cyborgsdodance

My experience researching about Dinkytown for our collaborative wiki project started out with some informal Google searches, which resulted in pretty much the same links that everyone else had found and already added to the wiki. Another obstacle for me was figuring out what I wanted to focus on for my research. Knowing that we would eventually turn our research findings into some form of a video blog entry increased the stakes in terms of process and audience. It’s one thing to throw words up onto the screen and another to weave together sound, image, and text to create some cohesive narrative. For some reason the fact that it will be a video makes the sense of audience seem larger and less forgiving.

Anxieties aside, I finally decided to “write what I know� and do a feature on Cumming’s Books, an independent, used-book store where I used to work. Focusing on something I already knew, allowed me to reallocate my energies to the actual research and production process.

Articulating how this research unfolded is somewhat difficult considering I’ve never researched with a visual end-product in mind, which is something to keep in mind as I consider assigning a similar project to my students. Some of my questions include…

To what extent did images influence my research question?
How much did that desired image or mood influence what data I gathered?
To what extent is there a visual discourse or grammar already shaping how I view my topic?
Will my images convey the same depth for the viewers that they contain for me?
How will I use language to project meaning into images and vice verse?

While I still fumble in my attempts to answer these questions, I’ve found Jason Ranker’s (English Journal, 97.1) description of fifth graders’ digital video production to be a helpful start. In his case study, he describes the literacy practices involved in video composition/production as moving “markedly into the visual realm� (2007, p. 78).

Much like the students in Ranker’s study, my reading of online texts was nonlinear, a navigating from one site to the next via a network of hyperlinked texts. McNabb et al. (2005) describe this type of buffet reading as requiring the reader to quickly evaluate the “value, sufficiency, relevancy and validity� of information in order to filter and sift through various sources. I don’t know how well I was able to evaluate the sites I visited, but I would agree that my clicking through sites was an attempt to move through the enormous amounts of energy. Furthermore, knowing that my end-product would be visual, influence my evaluation of these sources. For example, some sources did not have very informative text, yet I found the images to be helpful.
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See also my other explorations in online inquiry...

my research wiki, nonikwe's rabbit hole, devoted to digital literacies. I just started this wiki this month. My hope is that it will keep me organized.

(Below is the product of a new feature I just discovered, wherein I can link articles directly to my blog at the click of a button, while I'm doing research using the university databases/indexes. I don't fully comprehend the utility of this, but I'm sure it will come in handy eventually.)

Designing Meaning with Multiple Media Sources: A Case Study of an Eight-Year-Old Student's Writing Processes

Author: Ranker Jason J
From: Research in the teaching of English
Date: 20075
Volume: 41
Issue: 4
ISSN: 0034-527X
Pages: 402-434

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TED talks (Technology, Entertainment & Design)
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/

See also previous entry on design:
"dig lits: disruptin' the ole abc's"
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/doer0026/cyborgs/2007/01/new_literacies_diglits_disrubt.html

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Rebecca's pocket
http://www.rebeccablood.net/

Recently I've been reading a lot about gender and technology. Especially interesting was an article I read by Jaqueline Rhodes (2002), "'Substantive and Feminist Girlie Action': Women Online," which discusses various women's movements and their use of writing technologies to promote participation for voices traditionally marginalized. Also discussed are the gendered representations of techonlogy: the internet as "female," and computers as "masculine." These gendered concepts present women's communication styles as limited in their ability to fully reap the benefits of a male-designed cyberspace. While I agree that a certain logos, perhaps male oriented(?) dominates technological design, I feel that there is something positive (not clear yet how I want to articulate this "something positive") about the increased female participation within these online realms, especially when looking at the tween and teen demographics. Perhaps there is more gender related mediation happening that we aren't aware of. (I need to educate myself more on this. ) I acknowledge that design can be just as discursive as words, but I wonder how much these limitations are gender related?

To get back to Rhodes, she definitely had many other good points to make, which perhaps I'll write more about later, especially after I read more of Kress's work on design. For now, however, I just wanted to start an entry to file resources related to this idea.

BlogHer http://www.blogher.org/
This is a website the features female bloggers. Some questions that run through my mind when I look over these blogs are... how are "women's ways of knowing" represented in the range of topics covered by women bloggers? How do the women create a collaborative environment of "constructed knowled"? How do women challenge and reify the blog genre?

... and, in order to connect the cool snap of Rebecca, I also wonder how Rebecca Blood's blog writing would fit into this sampling? http://www.blogher.org/

"Gender and Technology" This article by Marion Harris Fey discusses gender in the classroom related to technology. I have yet to read it myself but wanted to keep it handy.
Download file

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The still swirling body of new literacies is a field I have much to learn about.

Taking a peek at the digital poetry of Thom Swiss (see link below) shows how the traditional senses of time, space, word, and author are disrupted. I wonder how these changes in form and genre will change our behaviors as readers and ultimately our roles as educators of these new media?

http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/swiss/cob/index.html

With the arrival of these new media, that strategically juxtapose images comes the need to be literate of design. Gunther Kress writes a lot about design. I have yet to read any of his work, but look forward to checking him out. (His book on new digital literacies sit atop my kitchen table at this very moment--perhaps I'll finish blogging soon and crack it open).

Below are some good sites that explore the changing norms of design. My eyes have especially enjoyed the eneri site.
http://www.eneri.net/ eneri design consultant
http://www.artistica.org artistica graphical design journal
http://www.netdiver.net netdiver digital design

Other links that explore digital literacies in general include the following:

ReadWriteThink (NCTE lesson plan for analyzing new media)
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=915

Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel's blog
http://everydayliteracies.blogspot.com/

Henry Jenkins 2006 White Paper--"Confronting Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century"
https://gophermail.umn.edu/session/doer0026//NOSEQ/rawdisplay/2/2/2/application%2fpdf/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.pdf

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