Julian McDougall

Children, video games and physical activity: An exploratory study

Media consumption and video gameplay can contribute to a sedentary lifestyle. Nevertheless, video games may have the potential to actually enhance childrens physical activity. Objective: To explore the potential of video games to contribute to childrens health and physical activity. Study Group: Twelve British children (seven female, five male) aged 8-11 years. Methods: Th children participated in daily video-game play during school lunch times for one week. Focus group interviews were employed, pre and post the game play week, to examine childrens perceptions of video games in relation to physical activity and health. Physical activity was assessed during all game play periods using pedometry and heart rate monitoring. Results: Pre the game play period, all children reported that video games had a negative impact on health and physical activity. Post game play, children reported that active video gameplay was an attractive alternative to traditional forms of physical activity that might be more attractive to nonexercisers. The results during the gameplay period revealed that boys and girls accumulated 10% and 11% of the recommended number of steps/day for health and also engaged in an average of 11 minutes (or 46% of the monitoring period) sustained moderate to vigorous physical activity through active video gaming each day. Conclusions: Although video games have traditionally been regarded as a negative influence on childrens physical activity, active video games may provide a viable alternative to traditional physical activity. Even a short duration of daily active video-game play can contribute significantly to children achieving the recommended daily volume of physical activity.

Alfabetización mediática crítica en la postmodernidad

En este trabajo se reflexiona sobre las relaciones entre alfabetizacion, alfabetizacion mediatica y educacion para los medios, relacionandolas con los hallazgos de diferentes investigaciones etnograficas, a fin de proponer nuevas formas de practica para la alfabetizacion critica en los medios. Vivimos en la postmodernidad, en la era «despues de los medios» –y no es que ya no existan los medios–, sino que, por el contrario, surge una forma de pensar –y ensenar– que se resiste a la idea de considerar los medios como algo ajeno a la ciudadania en la vida cotidiana. Para el autor, la permanencia de preceptos y practicas anquilosadas sobre educacion en los medios dificulta la puesta en marcha de proyectos de alfabetizacion mediatica, al igual que una vision tradicionalista de la literatura genera practicas viciadas de lectura en el aula. La ensenanza formal de la lengua ha obstaculizado el desarrollo de lectores criticos y competentes, imponiendo un modelo de lector unidimensional. Igualmente, los estudios mediaticos han ensombrecido la alfabetizacion en los medios, subestimando la legitimidad del estudio de la cultura popular en si misma desde un punto de partida erroneo. La educacion en medios es aun una asignatura pendiente y requiere un cambio de perspectiva. En este articulo, fruto de investigaciones, se propone una «pedagogia del inexperto» como estrategia para la alfabetizacion critica en los medios.

Shaping up? Three acts of education studies as textual critique

This paper presents a study of dominant educational discourses through textual critique and argues that such an approach enables education studies to preserve an important distinction from teacher training. The texts deconstructed here are specific to English education, but the discourses at work have international relevance as the rhetorics of accountability, performance and measurement (which we call cells of discourse) have global reach. Ward described a national picture in England whereby the great majority, if not all, of education studies undergraduate courses appear to be taught alongside, or within (through shared modules) teacher training programmes. But from a sociological position, these are two increasingly conflicting arenas—the study of education and the training of teachers. In response, Ward called for the subject to radicalize teacher education. The implications of this are significant if education studies is to retain a status as agent of critique. In this paper we return to the theme of education studies as a discrete practice from teacher training and suggest that any acceptance of a proximal relation to teacher education is counter‐productive. In so doing we offer three contemporary examples of the subject at deconstructive work, scrutinizing the published standards for teacher training in England, employer discourse and the Tomlinson report (commissioned by the English government to offer proposals for the reworking of vocational education) and the new curriculum for adult literacy in England. Particular attention is given to analysing the ways in which such texts speak the currently powerful discourse of standards.

After the Media: Culture and Identity in the 21st Century

Acknowledgements Introduction: After the Media Chapter 1 Power after the media Chapter 2 Genre after the media Chapter 3 Representation after the media Chapter 4 Ideology after the media Chapter 5 Identity after the media Chapter 6 History after the media Chapter 7 Audience after the media Chapter 8 Narrative after the media: from narrative to reading Chapter 9 Technology after the media Conclusion Pedagogy after the media: towards a pedagogy of the inexpert References Index

Open to disruption: education ‘either/and’ media practice

The Journal of Media Practice (JMP) is concerned with media practice as research, research into media practice and media practice education. With the emergence and expansion of media education in digital ‘third spaces’, networked communities and with open access, we can reasonably add education as media practice to these lines of enquiry. Thus, when Gary Hall and colleagues recently made Open Education: A Study in Disruption freely downloadable, the pertinence to JMP of this critical experiment appeared striking. Open Education (OE) engages critically with the creative disruption of the university through free online education. It puts into political context not just the 2012 batch of publicity-savvy MOOCS (Edx, Udacity, FutureLearn, etc.), but also TED Talks and Wikiversity along with self-organised ‘pirate’ libraries such as libgen.org and aaaaarg.org and ‘free universities’ associated with the anti-austerity and student protests and global Occupy movement. Questioning many of the ideas open education projects take for granted, including Open Access and Creative Commons, it proposes a radically different model for the university and education in the twenty-first century. This journal’s editors, through a visiting tenure between institutions, have a prior relationship with the Disruptive Media Learning Lab at Coventry University, a strand of the Centre for Disruptive Media and its Open Media Group from which the text in question is developed. In constructing a review of Open Education, a feeling of wanting to have a conversation grew, in part due to a tension between the book’s conviction that hierarchies and exclusions in the academy require disruption, and the traditional delimiting of the academic peer review with its lack of a dialogue between writer and reader. Moreover, rather than assert the conjunction between ‘open education’ and media practice, the opportunity to work this out more discursively by bringing our different perspectives to the conversation, transparently, as a move towards ‘showing the working’ of a book review, seemed palpable. What follows, then, is a review in the form of extracts from a conversation between JMP and co-authors Gary Hall, Shaun Hides and Jonathan Shaw. JMP: Open Education seeks to critically engage with the big questions, from John Henry Newman to Collini, about the role of the University in the digital age (see Berger and McDougall 2012) for a discussion of media education in this equation). The book weaves together – sometimes with inspiring coherence and sometimes more elusively observing ‘profound contradictions’ – connected strands of a temporal ‘thing in the world’ (my words), that is open education, and a more or less aligned project to harness its disruptive potential to re-think the social practices of the University. ‘Open’ can, though, mean many things and there’s a sense of a Journal of Media Practice, 2015 Vol. 16, No. 1, 1–7, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682753.2015.1015797

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.

Alfabetización mediática crítica en la postmodernidad = Critical Media Literacy after the Media

En este trabajo se reflexiona sobre las relaciones entre alfabetizacion, alfabetizacion mediatica y educacion para los medios, relacionandolas con los hallazgos de diferentes investigaciones etnograficas, a fin de proponer nuevas formas de practica para la alfabetizacion critica en los medios. Vivimos en la postmodernidad, en la era «despues de los medios» –y no es que ya no existan los medios–, sino que, por el contrario, surge una forma de pensar –y ensenar– que se resiste a la idea de considerar los medios como algo ajeno a la ciudadania en la vida cotidiana. Para el autor, la permanencia de preceptos y practicas anquilosadas sobre educacion en los medios dificulta la puesta en marcha de proyectos de alfabetizacion mediatica, al igual que una vision tradicionalista de la literatura genera practicas viciadas de lectura en el aula. La ensenanza formal de la lengua ha obstaculizado el desarrollo de lectores criticos y competentes, imponiendo un modelo de lector unidimensional. Igualmente, los estudios mediaticos han ensombrecido la alfabetizacion en los medios, subestimando la legitimidad del estudio de la cultura popular en si misma desde un punto de partida erroneo. La educacion en medios es aun una asignatura pendiente y requiere un cambio de perspectiva. En este articulo, fruto de investigaciones, se propone una «pedagogia del inexperto» como estrategia para la alfabetizacion critica en los medios.

A Lacanian Reading of the Study of Big Brother in the English Curriculum

This article presents a Lacanian analysis of the legitimising event represented by the circulation of materials from the English DfES (Department for Education and Skills), a ministerial government office, to teachers of English in schools to use as a means to facilitate the study of the television show Big Brother. The attempt, through Media in English, to ‘pin down’ the meaning of ‘reality’ television presents for analysis here the identity crisis of English—the tension between what it is and how it recognises itself—its ideal ego and its ego‐ideal.

Revisiting the evidence: practice submissions to the REF

For international readers of JMP, some history and context are required. The research excellence framework is an increasingly determining driver for the institutional development of research in the UK. The REF is a system, conducted in six-year periods for ‘assessing the quality’ of research in UK higher education (HE) institutions. The outcomes impact on academics, researchers, practitioners at the level of the individual, research centre sustainability, whole institution research strategy and the future direction of disciplines. The intention of REF is to provide accountability for public investment in research; to produce evidence of the benefits of this investment, described as ‘impact’ in a combination of social, economic or more abstract ‘undecided’ terms; to provide metrics for the future allocation of research funding and ‘benchmarking’ data and to indicate ‘reputational yardsticks’ for use within the HE sector and for public information. The wording for this outline is taken from http://www.ref.ac.uk/about/ in the public domain. The first formal audit of research across Universities was in 1986, evolving into a ‘selectivity exercise’ three years later and, managed by the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE), the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was used to allocate funding between 1992 and 2014, when the current REF, which we reflect on here, measured and compared clustered outputs (weighted at 65%), impact (20%) and environment (15%). Impact (societal/economic – the manifestation of ‘value for money’ for academic research) replaced the arguably less commodified ‘esteem’ in 2014. ‘Esteem’ the profile of a group’s research among peers and networks but not necessarily converted into public sphere ‘impact’ is now a part of ‘environment’ which includes PHD students, institutional support for research and other markers of the value of research in a University. Research outputs are graded 1–4 but an interesting change has taken place in recent years, with the international significance of an article, or other form of dissemination, becoming the norm (at Grade 2). Most challenging, for the practice researchers reflecting on the REF here, is the arrangement of the assessment into discipline boundaries, and the need for Universities to categorise research into groupings that, whilst increasingly conducive to multidisciplinary work, may not so easily accommodate practice research. In post-REF ‘debriefs’, three themes emerged. First, it was clear that the various ways of analysing the data (outputs, impact, the ‘power’ of impact calculated as an average of the number of researchers ‘returned’) made it possible for institutions to celebrate their achievements using a varied menu of options for data presentation. Second, the hyper-subjectivity of the REF (effectively a peer review of peer review) came to the fore. And third, the over-production and commodification of research in Journal of Media Practice, 2015 Vol. 16, No. 2, 97–107, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682753.2015.1041803

Media studies : the basics

Acknowledgements List of Figures Introduction 1. Studying Media 2. Reading Media 3. Powerful Media 4. Global Media 5. Changing Media 6. Making Media Glossary Bibliography Web Resources Index