Julia Davies

Display, Identity and the Everyday: Self-presentation through online image sharing

Drawing on a study of a photo-sharing website (Flickr.com), this paper explores ways in which everyday life is reconfigured through an online photo-sharing space, where traditional boundaries between the public and private spheres are being extended, challenged or eroded. The paper reflects on the presentation and subjects of the images; the narratives within and around them, and the affordances and practices which impact on the ways in which many people review and represent their “everyday selves and lives” online. The interactions on Flickr are presented as instantiating both learning and literacy as a social practice (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Lave & Wenger, 1991) within a context that can be conceptualised as simultaneously global and local. The paper further considers the relationship between digital and traditional domestic photography, drawing on analyses of photographic representation (Hirsh, 2002; Kuhn, 1995) and contrasts how digital practices affect meanings differently.

Affinities and Beyond! Developing Ways of Seeing in Online Spaces

This article presents an insider view of an online community of adults involved in sharing digital photography through a host website, Flickr. It describes how reciprocal teaching and learning partnerships in a dynamic multimodal environment are achieved through the creation of a ‘Third Space’ or ‘Affinity Space’, where ‘Funds of Knowledge’ are shared and processed in such a way that new meanings and discourses are generated. It is argued that this process is evidence of valuable learning and of the deepening of global understandings within the local space of Flickr. The new understandings are at least partly identifiable on the Flickr space, through the co-constructed ‘folksonomy’ or ‘online taxonomy’ of ways of looking at the world. Further, the article provides evidence for broadening existing definitions of literacy, at a time when the visual mode increasingly works interactively with verbal cues and explanations.

New Literacies and the English Curriculum

The central tenet of this book holds that not only have new technologies affected what it means to be literate, but also that this new conceptualisation means that the English curriculum and pedagogy need to reflect this change. Unsworth, in his useful preface and introductory chapter, argues that this is not simply about making minor adjustments to what we teach and how we teach it; he urges that fundamental changes need to be made. He points out that:

Trainee Hairdressers' Uses of Facebook as a Community of Gendered Literacy Practice

This paper presents research into how four female trainee hairdressers use Facebook. The participants are friends, attending college in the north of England. In this work I was interested in participants’ presentations of self as presented through their Facebook activities. This work draws on New Literacy Studies to consider the written texts and photographic representations in Facebook profiles and albums; it also draws on Paechter’s concept of communities of gendered practice and combines these theories to examine ways in which the participants’ Facebook literacy practices could be considered as gendered – and what this might mean. Through regular online textual representations of their lives, the trainees not only continually reviewed their own lives on a moment-by-moment basis, but kept surveillance of the lives of their online friends. In this process they participated in the maintenance of gendered communities of literacy practice. The data comprise notes and transcriptions of group interviews about the young women’s uses of Facebook and from Facebook data itself – the girls’ Facebook walls and selected photographs.

Game 2 Engage: Using iPads to Mediate and Develop Social Relationships in College Learning

This paper describes a project which focused on two groups of post 16 college students working together using a range of iPad applications. The potential of digital technologies to engage students in the curriculum has been prolifically documented. Less is known about how technologies might help students engage with each other. In this paper, we suggest iPads can mediate and enhance new relationships between distinct cohorts of students and thus create new opportunities for social learning. This research reveals how the specifics of the design and materiality of iPads affect the nature of the relationships amongst research participants both within and beyond the literacy classroom, and how a range of applications can be used to perform ‘social networking’ both on and offline.