I’ve been playing around with Keynote and Garage Band and have put together a short video on Informatics. It was an idea that I had months ago and never followed through. It kind of evolved from snippets and pieces and it’s not very good. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it was the lamest video that ever lamely lamed.
I have yet to upload it to Youtube. Shall I, shan’t I? Do I really want people knowing how lame I really am?
Read more of I don’t do this for a living…
I’ve been watching Twitter for a while. I can’t get over the feeling of voyeurism. It’s kind of bizarre. I know it’s supposed to be a conversational space, but it doesn’t quite feel like that. I tend to use it mainly for an outlet for my lame humour. Not that that comes out very often.
I know I have this propensity to sit on the sidelines and watch what goes on. It’s like I can learn something, vicariously. Not necessarily participating, but seeing what people do. Learning from the things that go on around me. But not actively participating.
I’ve been trying to work it out, and I keep coming back to things that happened long long ago. I remember being fascinated by a storm when I was at school. There were dark clouds on one side of the classroom and bright, sunny sky on the other. When I told our teacher, his response was scathing with some belittling comment about water coming out of a shower head. I think I learnt then that it doesn’t pay to be openly inquisitive and fascinated by the world around you. I started keeping things to myself and not telling people when I thought something was cool because it may be oh so obvious and joy had no place in learning.
I guess I did overcome that to a certain extent or I wouldn’t be where I am today. The thing I really love about my job is encouraging students to find the joy in learning, because really, that’s the best reason for it.
I don’t think I’ve found the joy of Twitter.
The joy of blogging is getting any hits on a post. I don’t have high expectations so anything can become joyful.
I need to relearn how to share that joy.
I’ve started a number of posts over the last few days, but not gotten around to finishing them. It’s kind of testing the ideas on paper (or the screen or whatever metaphor you want to use). I think I’m talking to myself. It’s partly the idea that this here bloggy thing is all about what I find interesting, or at least workable. Obviously, not every thing I start writing is workable. I have some ideas that when I put down, I realise that they don’t quite work. There’s some basic premise that’s missing. So I leave them there. In drafts. Perhaps I’ll get back to them.
I have gone back over them occasionally and worked out that some would just never come together and I delete them, one or two have been worthwhile pushing through but there is still a whole heap of them that haven’t been rejected or moved forward yet. I suppose that’s part of my internal conversation with myself and the blog is part of the external conversation.
I want to keep working on the idea that a blog is more about collaborating with yourself, even while it’s also opening up to others. There’s a kind of reflexivity that comes with writing and I know I don’t do enough. I guess the idea of writing is now so bound up in what I do for a living, that the fun has gone out of it. How do I get that back?
Perhaps I should just push some of my less fully formed ideas out and let them float. I don’t know.
I have way too many interests to maintain a coherent framework in this forum. Which perhaps suggests I need an incoherent framework.
To quote myself: “flooble”!
I’m putting the final changes into a paper which is essentially an argument against censorship but framed in the debates about literacy education. The point of the paper is that we cannot start censoring the internet because it denies us the opportunities to develop the skills needed to assess all information. But with efforts to keep out the offensive stuff, where offensive is being reformed so that it precludes offending anyone over 15, means that we potentially never get our ideas challenged, we never see the other sides of arguments. This kind of tactic has been used with some success by the censor advocates by equating freedom of speech with desires to see child sexual abuse images[1]. This directly impinges upon the ways we can frame arguments against censorship as the majority of us are offended by child ‘p0rn’, and by majority, I mean the 99.9999999% of people who don’t look at it [2].
I’ve been trying to reformulate traditional ideas about literacy and how we learn to read, and by read, I mean make sense of, information on the World Wide Web. There seems to be different skills needed that help us develop ways of processing information. Forget the old ‘information overload’ crock. If we feel overloaded with information, then we do not have the kind of literacy that I think we should be developing. For that, we need ways of connecting ideas, ways of assessing it quickly and yes ways of assessing it deeply, all at the same time. That shows how hard it is to develop these skills. There is a whole heap of knowledge that you need to facilitate sense-making, a whole heap of skills you need to find information, then assess it both quickly and deeply.
This is one of the problems with censorship and one of the ideas that I don’t see discussed much, if at all. If we take out all the stuff that could potentially offend us, then we are never challenged to find a position that shifts our understanding. We keep the same understanding – ever more shallow in a world of deep knowledge, and deep understanding needs. But it also has a contextual aspect to it. We need the skills that work in our own environment.
UNESCO uses the concept of ‘functional literacy’ – the ability to function in one’s own society. This means that anyone who engages in so-called ‘virtual’ societies needs the kinds of skills to really make sense of multiple frames of knowledge. Anyone who professes to work within technologically mediated contexts needs to understand them in toto. Many of the people involved in the current censorship debate, demonstrate that incredibly nuanced understanding of the potential of mediation and yet, the very people advocating the censorship – our politicians – take reductionist positions that over simplify the arguments[3].
A while ago, I came up with the notion of flitteracy – the ways we make sense of information in an information-rich environment. I’m not sure whether that encompasses all that we need to think about, but I notice that many people appear to be highly flitterate – they can bring together diverse concepts quickly and deeply. Similarly, I don’t think I am as flitterate as others, but partially because my work requires that I engage with ideas at a considerable deeper level than the average person. I suppose I am flitterate within some areas, and, in some ways, the objective of this blog was to help me develop those skills, but my demonstration of flitteracy has not yet been fulfilled.
To be precise, I am probably vicariously flitterate. I see the trends, I read the arguments, I shift my position. I suppose, knowing that knowledge will allow me to shift positions means that if I commit a thought to this blog, and then disagree with myself, I may feel silly[4].
So getting back to the inital point, I find myself arguing against censorship/filtering because it denies us the potential to develop sound arguments for and against all areas of our lives. Whether or not we need to develop in ways that allow particular standpoints is entirely dependent on our context. As *groan* citizens of the web, we do need a deeper appreciation of the interplay of knowledge and technology. But if we are not engaged in that social framework, then perhaps we don’t. However, we all need to understand the contextual value of information.
Now, to reformulate this in ‘academic’ style with supporting evidence.
Tags: censorship, knowledge, literacy
I was just checking to see when the next edition of the International Journal of Organisational Behaviour would be out and apparently it’s up. My paper about email’s potential contribution to bullying is up (PDF).
I wrote that paper in about 3 days, so it’s definitely not my best work, but it’s now in print (electrons?) which is what counts in my line of work.
Now I really should tidy up my list of publications.
Tags: research
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