Despite barely posting on the blog this year, I am still receiving quite a bit of blog traffic, so I thought I should offer up a bit of an update. This year I’ve had  minor health issues – I have had over 20 doctor visits, 1 retrieval from work via a wheelchair, and 5 hospital visits. which has meant that the blog was one of the first things to receive less attention.

Nevertheless, life is good, I feel happy and am definitely on the way to better health. This year my highlights have been:

• go to Dublin City University to be on a student’s PhD viva. This was definitely one of the highlights for me as the PhD student was brilliant, the folk at DCU were very welcoming and took time to show me around Dublin, and I also managed to meet up with an old and dear friend from UWCSEA, Natalie, who I hadn’t seen since I was 17.
• become a reluctant media “go-to” person. Although I LOVE giving lectures and conference presentations, I always feel in control and prepared for those, whereas media is quite unpredictable, I never know what to expect and TV especially can be a bit daunting. However I have been in two newspaper articles, been interviewed on radio twice, and also been on TV twice! Although reluctant, I am genuinely thrilled that my research has received the attention it has, which is why I almost always say yes when asked. My ARC research appearing as a Catalyst story was another highlight of the year.
• having Professor Len Unsworth work at UTAS with me as a visiting fellow. Len has been a mentor since I first had a conversation with him about my work in 1998, and it is such a pleasure to continue working on research grants and publications together. Having him at UTAS to work with every day for some months really rejuvenated me like a shot in the arm!
• running a conference on New Literacies. Organising a conference was much harder than I expected, but it was lovely to have colleagues from around the world as well as locally to work intensely with us over 2 days and join in interesting conversations. I have to say that UTAS is very small, so those kind of like minded conversations within a specialised field like new literacies are quite rare.
• research has been going really well. We’re 2.5 years into our 3 year ARC grant and the days I spent working in schools (interviewing young kids about their animated movies / digital stories) are such a pleasure. I also received two other grants this year – one has almost finished (“teaching teachers for the future”) and another one has just started (“interreality fictions”). Research (and writing) is my favourite part of being an academic (as opposed to sitting in long dull meetings being talked at for hours on end!).
• art classes – yes I do other things aside from work, and its been lots of fun taking classes and making time to draw and paint.
• being with family and being in Tasmania. I am not sure whether I will be staying in Tasmania in the long term but I really love living here, and being close to my family, especially my brother Matthew who lives just 5 minutes away from me.

So, thanks if you’re still visiting the blog. Happy festive season

Here is the interview:

And this was the flyer from my presentation:

I am convening a conference on September 3 and 4 which I am very excited about – click below for the conference flyer.

NewLiteraciesFlyerPDF

UPDATE: Here is a tv news spot about our conference:

and here is some assorted media coverage from the conference:

New Literacies conference media

I have been invited to speak at the national AATE conference in December (Australian Association for the Teaching of English). Stay tuned for further details!

Here is the story that aired this week on the ABC TV show Catalyst, or watch it below:

My colleague Ruth Fielding-Barnsley and I are presenting our research at an upcoming research seminar. All welcome!

Research Seminar Series 2010

26th August 2010 4:00PM – 5:00PM

Venues:
Education Video Conference Rooms:
Launceston: NH.A221c.Video Hobart: SB.Hytten325.Video
Cradle Coast: CC.A119.Video

The format of these presentations is one that will leave plenty of time for discussion, so please come prepared to exchange ideas.

Resistance to Literacy Intervention
Presented by Ruth Fielding-Barnsley

A total of 752, 5 year old children were screened on measures of phonological awareness and expressive language and of these the lowest 20% were included in an intervention program. The two approaches to intervention included a language based program and a phonological program. The language program was based on Marian Blank’s four levels of language and the phonological program was based on Hatcher and Hulme’s Sound Linkage program. Each child received a total of 16 hours of intervention in small groups including 8 hours of phonological awareness and 8 hours of language enrichment, in addition the 20 resisters received 4 hours of alphabet instruction and 4 hours of building cvc words.

Children’s Multimodal Authoring
Presented by Angela Thomas

Currently I am half way through an ARC (Australian Research Council) project, which I am working on with Professor Len Unsworth from the University of New England, and Linkage partner, the Australian Children’s Television Foundation. Our project is titled “Teaching effective 3D authoring in the middle years: multimedia grammatical design and multimedia authoring pedagogy”. Aims of the project include: 1) To provide an account of children’s innovative, transformative and critical multimodal stories; and 2) To develop a transformative pedagogy for multimedia authoring, with the teaching of explicit multimodal metalanguage. In this presentation I will showcase some of the teaching materials developed in collaboration with the ACTF and ABC, present some of the data collected to date and discuss the mode of analysing the data.

I’ll be presenting a public lecture on education and virtual worlds as part of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery’s Game On 2.0 speaker series. Come along if you’re in town

UPDATE: Here is a newspaper article related to my public lecture:

The Royal Shakespeare Company just produced a new production of Romeo and Juliet… over twitter. It consisted of 4000 tweets over a period of several weeks. I have enjoyed going through the archives and piecing together this version, but wish I’d managed to see it all playing out in real time. I think it is a clever adaptation – fresh, cross-media (tweets, youtube videos, images) – yet it still retains a kind of beauty and poetic nature, with smatterings of the original thrown in, such as:

julietcap16 My wrists be the first to receive the deep red, yet pleasurably painless tattooed pattern from which the water of my veins be purged.

Juliet also had several videos on a youtube channel. In this adaptation Juliet was a wannabe song writer. Here is her song dedicated to romeo and his tweets:

Songwriting is another form of the poetic. I also really enjoyed viewing the images and captions, which were haunting and poignant in the way they captured a young girl’s thoughts and dreams:

One of my former honours students (in 2006 I think it was), did a study of text messaging and literacy and found that many English teachers were using text messages creatively in their classrooms, to explore literature, poetry, writing, and communication.

I really liked an article by David Crystal about the poetics of text messages (and I am making this connection because twitter is also about brevity and containment of a message within 140 characters):

The length constraint in text-poetry fosters economy of expression in much the same way as other tightly constrained forms of poetry do, such as the haiku or the Welsh englyn. To say a poem must be written within 160 characters at first seems just as pointless as to say that a poem must be written in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. But put such a discipline into the hands of a master, and the result can be poetic magic. Of course, SMS poetry has some way to go before it can match the haiku tradition; but then, haikus have had a head-start of several hundred years.

Crystal goes on further to claim the following:

An extraordinary number of doom-laden prophecies have been made about the supposed linguistic evils unleashed by texting. Sadly, its creative potential has been virtually ignored. But five years of research has at last begun to dispel the myths. The most important finding is that texting does not erode children’s ability to read and write. On the contrary, literacy improves. The latest studies (from a team at Coventry University) have found strong positive links between the use of text language and the skills underlying success in standard English in pre-teenage children. The more abbreviations in their messages, the higher they scored on tests of reading and vocabulary. The children who were better at spelling and writing used the most textisms. And the younger they received their first phone, the higher their scores.

So, I’m all for texting and tweeting in creative ways – and I’d like to see more use of it in classroom contexts.

For further information see:

• Such Tweet Sorrow (Mudlark and the Royal Shakespeare Company website)
• Romeo and Juliet get twitter makeover (The Telegraph)
• Romeo Tweets Juliet (NspireD2)
• Romeo and Juliet get Twitter Treatment (The Guardian)

I missed this! Mattel created a really clever campaign to update Scrabble. From the art director on the campaign:

“Everybody knows Scrabble, it’s one of those iconic games, and over time it became maybe, in a way, a little bit old fashioned, so we wanted to get people, especially young people, to be more interested in the game. We wanted to do something very visual, and very self-explanatory, kind of bringing the words to life, and make them as fun as possible, so that’s where the ‘the Beautiful Word’ came from.”

Here are the ads that ran for “the Beautiful Word” campaign:

You can read all about the campaign on my new favourite website, Jawbone TV.

As soon as I saw some stills from this movie I was enchanted. This movie comes from the imagination of Academy award winner Jan Svěrák, who also worked on the amazing online games of Samarost and Samarost 2. From kookythemovie.com, comes this description of the movie:

When asthmatic, six-year-old ONDRA is forced to throw away his scruffy, sawdust-stuffed old teddy bear, KOOKY, he prays for the safe return of his furry friend. Soon afterwards, across town, Kooky is about to be crushed in a rubbish dump when he suddenly comes to life, making his escape into a mysterious forest. The naïve, cuddly Kooky needs help to survive amongst the rough-and-ready creatures of the forest and he finds it when he meets the crotchety forest guardian HERGOT. Hergot is in charge of watching over the forest, but he has his enemies too – the malevolent NIGHTSHADE plans to take over the forest, by proving that the short-sighted but good-hearted Hergot is not up to the job of guardian.

Using puppetry and live action, Kooky is both an inventive, thrilling family adventure and a celebration of the childhood imagination.

Here is a trailer with English subtitles:

And also fun are some of the images from facebook:

Wonderful! I love all the behind the scenes shots, and the “making of” info on the website and on facebook. I wonder when we’ll get to see it here in Aus.