John Daley

Avatars and reality

Recently I have read 2 posts in separate blogs regarding avatars. 

By this I  am not referring to the Hindu concept of the re-incarnation of a higher being.  Rather, I refer to the little pictures of computer users you see in blogs, bulletin boards, and on places like Twitter and Second Life.

The posts were by:

• Old mate and all-round good guy John Larkin, who writes from the educator's perspective
• Phillip Merrick, a co-founder of VisualCV.com, who is writing from the perspective of the job seeker and the prospective employer

Both posts refer to the need for honesty and transparency in one's online representation.

John writes:

I utilise a portrait photograph as it represents me. What you see is what you get. As an educator, as a teacher I feel that is the correct approach for myself to take if I am to blog and tweet professionally.

Mr Merrick writes from the point of view of the issue of whether or not this clashes with anti-discrimination law - a variation on the "what you see is what you get" policy above:

We spent quite some time before launching the site investigating the legal and corporate HR issues relating to use of pictures and video, and we feel safe in telling job seekers they can use one or more pictures on their VisualCV, so long as they are comfortable [in] doing so. US laws say you cannot discriminate, almost (but not quite!) as simply as that. And of course at VisualCV we do not condone discrimination of any kind. But consider that if someone were prone to discriminate on the basis of age, race, country of origin or gender, many of those characteristics can be deduced from a plain vanilla resume. Not to mention that most recruiters and hiring managers will inevitably google a candidate -- and many people today have images of themselves online (think Flickr, Photobucket etc., in addition to Facebook and MySpace). Finally, with the possible exception of age (do I really look over 40?), all such characteristics are immediately apparent once a candidate presents themselves at the first interview.

(Anti-discrimination law in the Australian State of New South Wales is broadly the same as Mr Merrick states in the USA, except that religious organisations in New South Wales - such as schools and places of worship - are exempt.)

This issue interests me from both perspectives. 

Students in my job-application classes ask about whether to put a picture at the head of the CV;  I have chickened out a bit and said just to do as they feel comfortable - interestingly, making the point that Mr Merrick makes about any latent discriminatory tendencies will come out anyway.

As to John's view about openness and transparency as an educator - I couldn't agree more!  John makes that very point in the Twitter discussion he cites:

John Larkin: ... We teach our students to be wary of those they communicate with as they may not be what they seem. So, what about teacher avatars?

When I started experimenting with all this Web 2.0 stuff, I adopted the username of lysurgis23. This was in honour of my membership name in the Argonauts Club on ABC [Australia] Radio in the late 1960s and early 1970s; alas the sought after rank of Dragon's Tooth and Bar eluded me,  but set me off on an interest in writing that continues to this day.

But I quickly realised the importance of honesty in my online dealings.  I kept the Argonaut name for consistency across my www use (and in honour of the presenters, including Jason, Phideas,  Elizabeth, Jimmy, and the Muddle-Headed Wombat) but nowadays you usually do not have to look far to find my real name.

I agree with both gentlemen regarding the use of avatars, and I will be advising my students accordingly.

But the other issue is, of course, the online environment encountered by women. 

There are plenty of misogynists, dodgy characters and weirdos out there.  I advise my women students to pick a gender-neutral name when registering for a web-based email account (such as jsmith@ rather than janesmith@), and I  consider that there is a case for such neutrality for a woman user of the www if she feels more comfortable about this.  (And most of my students in these courses are women.)

Am I being inconsistent?

• The picture of John Cleese as the hotelier Basil Fawlty at the top of this post is from the BBC News / UK of 30th September 2005.

The further politicisation of literacy education

There is - or rather was - a valuable mailing list of literacy-education-related articles regularly compiled and distributed by Associate Professor Brian Cambourne.

Every few days he would distribute a summary of what media articles related to literacy education was apearing in the Australian and international media.

recipients of the summaries used this to inform their, research, to spark discussion with students, to improve their own teaching practice - in short, this information was used far and wide and this service was highly valued.

Now its compiler has been attacked by Miranda Devine in an ill-informed and emotive piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.

The discussion is far more complex than the baddies-in-black-hats scenario that Ms Devine paints in this article.

I also do not believe that Brian Cambourne deserves to be insulted - being portrayed here as some sort of monster.

But I believe that the words of the Bullock Report into reading education in the United Kingdom in 1975 best sum up the true situation (as distinct from that which was written up in the Herald):

There is no one method, medium, approach, device, or philosophy that holds the key to the process of learning to read. Too much attention has been given to polarised opinions about approaches to the teaching of reading. What is needed is a comprehensive study of all the factors at work and the influence that can be exerted upon them.

This point was also made by Ron Sinclair who came to Brian Cambourne's defence in a letter to the editor on 23rd March:

To quote from the letter:

Cambourne has produced a wealth of impressive evidence to substantiate his advocacy of holistic approaches to literacy. He is one of many dedicated literacy leaders who rightly emphasise the centrality of meaning in learning to read and that excessive emphasis on fragmented decoding achieves only limited results. Such reductionism can produce "readers" who are able to decode print, but who seldom go near a book.

Whole language advocates are not averse to teaching phonics; they teach embedded phonics as one strategy among many necessary to help children with reading problems. How many times must it be said that almost all schools teach phonics thoroughly? [...]

{...] To characterise whole language advocates as those who think "children learn to read naturally just by being exposed to books" is insulting. It fails to recognise the wide acceptance of whole language emphases on skills being taught in context, literacy across the curriculum and quality literature at all levels of the reading experience.

From my limited teaching experience I can see that it would be wrong for me to place all my teaching-reading strategies in one basket.  The students I meet have differing needs, and there is no one-size-fits-all to these students.

As for Brian Cambourne's work distributing the newspaper articles - not surprisingly, he does not want to do it any more.

• Bullock A (1975).  A language for life:  Report of the Committee of Enquiry appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Science under the Chairmanship of Sir Alan Bullock FBA.  London:  Her Majesty's Stationery Office.

The politicisation of literacy education

This copy of an open letter written to President Barack Obama of the USA  concerns the politicisation of literacy education in the USA. It was written by Yetta M Goodman and Ken Goodman.

My humble view is that this open letter is well worth ploughing through.

Download Open_letter

Text, meaning and perspective: the case of the 3 Little Pigs

Today in an English class we considered how text can have hidden meaning as well as (or instead of) literal meaning.

As an example, we considered the story of the 3 Little Pigs.

Firstly we actually read the story - all of my students are from a CALD background, and many  had not encountered this story before.

We then looked at the literal meaning and the hidden meanings of this story.  Obviously pigs don't build houses and wolves don't huff and puff, so this eventually got us into moral (lesson) and allegory in this type of text.

This was backed up by some students recounting such stories from their own background.

From here we looked at alternative ways of telling the story.  This included:

The famous 1957 cartoon Three Little Bops (directed by Friz Freling)

:

The Three Little Bops
Uploaded by redhotjazz

This video runs for 6 minutes 42 seconds, and requires a high-speed internet connection for download

The following books (mostly listed in the book column to the right of this page):

• BAILLIE Allan, and BENTLEY Jonathan (1999).  Archie the big good wolf.  Sydney:  Red Fox.
• HAWKINS Colin & Jacqui (2004).  Fairytale news.  London:  Walker Books.
• WOLF A, as told to SCIESZKA Jon and (illustrator) SMITH Lane (1989).  The true story of the 3 little pigs!  London:  Puffin.

Learners seemed to particularly enjoy Wolf (1989) because it presented a near-congruent alternative explanation for the Wolf's behaviour in the story.  Hawkins & Hawkins (2004) also enabled us to consider how the message in a text can be transmitted by more than just words - in this book was enclosed a separate newspaper which happened to be a crucial part of the story.

Setting up the internet access for Three Little Bops was a bit clunky;  I would prepare and rehearse this part more carefully next time.

The result was, I think, a hit.  People appeared to engage with this material and they drew links with their own use of texts.  They also thought the cartoon was a hoot.

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