willy nilly in London town

I'm home after my first full day in London. I ALMOST went to Windsor but decided to go with the first bus that came along. The one I got on took me to Terminal Four and from there it was the Piccadilly line into London. It was a good day. I walked around and took in the place. I'm familiar with Central London so today it was a matter of walking around, soaking it up and noting how things have changed since the last visit. So, Charing Cross first off and to some book shops. Then I wandered through Soho and Chinatown. I had some Thai soup for lunch and then made my way down Shaftesbury Avenue and into Piccadilly. By then my feet were starting to blister so I opted for a bus to South Kensington and then the train back to Heathrow.

This evening I am going to get into some work. I need to work some more on my workshop presentation for the United Kingdom Literacy Conference. Here's the abstract:


Examining how digital literacy practices are situated: Young children’s computer use in the home
Young children’s digital literacy practices are integral to contemporary understandings of the changing face of literacy. Children engage in a range of practices including computer activities such as game playing, use of the Internet, and desktop publishing. While we know what young children like to do on the computer, we know rather less about how they do it. This workshop will enable participants to examine how young children accomplish their activity during computer use at home. The workshop examines a recording of two children aged four and seven. Participants will use the recording, and a transcript of it, to examine the children’s interactions with each other while playing a computer game. The specific focus for analysis will be on the ways verbal and non-verbal actions situate their computer activity during turns-at-talk. Questions that will guide analysis are: What aspects of context do the children orient to and use? How does this contribute to the course of their computer activity? Analysis will enrich understandings of digital literacy practices, including how talk indexes prior knowledge and experiences and situates these in the here-and now of digital literacy practices.

I will be using data from by cyberspace project. The recording that I am using is of two young girls from Rockhampton who regularly used the computer together. It is the final recording that I want to analyse and I am looking forward to getting into analysis again. The conference workshop will be interesting. I plan to show a small section of the recording and then work through some analysis with participants. I hope that the workship will enable some interesting insights for participants and also allow me to share some of my ideas and work.