Life Online

I was in a meeting today speaking with people about the Blended Learning course which Sheffield college has introduced to a number of Sheffield secondary schools.
And I have only just this second discovered that the Evaluation of this course which Jackie and I produced a few weeks ago is on the web here.
Last year the course won a Beacon award as it was taught within the colllege, but this year they have been shortlisted again for another award, for successfully importing the work into schools. I hope they get to win again!!

The course is wonderful and has been developed by an incredibly commmitted team - and I believe that some of those teachers created a 'Third Space'. Yes. I do. Moje et al explain this brilliantly in their rather long paper , but I love this piece especially shots like this:

In third space, then, what seem to be oppositional categories can actually work together to generate new knowledges, new Discourses, and new forms of literacy.

(Moje et al, 2004:page 5)

The idea is that by bringing learners' Funds of Knowledge into the classroom and introducing them to new Funds of knowledge, then learners can interrogate each Fund of knowledge through the perspective given by the other. In the case of the college course it is for example that learners can look at Rap and at traditional poetry side by side; they learn new ways of seeing and understanding. That is the potential anyway, I think.

In today's meeting room there was a beautiful vase of sunflowers:

The centres looked sticky.
Talking of sticky situations ... Jackie is here in Australia at the moment doing a scary keynote. I have found the programme here. And I note she is on first thing on Saturday morning. Poor love. Still, it will also be very exciting and I have read her fab paper which is called:

The third spaces of digital childhoods:
Implications for early literacy curricula and pedagogy

(Blimey)

Just as a tiny taster, I don't think Jackie will mind me showing you this bit from the introduction:

This nexus of cultural identities is, therefore, a shifting space, a space which is always in flux. This notion of hybridity occurring through cultural border-crossing has a long history, as Heidegger (1975) argued, and was strongly articulated in the work of Bahktin, who suggested that the ‘most intense and productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries of its individual areas and not in places where these areas have become enclosed in their own specificity’ (Bahktin,1985: 2). Therefore, in this articulation of the notion of ‘third-space’, both Bahkthin and Bhabha emphasise how the process of cultural production is dependent on interactions between previously quite separate, even dichotomous, spaces. In this paper, I draw on this use of the term in order to explore the cultural hybridity of children’s experiences with popular culture, media and new technologies in the home. The way in which these experiences draw together various aspects of children’s lives and identities and create new cultural experiences in which boundaries are blurred is examined.

Yep. I know. Brilliant. (Her office is next door to mine and Ikeep hoping the ideas will seep under her door and into my room. I keep my door open for that reason.)


The good thing is that our Jackie will be meeting Anya here next week.

Anyway, have you seen the call for papers here and here?