things digital

Currently, I am enjoying my new LaCie mobile hard drive. it's a beautiful machine that is only slightly larger than a cigarette case. At 160 GBs, it is just the thing for storing the digital recordings that will constitute my data for the At Home in Cyberspace project. Other benefits - the portability of it (it could fit in a shirt pocket), the cost (around $147) and the fact that i can store stuff on it withhout needing to use the university server (I can't access any documents stored on this, when at home). Since I am going to work full steam on transcription, at home and at work, the LaCie makes great sense.

Once stored on the LaCie, the digitial recordings come up a treat. I have some good stuff -ordinary (in the CA fashion) but also out-of-the-ordinary according to how many folk would think about young kids using computers. For example, one recording captures a child under three making use of a google search. this week, I went to make a recording at a house. the child uses a touchpad for using the computer, but when it came to making the recording, the touchpad was frozen. a mouse was suggested as an alternative but the mum said no cos the child didn't know how to use one. "yes i do" she piped up. while she hadn't used one much, she was soon flying along - that fearlessness is lovely to see.

a co-incidence this week. lois (former PhD student) wrote to say that her post doc requires transcribing of digital recordings and did i know anything about slowing down digitial recordings. well .. YES! I sent Lois the link to transana and attached a copy of my draft article on transcription.

meanwhile, there are lots of conferences and suggestions for future issues of journals that address multimodality. the CA conference in 2010 (Mannheim) is one. Next year there will be a couple of issues of English Teaching: Practice and Critique devoted to digital things. So, timing is looking good for my research and publications that will flow from it.

Finally, I'm working on a course for Term 2. It is called English Curriculum and Pedagogy. I've managed to orient student presentations to visual literacy/digital literacies/multiliteracies. I think it should lead to some interesting thinking for the students around how and what we should be teaching in classrooms in the 21st Century.