions the increasing superficiality or shallowness of so called ‘horizontal’ knowledge acquisition. He suggests that it is actually older learners who are empowered by new technologies because they already have a ‘framework’ developed through traditional methods of reading, research and thinking; processes to which younger learners are becoming increasingly excluded.

Brabazon’s approach of banning her students from using Google and Wikipedia therefore seems justified. Yet I would argue such broad-brush reactions overlook the potential of using technologies in a more focused and supportive pedagogy, where appropriate tools can be facilitated at a micro-level around personal and collaborative enquiry that may support and encourage deeper learning processes.

Malik concludes by suggesting new digital technologies are not the problem, rather that the social and cultural practices that have emerged around their use have not been sufficiently challenged by pedagogical approaches which readily adopt them.

The programme transcript is available here.

I’ve recently had trouble interpreting terms like digital literacies, visual literacies, knowledge literacies, and web literacies. What exactly do they mean?

In an enjoyable lecture – appropriately titled The Great Multimodal Muddle – held last night at the School of Education, freelance writer and researcher Cary Bazalgette talked of the confusion resulting from the extended application of the term ‘literacy’ to non-print based media. She stressed that literacy should always refer to the knowledge and understanding of texts, and also explained how the concept of multimodality is nothing new; using Danish church interiors and Maori carvings as examples.

Bazalgette challenges the notion that all digital media should be seen collectively, proposing instead that the study of lliteracies be conceptualised around two basic categories: ‘Page-based Texts’ (which includes digital artifacts like Webpages and SMS), and ‘Time-based Texts’ (i.e. TV, film, games, VR, recorded music, podcasts etc.) This seems to be a useful framework, though I would argue Web environments which increasingly combine multiple media (i.e. page- and time-based texts) make this approach problematic.

Bazalgette concluded with some interesting observations on recent research, explaining how very young children  learn concepts of narrative, genre and character through viewing TV, whilst developing an understanding of ‘film language’ that is often to a higher level of sophistication than that provided by age-appropriate print texts.

Joi Ito’s recently published Freesouls project includes online essays exploring social, political and educational aspects of the creative commons movement. Writers include Lawrence Lessig, Yochai Benkler and Howard Rheingold.

The first instalment of Henry Jenkins’ new whitepaper with Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf and Joshua Green on ‘spreadable’ media has just been posted on his blog (with the remaining sections to follow). Largely situated within Jenkins’ continuing argument of a convergence culture, Part One describes how the biological metaphors of viral media and Memes Theory have been adopted to describe the transformation and mutation of media content in a participatory Web environment.

I’ve just started reading Yochai Benkler’s acclaimed The Wealth of Networks – a book I’ve been meaning to catch up with for some time. The full text is available through the Books Unbound site; a free digital initiative from Yale University Press. You can also download a PDF version from the wiki site.

This is just a small part of my Delicious site as interpreted by the CALIBRATE visualization programme developed by Joris Klerkx in the Department of Computer Science at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The tool identifies and presents tag and community (multiple-user) relational structures using cluster mapping, and integrates a list view and frequency filter. In a paper just published online in the Journal of Digital Information, Klerkx and Erik Duval describe the development of the programme and present results from ‘Think Aloud’ user testing and post-experimental questionnaires. You can download the software and view a demo video here.

Reference

Klerkx, J. & E. Duval, E. (2009). Visualising Social Bookmarks. Journal of Digital Information, 10(2).

In a paper published earlier this year, Malcolm Tight explores the theoretical ideas around commonalities in the approaches of communities of practice and Becher’s academic tribes and territories. He conducts a co-citation analysis of Higher Education research journals; focusing on author identities and locations, themes, theories and analyses, methods and methodologies, presenting a rudimentary diagrammatical representation of his analytical modelling.

Similar notions of ‘citation mapping’ have been explored elsewhere, particularly in the natural sciences, and a version has recently been introduced to the citation and journal database ISI Web of Science. And Interactive Designer W. Bradford Paley’s visualization of 800,000 scientific papers uses author citations to explore the interconnections between science paradigms.

Reference

Tight, M. (2008). Higher education research as tribe, territory and/or community: a co-citation analysis. Higher Education. 55, 593-605.