AERA Friday: " Literacy and Language Learning Across On-line and Offline Spaces"

Division C-Learning and Instruction  Le Centre Sheraton Montreal, Jarry Fri, April 15, 10:35
am to 12:05 pm 

(Tech)tual Interaction: The Dialogic Nature of English Language  Learners'
Activities in a Fanfiction-Based Website. Rebecca Ward Black, University
of Wisconsin-Madison

• fanfiction: fan-authored text derived from popular texts


• fan-art, video, music, fiction


• http://fanfiction.net : archives hundreds
  of thousands of fandoms, etc.


• review links back to reviewer's site (network)


• Final Fantasy has over 12,000 fictions


• Harry Potter has over 175,000 fandoms


• what does this look like vs. classroom writing spaces


• Tanaka Nananako (self-chosen pseudonym) wrote 50 fictions; has 6000 reviews,
  and her own responses to reviews, then revised texts (wrote 14 chapters
  in 2 years, mixing You've Got Mail with Card Captor Sakura in
  her high school setting.


• cultural linguistic hybridity is valued in fanfiction


• self-deprecating language to elicit positive responses


• fanfiction.net is an example of an affinity space (Gee)


• expertise and leadership is "pourous" (Gee, 2004)


• Implications: good academic writing? authentic, menaingful texts.
  draw on personal, linguistic popcultural resources; engaged interctive
  audience. communicative social function. Tied to identity.

Re-envisioning Language, Language, and the Immediate Subject in New
Media

(Previously titled " Second Language Literacy and Globalized Youth Culture
in  Networked Electronic Media") by  Wan Shun Eva Lam,  Northwestern
University

• Three Areas: Mediascapes; Studies of technologicaly- mediated
  literacies; Diaspora and transnational networks and cultural practices online



• Research: Alverman 2002, Lam 2004, Black in press, Chandler-Olcott & Mahar
  2003, Gee 2003, Hagood et al 2003, Lankshear ____


• How do immigrants use literacy and language online to foster new learning
  experiences competencies and representations of their linguistic and cultural
  identities.


• what practices do they use?


• Chinese girls prefer English chat room over Chinese chatroom because they
  want to improve their English, and can do so somewhat anonymously


• code-mixing between English and Chinese and hybrid language = linguistic
  diaspora


• Internet media affords: acculturation to transculturation; blended
  forms of language and literacy; productive critical literacy

Investigating Adolescent ELLs' Literacy Engagement in an Online Community:
Negotiating Literacy and Identity in  Cyberspace by Youngjoo
Yi, Ohio State University

• "Welcome to Buckeye City" (WTBC) -- a place where Korean teenagers
  who live in the area can hang out


• "1000 people, 10,000 stories" post and respond news articles,
  especially Korean news, and announcements


• Korean: unspoken official language


• to maintain Korean language, literacy, -- language is a border mechanism,
  and symbol of who they are.


• kids like writing for online community, but have a disdain for school-based
  writing


• attitude comes out online, whereas in the RW, they may be very very shy
  and well-behaved.

My thoughts: I think that one of the reasons that online
spaces foster so much writing, is because it is a networked (shared) social
space, and shared social spaces will be filled with content from whatever
tools are available. In this case, writing. When other options become available,
other things will fill.

Attention Structures and Computer-Mediated Communication  among
Hong Kong Secondary School Students. by Rodney  Jones, City
University of Hong Kong 

• MMLC (multimedi communication lab)


• you're supposed to be able to control your students with the monitor control
  at the front, but most of the students have figured out how to override the
  system


• Getting the Attention of the Students is a problem


• Where is the idea of attention located? most feel it's located in the individual,
  but another option is to see attention as a social commodity, in a sort of
  attention economy (Oooh! I like this!!)


• Mediated Discourse Analysis -- not so much on the discourse, but on the  actions that
  discourse makes possible


• the nexus of practice (Scollon Scollon 2004) between three attention structures:
  1. historical  body - 2. interaction of the other and the 3. discourse
  in place


• sweet illustration of attention structures in the example of "crossing
  the street" (historical body is self experience; interaction
  of other is social; and discourse in place is environment


• attention is distributed over many tasks: "polyfocality" (or
  polychronism)


• attention is distributed through many spaces online and offline


• ICQ bugs parents the most, for the students, it works to distribute and
  organize attention strategically among classes and peers.(doing homework
  together)


• Interaction order, cycles of discourse, and


• computers are in physical space, but also in virtual space


• ICQ complaint: no content, but that's not the purpose, the purpose is to
  distribute and attract social information.


• teachers don't have the historical body to deal effectivley with the type
  of communication of ICQ


• Paying attention to [things] AND Paying attention for [teammates]


• attention is consequential -- if you don't pay attention in Counterstrike,
  you die


• Games warm up the brain for homework


• HK classrooms are panopticon model -- not to hold attetnion, but to control
  it.


• (this is where the Air Force comes in)


• teachers use computers as books


• attention structures at home are polyfocal, embodied/situated; synch; consquentual,
  distribueted; negotiated/flexible interaction order,


• attracting attentiion


• compared to MMLC (classroom) controlled


• you can get me to pay attentions just by getting me to care

Discussant:  James Paul Gee, University of Wisconsin-Madison 

• farewell to language as we know it


• doesn't do what language was designed to do, which is to connect to identity
  and social action (what the hell are you doing?)


• language is finally coming home; ironically with the latest technology,
  ironically, it's being struggled against by parents/control freaks


• birth of something really exciting in pop culture


• Rodney Brooks, the man who makes robots (the "better" robots
  are the ones that look and act like humans.


• rodney started to program along the problem, not the rules


• learning is indigenously coming up, it's not following a set of rules.
  when you try to "rule" it, it generally fails.

Kevin M. Leander, Vanderbilt University  Paget, TERC

• pleasure to respond to this set of papers


• New Literacy Studies is at risk of being stuck b'c


• global transcultural flow


• very broad distributions of practice and knowledge in a much broader space


• sharing compliments


• fear and loathing of online discourse (in US and in HK)


• motivation in school writing  is low b'c there is no meaning (the
  factory/business model is a bad one)


• writing workshop vs. online writing in Rebecca's paper -- what happens
  to the idea of "the original author" -- not so big in online writing.


• multiple home spaces in talk, and constructions of home.


• relations to machines.


• mediated view of work as actions


• Rebecca's drawing on Activity Theory -- how does online stuff wotk in AT


• off task most of the time in online activity (task is gaining social status)


• pleasure, desire, play,


• affinity discourse analysis?


• how can we use images as a primary means of language/communication?


• use online space as a way to get away from RW space

Discussion

• where does the body end and the world begin? Gregory Bateson's example
  of the blind man and the stick (end at the fingers? at the middle of the
  stick? at the end? or in the world?)


• Henry Jenkins book on FanFiction -- kids use space to write their people
  of power.


• who has access? HK vs. Appalaccia (question of class)


•  many of these spaces are for profit as well. (idea of consumption)


• consider it in conjunction with production.

Discussant:  K. Ann Renninger, Swarthmore College