literacy

Watch Josie Fraser’s NetworkED seminar online

A big thanks to all of those that joined us for our NetworkED seminar with Josie Fraser, whether in person or online. For those of you who missed out or would like to revisit some of her points we are happy to provide a recording of her talk below:


LTI NetworkED Seminar Series – Josie Fraser ‘Digital Literacy in Practice: Making Change Happen’

JosieFraserTitle

Josie Fraser spoke about her experiences of working on the Digi Lit project.
As the 10th largest city in the UK, Leicester is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in Europe, with huge amounts of children living in relative poverty.  Josie has had to deal with issues of access and what it means to provide education that is available for all and works for everyone in the community.  Set up as a partnership between the council, De Montford University and 23 secondary schools the Digi Lit project is an attempt to work within existing power structures while making sure that learners are not being left out.

November 6th, 2014|Announcements, NetworkED|Comments Off on Watch Josie Fraser’s NetworkED seminar online|

Mourning the loss of the past – and blaming it on the digital age

Discussions of digital communication (blogs, twitter, email, sms) in traditional media such as radio or newspapers can be predictable and unsatisfactory. Keeping Radio4 on for company & background noise, I caught how this morning’s Woman’s Hour invited writer Barbara Taylor Bradford and Emma Barnett, Digital Media Editor of The Telegraph to have a short debate on “how important is letter writing in the digital age”; in practice a piece to be filed under “nostalgia” (twitter hashtag #mythofthegoldenage).

The discussion was unfortunately set up by the presenter as a false dichotomy from the outset. She asked, rhetorically, if anyone would ever fondly re-read a blackberry message ‘c u @ nandos’ as they would a handwritten love letter. But this is a case of not comparing like with like. All three agreed that more work, and thus more care, goes into fashioning a handwritten letter on beautiful stationery, but in comparison to what? A successful blogger will take great care and trouble over crafting their posts. I can agonise over my responses on public political blogs, even when posting under a pseudonym. I want to be fair, I want to get my facts right and I don’t like typos. Sentiments such as friendship and love can be expressed very well in an email and perhaps more legibly if one’s handwriting, after years of keyboard use, resembles that of a deranged monkey. The art of slow writing hasn’t died out merely because it is now done electronically. Championing the handwritten letter is a charming cause, but it needs not be done in opposition to digital writing. While the medium matters, and is, pace McLuhan, itself a message worthy of focus independent of content, it seems to me a futile exercise to construct a hierarchy of media. Especially if, predictably, older ones will score more highly, because of that human condition, nostalgia. Nostalgia is a kind of home sickness, a longing for the familiar, an understandable emotion, but not one which ought to be overindulged.

Our foremothers in the 15th Century might have similarly asked “wither the Illuminated text in the Gutenberg age”. And some of them will then have projected forward rather than glanced backward, visualising that the printing press might enable them to focus more on what is being communicated and less on how prettily it is presented.

September 19th, 2011|Social Media|Comments Off on Mourning the loss of the past – and blaming it on the digital age|

Emerging Technologies

 The 2011 Horizon Report includes predictions on the technologies that will enter mainstream use in Higher Education over the coming years.  I’m a bit sceptical of these predictions as they always seem overly optimistic.  For 3-years in-a-row Mobiles have been listed as entering mainstream use in one year or less… (or more it seems).

This year’s report suggests the following will be entering mainstream use in:

One Year or Less

  • Electronic Books
  • Mobiles

February 9th, 2011|Reports & Papers|1 Comment|

on reading

Last night on Radio4’s Front Row novelist Susan Hill, talking to Mark Lawson about her new book (which charts a year in which she resisted buying new books, instead finally reading or re-reading those from her own  collection), revealed that she had also used that year to restrict her use of the internet, in particular her internet reading.

She had previously become aware that her concentration was not what it used to be and  suggested that “if you use the internet a lot you notice your concentration begins to become fragmented and you don’t have that complete concentration for two or three hours.”

With these comments she was not making a moral judgment, she was not condemning the internet for its pernicious, ruinous effects on the human ability to read; rather she was explaining how reading on the internet can embed the habit of skim-reading, of flitting from hyperlink to hyperlink, as most web pages encourage sound-bite (or rather: vision-bite) reading.