From the paper:-

 The essence of the challenge for all educators in the 21st century is to get the learners to:-

• read more widely
• see more clearly
• think more clearly
• (why am I thinking of the song "Day By Day"?)
• challenge authority on every occasion
• more importantly get learners to challenge themselves

 The aim is to promote the free-flow of information and ideas in the interest of all and to promote a thriving culture, economy and democracy.

 Information Literacy is the ability to deal with complexities of the current information environment - it must

• subsume all the skill-based literacies but not be restricted by them
• not be restricted to any one technology / technology group
• centre around understanding, meaning and context

 So much e-learning remains as e-teaching (the provision of lecture material online) - is this due to poor information literacies amonst the tutors?

 The "information literate" are those who know when they need information and are able to identify, locate, evaluate, organise and effectively use the information to address and resolve problems

 The Australian Information Literacy Standards

An information literate individual has learned how to learn and is able to:-

1. recognise a need for information
2. determine the extent of the information needed
3. access the needed information efficiently
4. evaluate the information and its sources
5. incorporate selected information into their knowledge base
6. use information effectively to accomplish a purpose
7. understand the economic, legal, social and cultural issues around the use of information
8. access and use information ethically and legally
9. classify / store / maipulate the information generated
10. recognise information literacy as a pre-requisite for lifelong learning

Firstly, Barrett attests that most graduates did not have a clear sense of their research aims at the start of the process - they fumbled about and were guided by colleagues, tutors and supervisors. This is so good to hear as I am usually in the same boat. The important thing here is that this is probably when most of the searching of libraries and whatnot occurs - so that searching can at bet be unfocussed and at worst be blind fishing. Without good IL skills the period of fuzziness is probably an awful lot longer than it needs to be.

The second little gem was that most students lack personal collections and substantial subject expertise. Again, I thought I was alone but so many people I have spoken to lack a personal collection or just have haphazard piles of documents in cupboards or piled on desks. From this knowledge I feel I can make best use of the web-based personal catalogues offered by del.icio.us, Connotea, Furl It, Zimbio and the like. All the tools are there - we just don't use them. I shall catalogue all my piles of paper.

What a paper to start us off on! It was like pulling teeth but I got there in the end I think. A good (content) opener for the course as it provided so much food for thought.

Intertextuality has to exist otherwise we would have to write everything de novo each time - scientific advances would be limited to the lifespan of any one scientist.

Newspapers of ten translate the "official" laguage of politicians and the like into the vocabulary of the the day-to-day spoken word (or rather the newspaper's interpretation of the spoken word). Why do they have to do this? Is it that "official" language is not digestable by the masses or are we losing the ability to understand "proper" vocabulary? I fear I do not know the answer to this!

From the paper:-

 Many non-commodity institutions are being drawn more and more into the commodity model and the matrix of consumerism - they are under pressure to "package" their "commodities" and "sell" them to "consumers".

 Presuppositions (based on prior texts of the text-producers or by other texts) can be manipulative as well as sincere - they are a good way of manipulating people as they are very difficult to challenge.

 A genre is not only a particular text type but a particular process of producing, distributing and consuming that text

 A discourse is a particular way of constructing a subject matter. E.g. Medicine is an area of knowledge constructed from a technological and scientific perspective unlike that of "alternative medicine"

Reading the paper did improve my understanding of sequential and cultural contexts in speech utterances and the importance of considering these when analysing dialogues.

Understanding the relationships between conversation participants helps understand the conversation through analysing the dialogue - are the participants on an equal footing or does one have some sort of superiority over another? This would change the giving and receiving of an utterance.

From the paper:-

 There is no point looking at a single utterance without considering their place in the local sequence of utterances and there is no point just looking at their sequential place if the contextual details are available. Contextual knowledge is a luxury though

 The analyst must know the cultural as well as the sequential rules for the use of certain utterances to correctly analyse the dialogue

Reading this paper has made me quite excited about doing some actual discourse analysis. I know I've got a lot more reading to do first but I think I'm starting to understand the complexity of the subject and intend to have a fisrt bash at things quite soon - I think I'll record one of my sessions at work next week and see what I can do about analysing it.

Good things I got from the paper - the actual process

Analysis of the teacher-pupil discourse

• Looked at how the teacher and all of the pupils interacted
• Was there any encouragement / discouragement? What forms did these take?
• How was discourse encouraged / discouraged? Did these change from pupil to pupil / over the time of the study?
• How much did each pupil talk and did this change over the course of the study?
• Was the students' talk "useful"? Did it use the vocabulary of the subject or help others in the class forward their understanding of the subject?

Analysing the teacher's intentions within the discourse

• Why did the teacher behave the way she did in the classroom?
• Where some pupils encouraged / discouraged more than others? If so then why?
• What were the teacher's expectations of the discourse and were these satisfied? Waht are the sources / aspects which have defined the teacher's expectations?
• How controlling was the teacher in the classroom? Did this have an effect on the discourse?
• What assuptions were made by the teacher in the classroom and did these have an effect on the overall discourse?
• Are there any sorts of pressures acting on the teacher which could have / did have an effect on her in the classroom/ If so, how did they manifest themselves?

Alignment of teacher's intentions with policy / institutional discourse

• Did the teacher's actions support the policies of the institution / society or not?
• How did policies and institutional discourses manifest themselves in the classroom and did they affect the classroom discourse in a beneficial / detrimental way?
• Did the teacher manage to achieve or advance the curriculum requirements or not? How? Why?

So much food for thought!

The best part of this paper for me was the discussion about the over-romanticising of the idea that the provision of material will overcome the digital divide in some sort of magic way - it will, prpobably, actually increase the divide. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink! Also, so much of the world don't have the basic access so providing them with more things they can't access with help not one jot!

I did like the idea of not just throwing away the old traditional literacies though - use them as building blocks and as an access to the digital / information literacies required in a digital future.

From the paper:-

 Does the possession of multimedia literacy or the lack of it create a new divide between those who have it and those who don't? Will it make those who do not have the literacies into passive consumers of pre-packaged information?

 What is the relationship between traditional literacies and the new multimedia literacies? This question needs to be addressed if those with weaker IL skills are not to be left behind / out

 Competence in traditional literacies are often the gateway into new literacies.

 "We strive towards post-industrial forms of knowledge acquisition" - I hate this comment! It makes us sound as if we have been languishing in some sort of knowledge-poor Dark Age and the industrial age has been over for about 50 years or so - comments like this are way too late!

I'm impressed with the speed this site was set up. It's great that it contains all of the functions that Eduspaces had too as I really liked that site.

Here's looking forward to a new term - making some new friends and reacquainting with some old ones (if thirteen weeks could be considered old)

Have a great term eveybody!