Category: INF533 – Literature in Digital Environments

 

 

The context of my digital storytelling project is to create a piece of digital literature that would assist the transition of Year 7s during their first term of secondary school through an epistolic Twitter narrative supported by real world actions and consequences. By creating content for the school’s students, staff, parents and caregivers a connective framework of engagement and knowledge is constructed which provides a scaffold for the necessary conversations between and within these groups during this critical juncture. The top priorities of this work will be the early enculturation of engagement with the school library, welfare team, and sporting or recreational social groups. The secondary priorities will be to stimulate conversations between students, staff, and caregivers either online or in person as well as provide name recognition for key members of staff. The final priorities are to engage members of the community in this work of literature both as content consumers and content creators.

In alignment with the Australian Curriculum this work of digital literature will focus on implicitly presenting the General Capabilities through the lens of the Cross Curriculum Priority of Sustainability which is applied to all Learning areas. The work will therefore not be singularly Learning area specific but instead focused on the outcome of students understanding their place in the world and the resources and support available to them. The Australian Curriculum’s Organising ideas for Sustainability catagorised under Systems, World views, and Futures will be elucidated for the school environment with reference to larger and smaller scale relevant contexts. By situating the issues and solutions faced by our community within the school context in this way and being proactive in advocating for engagement, empowerment, and education as answers to both smaller and larger problems the sought outcome is to illuminate the pathways to resolve more complex problems both in the now and later in life.

The story will utilise the technological and storytelling abilities of a secondary school’s Teacher Librarian, with space for additional pseudonymous co-conspiratorial authors, to assist with the transitions of new Year 7 students across the 10 weeks of term 1 through communication with the intended audience of all the school’s students, teachers, administrators, and caregivers. Through an exploratory epistolic narrative the Year 7s will be introduced to the school’s places and people that are resources for them to draw upon while peers, parents, and staff will be prompted to empathise and communicate to support the Year 7s in the journey of their first term. Additional story elements will be delivered through a mixture of real world and digital channels. These will include: full school assemblies, school website, school newsletter, Parent and Caregivers association meetings, and real-time based real world interactive options at the sites where the greatest engagement is sought.

In addition to content representing pseudonymised students or staff created by the teacher librarian there will be opportunities provided for scaffolded content creation by students, staff, and parents which would be added to the feed at the discretion of the teacher librarian presented in the pseudonymous format in order to create intrigue into what content is from who it purports to be and what is not.

By introducing or refamiliarising the audience to resources including the school library, welfare team, social clubs, computer lab, and sports teams to students, staff, and parents at an early stage in the Year 7 transition the protective effects of social integration, developing friendships, and knowledge of where to access resources for school work or recreation will serve as a prophylactic against isolation, poor mental health outcomes, and falling behind on required work during the first term for the Year 7s.

The outcomes targeted are an increase of utilisation of the schools human and physical resources and a reduction of the initial and ongoing issues faced by Year 7s commencing secondary school. By providing a common scaffold for communication between students, parents, and teachers it is hoped that conversations will be stimulated that connect students who begin ignorant of what support is available in this environment with what will best serve them as students of the school and, in the future, citizens of the world.

As I head towards the end of my unit of study on Literature in the Digital Environment  I am less perplexed but more amazed at the diversity in the origins and evolution of digital formats.  The first medium to lend itself towards the capabilities of the digital medium was film even if this originally meant physically cutting and reattaching strips of film stock to itself. We could copy, cut, rearrange, and join unique works together to make further new works. The computer has made this process easier and quicker and now our aspirations race to meet the boundaries of what can be achieved with technology. I want to reaffirm the point that I made in an earlier post that authors are emailing manuscripts to publishers who are emailing them to printers and without the connection to physical typesetting there is a very real sense that the majority of works are now in some sense digital as they have passed through the gateway of transmission over the internet and benefited from the affordences that this entails.  The world is certainly changing and no less within our education environments and school libraries. There is an expectation from some that ebooks will in certain ways supplant the physical texts and this is not borne out in the practices we see in students. We need to balance the salivation of cost cutting visionaries who might wish a compleatly online library that is accessed by the student via a BYOD program.  The reality is that the different use cases of learners, projects, and systems will dictate a range of resources for different circumstances and the physical book remains an efficient, flexible, economic choice for both students and librarians. It is the shark of the information ocean; ancient, effective, and powerful.

 

The concept of Digital Literature is still not satisfying defined to me and perhaps will never be due to the exponential iteration of content creation from across the world. But perhaps by looking at certain qualities seen in the medium we can gain an idea of what distinguishes it from what came before. At the fundamental level digital consists of digits, of 1’s and 0’s, that encode information. This practice allows for easy transmission, printing, and manipulation via computer. This contrasts to the pre-computer past where literature was either manually copied with a stylus or more recently with the assistance of a machine such as moveable type or a typewriter. The increased speed of reproduction and transmission changes the nature of the medium into one where we can modify, reimagine, and remix works back into the cultural milieu that in the past may have seemed inviolable sacrosanct works.
Marx argued that the means of reproduction determined the nature of society but never foresaw a book being reproduced with cntrl +A, cntrl +C, cntrl +V.

To look at it on a less theoretical and a more practical level. Digital Literature is what takes advantage of our technology hardware and infrastructure. Devices such as smartphones, laptops, or dedicated e-readers combined with trusted suppliers of electricity and internet. Additional content becomes accessible across different works through hyperlinks between texts and the reader’s experience can wander from one author’s work to another according to their whimsy. Reading styles have changed due to this functionality of the medium; from reading whole works, in one to a few sittings, to taking numerous bites of many.

In the museum sector we are seeing numerous new ways of storytelling and the delivery of experiences to our visitors. Apps can work if they have a focused function tied to their design. A good example is MONA’s O which is designed to replace didactic panels on walls and allows the visitor to choose the flavor they receive information in as well as being able to review their visit in the order of their experience and thus relive it. There are many apps that try to do everything for everyone and end up doing nothing for all due to bloatware interfaces.

Is a website automatically Digital Literature? Is an app? What I like to think about is the boundaries of systems where they break down so where is the boundary of Digital Literature? are there print books today that have never been emailed to the publisher? are there book printers who receive works in a non-digital way? just because it looks like a book and smells like a book doesn’t mean it hasn’t been assisted by a digital pathway during its genesis. The limits imposed on a work are the choice of the author, their intentions, their selections of technology. A print book containing a QR code is linked to the digital web and any image that is not individually hand drawn was printed from a file. We are trying to put in boxes a phenomenon of infinite graduation and we are better off engaging with literature just as we have before to understand it through experience rather than taxonomy.