December 2005 Archives

As the semester winds up, what's a geeky girl to do but look forward to next semester's classes?  :)  I'll actually be taking a fairly light class load, freeing up some time to work on the lit review for my diss proposal and to take the certification exam, among other things.  Class-wise, I'm taking part II of Comm and Social Theory, which should be quite interesting.  The class I'm *wicked* psyched about though is an experimental, joint class between TC and Columbia's Architecture school.  It's being taught by Kelvin Shawn Sealey of TC's Film & Ed Research Academy, and Scott Marble.  From the syllabus:

This joint GSAPP and TC course has two primary objectives. The first is to create an important and long overdue interdisciplinary blend between the fields of architecture and education in an academic setting, one we feel will be in service to both fields. The second is to channel the strength of the blended fields into focusing on the real world experience of the post-Katrina New Orleans school system.

Readings include Lefebvre, Soja, and a bunch of interesting people I've never heard of.  Should be a great opportunity all the way around.

So you may have gathered from a recent post that I'm interested in thick descriptions of student technology and literacy practices across spaces.  Scott left a comment that pointed me to an ambitious-sounding study called Being Digital in School, Home and Community: "The project aims to generate comprehensive and detailed accounts of young people's engagement with digital technologies and to consider the implications for school education."

Their project description reminds me of another project that I blogged about a while ago, Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media, out of Berkeley and the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC: "This project works to address this gap in understanding and practice with a targeted set of ethnographic investigations into three emergent modes of informal learning that young people are practicing using new media technologies."  Both of these projects impress me with their scale, funding, and their potential for providing rich data.  Do y'all know of other projects like this out there, large and small?  And more selfishly, do you know of any that focus on undergraduates?  :)

Here it is:

Note how the parrot is totally eyeing my button.

Gus Is queen of the might (i.e. more Miami hijinks)

A parrot ate my button!  No, seriously.  You could get your picture taken with these parrots, and for laughs, my advisor insisted that his students should do this.  It was pretty funny actually, even more so when the parrot I was holding in my arms ate the button on my jacket!

I'm here in sunny Miami, where the palm trees have Christmas decorations and posses of hawks circle the skyscrapers.  Gaggles of hawks?  Anyway, I gave my talk this morning, Blogging within the system: An exploration of undergraduate literacy practices in school-sanctioned blogs (view presentation and talking notes), and I think it went really well, despite being at the god-awful hour of 8:30 am.  We had two other great presentations (Dana Cammack on identity practices in livejournal, and a discourse analysis of livejournal by Achirya Rezak and Donna Alvermann) - three, if you count the insightful commentary offered by discussant Michele Knobel - and a lively discussion that was unfortunately too short.  We kind of had to be dragged out of the room to make room for the next presentation.  There have been a lot of cool people at this conference doing serious work around blog practices, including DrJoolz and Guy, who I've been psyched to spend time with, and Anya, whose presentation I sadly missed.  Anyway, I'm toying with the idea of putting together a blog for people researching in this area, so that we can share ideas and resources.  Will probably ping people to see if there's interest (or ping me).