John Potter

Curation as a new literacy practice

Curating, as a verb, incorporates many sub-components and actions; it suggests at least the following: collecting, cataloguing, arranging and assembling for exhibition, displaying. As well as the institutional and professional contexts for such work through the centuries and across cultures, many people have made personal collections of texts and artefacts that have stood for them in the world, in some ways, as representing a nexus of relationships, affiliations and markers of identity (Miller, 2008). As with so many aspects of life and cultural practices we should not expect people’s use of digital media to do anything other than change significantly the ways in which curation operates. Indeed it has been suggested that curation itself is now a metaphorical new literacy practice which incorporates the collection, production and exhibition of markers of identity through time in both digital production and social media (Potter, 2012). Such curated media collections and performances are provisional and contingent, permanent or transient and involve varying degrees of agency on the part of the end user, along with risk, opportunity and personal efficacy. For all ages this involves engaging and developing skills and dispositions which enable agency in some way; curatorship is to curation as authorship is to writing. New or adapted skill sets in new media are nascent in people of all ages but suggest certain ways of being and learning for younger people in formal or informal settings of learning. For the purposes of this special issue in E-learning and Digital Media we are defining curation/curatorship in new media as a distinctive new literacy practice and we are exploring through the articles the ways in which this impacts on, or is evidenced in, activity in a variety of spaces.

Curating media learning: Towards a porous expertise

This article combines research results from a range of projects with two consistent themes. Firstly, we explore the potential for curation to offer a productive metaphor for the convergence of digital media learning across and between home / lifeworld and formal educational / systemworld spaces – or between the public and private spheres. Secondly, we draw conclusions from these projects to argue that the acceptance of transmedia literacy practices as a site for rich educational work – in media education and related areas – can only succeed if matched by a convergence of a more porous educator–student expertise.

Dynamic, Playful and Productive Literacies

Abstract This paper reflects on recent projects in a variety of media forms, in both formal and informal educational settings, discussing ways of expanding our notions of literacy practices which reflect their place in the wider lived experience of digital culture. We have collected these reflections under three headings. The first of these, Dynamic Literacies, presents an overarching view of literacy as both ideological, following the ‘new literacy studies’, and dynamic, incorporating both semiotic and sociocultural versions of literacy in ways which reflect the changing nature of lived experience in the digital age. The second strand, Productive Literacies, constructs an argument around digital making practices with younger learners which views these as media crafting, critique and artistry. The third strand, Playful Literacies, explores recent projects which are located in games and game-authoring practices as a specific example of connecting pedagogy to contemporary media forms and learner agency in formal and informal settings. Taken together, the three perspectives allow for common ground to be established between multimodal production practices, whilst providing suggestions for framing literacy pedagogy in response to the pervasive use of media and technology in contemporary digital culture.

Third Spaces and Digital Making

In this chapter we articulate our understanding of the term third space and position our use of it as part of an evolving semantic which takes in metaphorical, virtual and physical spaces which are all interstitially located between larger institutional organisations: home, school, work and so on. These interstitial spaces are locations for thinking, working, negotiating, playing and more, in the context of digital media, education and culture. They are all places in which ‘literacy events’ (Street, Curr Issue Compar Educ, 5: 77–91, 2003) take place, in which meanings are shared and in which pedagogical framing of those meanings is a key determinant of action in education. In other words, we see third spaces as connected to the notion of ‘dynamic literacies’ introduced in Chapter 1. We see such spaces existing as potential locations for learning in which hierarchies are also fluid and we examine further the potential for ‘digital making’ to exist in these spaces.

Digital Media Learning in the Third Space

ABSTRACT In this article, we share the outcomes of two fieldwork focus groups conducted as part of a larger project investigating ‘third space literacies’ in digital media learning contexts. One focus group brought together an international group of media education practitioners at the Media Education Summit in Rome. The other was a transcribed conversation between four published researchers in the field, ourselves, Neil Selwyn and Cathy Burnett. The data from these two fieldwork activities was first presented as an afterword to our book Digital Media, Culture and Education: Theorising Third Space Literacies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Here, we present the outcomes and discuss their implications for the themes addressed in this special issue, namely contemporary forms of participation in formal and informal learning. Our contribution is a theoretical and research informed position, drawn from Cultural Studies, new literacy studies and educational research, on the ‘conditions of possibility’ for learning to take place in the ‘third space’ across and between these domains. This space facilitates dynamic literacies, curational practices and a porous exchange of knowledge. Purposive use of such a space can answer questions about the use of digital media for teaching and learning in school, the affordances of transmedia for education and the connection of teaching and learning in and out of school.

Cultural Studies Goes to Not-School: Digital Struggles

What frameworks of education anywhere in the world are negotiating with the different ways to make meaning in the digital age? How can multimodality and sociocultural theory work together in the context of learning? This chapter will provide a framework for aligning these hitherto distinct – and sometimes conflicting – theoretical ‘lenses’ to assess digital education as the social practice of ‘horizontal’ meaning making rather than a ‘vertical’ regime of value/legitimation. This chapter will be ‘bookended’ by a consideration of the implications of digital networks and third spaces for the explicitly pedagogic legacy of the Birmingham Contemporary Centre for Cultural Studies (including the works by Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart, Dick Hebdige, Richard Johnson, Angela McRobbie and Tessa Perkins), its development in the ‘seminal’ Cultural Studies Goes to School (Buckingham and Sefton-Green (eds) and the recent revisiting of these approaches in a literacy studies context in Learning and Literacy Over Time (Roswell and Sefton-Green 2015).

The Networked Educator and Open Learning

This chapter will employ ANT to assess the research evidence (not the conjecture) that supports the view that the social network is an emerging human/non-human agent in contemporary education and learning. Examples under scrutiny here will include Teachmeets, learner networks, MOOCS (both established and emergent) and ‘we media’ peer pedagogy. In each case, ANT will be deployed to evaluate the place of the ‘affordance’ in the educational landscape and the degree to which validation is present, and on what terms. A major case study will be the Open Education movement (Hall et al. 2014), and their project to disturb ‘either or’ models of networked learning from within the educational mainstream, in favour of ‘either and’ disruptions which problematise conditions of possibility for expertise, discipline boundaries and the commodification of learning, whilst existing in the same space as profoundly neoliberal ‘providers’. Crucially, the extent to which each network operates within a pedagogic rationale will be explored, from the perspectives of providers and users.

Foreword – Terms and Conditions

In this opening chapter we describe the major themes of the book in the fields of digital media, culture and education. We are concerned with defining literacies as ‘dynamic’ in the context of rapidly changing, all pervasive media and technology. We see this as taking a position which rejects simple definitions and performative measures of narrow sets of skills. Following this we address critically the following concepts and debates: ‘third spaces’ for learning; the digital maker movement; the notion of curation as a new literacy practice; what counts as expertise and knowledge in the context of digital media and education; networked and open education; cultural studies and ‘not-school’. We conclude with an afterword in the form of a reflexive conversation colleagues about major themes in the book.

Afterword – An Exchange with Cathy Burnett, Neil Selwyn and Others

In this closing chapter we restate the theoretical position taken throughout the book, drawn from cultural studies, NLS and educational research, to discuss the implications of the themes and findings from each chapter for learners, teachers, educational developers, policymakers and researchers. This will take the form of a summary overview, bringing together the key strands into a set of ‘conditions of possibility’ rather than recommendations. This concluding chapter will be presented as a transcribed ‘reflexive’ conversation between the two authors and two critical friends from the field of literacy and technology in education, Cathy Burnett and Neil Selwyn, reflecting on some of the key issues in the preceding text. Finally, we discuss the book and its key issues with attendees of the Media Education Summit, an annual, international conference which runs a conversation strand and, with the delegates’ permission, we present a range of views on issues we have raised.

Digital Curation/Digital Production: Storying the Digital Learner

In this chapter we invoke and develop critically the notion of curation in digital media. We will describe how a theory of curation is operationalised and turns into social action inside and outside places of learning whilst acknowledging that this clearly is the subject of much debate, in which very similar questions are being asked using different analytical frames drawn from sociocultural theory, psychology, literacy studies and more. In sociocultural theory, for example, the curatorial impulse around personal possessions is explored as a specific analogue for relations with people (as in Daniel Miller’s work). From cultural psychology, in contrast, building on the work of Jerome Bruner, the relation to self-storying is seen as a way of constructing the self. These and other perspectives on curation are explored using concrete examples and related back to digital practices.