Showing posts with label multimodal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label multimodal. Show all posts
Thursday, 14 April 2022
Behind 'Design principles for developing critique and academic argument in a blended-learning data visualization course'
Written for visual design educators and social semiotic researchers interested in students' use of data visualisations for argument.
Designed by Arlene Archer and Travis Noakes, 2021.
Table 2. Lesson topic changes from 2017 to 2018's course
1) Delimiting the scope of the task
2) Encouraging the use of readily accessible design tools
3) Considering gains and losses in digital translations
4) Implementing a process approach for developing argument and encouraging reflection
5) Developing meta-languages of critique and argument
6) Acknowledging different audiences and the risks of sharing work as novices
Figure 2. Tumi's limitations slide 2018
Professor Arlene Archer and my chapter, 'Design principles for developing critique and academic argument in a blended-learning data visualization course', is to be published in 'Learning Design Voices'. Edited by Professor Laura Czerniewicz, Tasneem Jaffer and Shanali Govender. the book is produced by the University of Cape Town's (UCT) Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT). Its compilation aims to catalyse a discussion of key themes shaping practice in online learning design. Our contribution falls under the book's 'Learning materials, activities and processes' section. The book's other two tackle 'Learning Design as field, praxis and identity' and 'Humanising Learning Design'.
Our new chapter is a sequel to 'Exploring academic argument in information graphics' (2020), in which we proposed the framework for argument in data visualizations shown in Table 1. This social semiotic framework provides a holistic view that is useful for providing feedback and recognising students’ work as realised through the ideational, interpersonal, and textual meta-functions. For example, in addition to the verbal (written) mode that they are usually assessed on in Higher Education, students' digital poster designs must also consider composition, size, shape and colour choices.
Designed by Arlene Archer and Travis Noakes, 2021.
When the course was first introduced, many students' were able to produce attractive posters, but there seemed scope to support them in developing better arguments by revising the course's contents. Our follow-up piece describes how using this framework proved helpful for changing a second-year journalism, blended-learning course and helping students' argument-development:
In five-weeks, the lecturer had to teach novices- data infographics, graphic design and Excel software, visual design aesthetics and multimodal argumentation via data visualization designs. Many changes were considered for improving the posters’ argument and the lecturer changed the 2018 syllabus structure by adding two new sections (for ‘Multimodal argument’ and ‘Creative ideas for infographic design’, see Table 2).
A midway assessment was also introduced in which students’ infographic arguments were tested as works-in-progress. Reviewers’ feedback presented those who went for the wrong goalposts with opportunities for changing their direction by the final assessment. The new sections and mid-way assessment proved helpful for supporting 2018's students on aggregate with developing better arguments via infographic posters. The initial course was arguably weighted too much on using new tools for aesthetic design. By contrast, the new iteration was weighted towards teaching opaque discursive conventions and how to make a coherent, strong infographic poster argument using different modes that travel well as they traverse different formats.
To illustrate the benefits of this shift, our article focuses on two students, whose work differed from those of the 2017’s class in presenting meta-level critiques. As a result of some of the curriculum interventions, students began to engage with normative attitudes and societal discourses that shaped the information they shared. They began to flag how the graphs they shared might represent a numeric simplification of a qualitatively complex situation, and to point to the ways in which the categories for comparison may be blurred.
Before presenting two in-depth student cases, we described how several principles for learning design informed our analysis of student work using this framework:
1) Delimiting the scope of the task
2) Encouraging the use of readily accessible design tools
3) Considering gains and losses in digital translations
4) Implementing a process approach for developing argument and encouraging reflection
5) Developing meta-languages of critique and argument
6) Acknowledging different audiences and the risks of sharing work as novices
"Tumi" and "Mark" followed different approaches to metalevel critique in their data visualization project's. Tumi’s presentation (see Figures 1 and 2) critiqued the usefulness of Youth Explorer for exploring education in a peripheral township community versus a suburban ‘core community’. In contrasting the Langa township ward's educational attendance data versus the leafy suburb of Pinelands, she flagged why the results may be skewed unfavourably against Langa- children from peripheral communities often travel to core communities for schooling, so data for both core and peripheral communities “can be blurred to some extent”. Tumi also flagged that youth accused of contact crime were not necessarily ‘convicted or found guilty’.
Figure 2. Tumi's limitations slide 2018
By contrast, Mark’s poster (see Figure 3) critiqued the statistics available for understanding ‘poor grade 8 systemic results’ and the reasons for higher drop-out rates in schooling between suburbs. His poster explored the limitations of what Youth Explorer can tell us about systemic tests and how these link to dropout rates and final year pass rates. He argued that a shortcoming is the dataset’s failure to convey 'the role that extra-curricular support plays' in shaping learners’ results. Mark's poster reflected the fact that many children from affluent homes go for extra lessons after school to improve subject results. This knowledge of concerted cultivation was based on his personal experience, but is unaccounted for in most official accounts of educational input.
Both cases reveal how teaching a social semiotic approach for analysing and producing argument proved helpful. It informed changes to a data visualisation poster course that could better support students’ development as critical designers and engaged citizens- the two aspirant media professionals' meta-critiques flagged important challenges in relying on data that may be incorrect and incomplete, accurately spotlighting the inherent difficulties of simplifying qualitative complexity into numbers for their audiences.
If you would like to view a presentation on our research, please visit my earlier blog post at
https://www.travisnoakes.co.za/2021/10/the-presentation-developing-critique.html.
Acknowledgements
The research is based upon work supported by the British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship scheme. Travis’ research was supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship (2019-21) at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Both authors thank the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Film and Media Studies for facilitating our research with students between 2017 and 2018. In particular, we thank Professor Marion Walton and Dr Martha Evans for their valued assistance. We also greatly appreciate the feedback from the editors and reviewers at Learning Design Voices.
Need support doing Social Semiotic research in Africa?
Both Arlene and Travis are members of the South African Multimodality in Education research group (SAME) hosted by UCT. Should you be interested in sharing your multimodal research project with its experts, please contact SAME.
I hope that you will read our chapter and find it informative. You are most welcome to give readers and I your feedback in the moderated comments section below.
Wednesday, 6 May 2020
'Exploring academic argument in information graphics' in 'Data Visualization in Society' from @AmsterdamUPress #Academicbooks #OpenAccess
Written for design educators and social semiotic researchers who are interested in infographic design and multimodal argument.
Associate Professor Arlene Archer and I wrote 'Exploring academic argument in information graphics', which was recently published in the book, Data visualization in society. Our chapter proposes a framework for analysing and producing argument in data visualisation. This framework is applied in the chapter for investigating two second-year journalism students’ semiotic and rhetorical strategies in making arguments via data visualisation posters. We then discuss the broader implications in Higher Education for teaching students to become critical citizens via infographic poster production and analysis.
Associate Professor Arlene Archer and I wrote 'Exploring academic argument in information graphics', which was recently published in the book, Data visualization in society. Our chapter proposes a framework for analysing and producing argument in data visualisation. This framework is applied in the chapter for investigating two second-year journalism students’ semiotic and rhetorical strategies in making arguments via data visualisation posters. We then discuss the broader implications in Higher Education for teaching students to become critical citizens via infographic poster production and analysis.
 |
| Figure 1. Data Visualization in Society book cover, Amsterdam University Press, 2020. |
The chapter drew on my fieldwork as a lecturer in the multimedia production course (FAM2017S) teaching infographic poster design to journalism students at the Centre for Film and Media Studies, UCT. I liaised with Professor Marion Walton and Dr Martha Evans in preparing a five-week course for teaching infographic poster production in 2017. Students learnt to explore educational inequalities between two suburbs in Cape Town using youthexplorer.org.za's aggregated data and to visualise their findings via infographic poster design. Arlene kindly volunteered as a guest reviewer of students' poster design progress. As novice designers, students' data visualisation arguments produced some interesting inconsistencies and disjunctures that helped inspire this chapter. Its analysis was also informed by a review of students' final posters and accompanying rationales.
In response to these concerns, Arlene proposed the framework for analysing and producing argument in data visualisation. Its components are illustrated in Table 1 below.
 |
| Table 1. A framework for analysing and producing argument in data visualisation. Archer, A. and Noakes, T. 2020. |
We are very grateful to the book's editors, Professors Helen Kennedy and Martin Engebretsen, for their feedback and help in refining the chapter.
In 2018, I retaught infographic poster design to a new group of second years and adjusted the course to allocate more for considering argument and included this framework and the article's cases for students' consideration. Both interventions helped students to improve the critical arguments in their posters. Arlene and I are writing about these changes in a draft manuscript, 'Developing critique and academic argument in a blended-learning data visualisation course'.
There are three ways you can view Data Visualization in Society digitally:
2. Its Open Access version is at https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzgb8c7.
3. You can download it as an Adobe Acrobat pdf book via http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22273.
Or to purchase it in hardcopy, you can order through your local bookseller, via Amsterdam University Press for Europe/Rest of the World, or via Baker & Taylor Publisher Services for North America.
I hope that you will find our chapter informative and welcome any feedback in the comments below.
Thursday, 8 March 2018
Missing social information and disidentifiers in digital self-presentation
Written for multimodal researchers interested in young peoples' self-presentation strategies and curation of digital personas.
I submitted 'Inequality in Digital Personas- e-portfolio curricula, cultural repertoires and social media' in mid-February. Some of my thesis' findings and recommendations were removed to meet the 80,000 word restriction. This redacted writing may still have some value to researchers, so I'm sharing them as blog posts. Here's the first (all will be labelled 'PhD' for ease-of-finding):
Research background and three key contributions
Moving image media have become central to the learning and everyday life experiences of young children (Buckingham, 2003, 2013). However, such media are largely ignored in multimodal research, despite its acknowledgement of the importance of computer games, film and television (Kress, 2010). My research made a novel contribution by focusing on visual arts e-portfolio styles. This benefits research into the broad range of texts in the classroom that have resulted from the impact of digital media in the last decade (Bazalgette and Buckingham, 2013).
My action research project (2009-13) enabled students at two sites, an independent and a government school, to be taught the creative appropriation of online portfolio software, Carbonmade, for curating their electronic learning portfolios (e-portfolios). The two very different sites were chosen for the following reasons: first, I wanted to explore a wide range of students' choices that economic, cultural and social differences might contribute to; secondly, the bandwidth costs of online publication are significant in under-resourced settings (Donner and Walton, 2013), and thirdly, there are massive differentials in South Africans' general levels of access to, and familiarity with, online media (Goldstuck, 2010, 2017).
Aside from assisting students with developing new media literacies as digital curators, my investigation also made valuable contributions through two other methodological innovations. Its longitudinal nature is unusual amongst multimodal studies in spanning three years (2010-12) at an independent school and two years (2012-2013) at a state one. Diachronic changes in students’ digital designs were examined through the novel methodological contribution of a screenshot analysis. My third contribution is an original description of how young people’s access to digital infrastructures influenced their development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio curation and the modal density of their e-portfolio styles.
Although multimodal content analysis proved highly useful, my thesis did not focus on contributing to social semiotics. Nevertheless, interesting findings emerged that contribute to multimodal theory: Researchers have described the dangers of stigma (Trottier, 2013) and oversharing (Agger, 2012) in peoples' digital self-presentations, but little has been written on the absence of social information as missing identifiers (Goffman, 1963) or concerning disidentifiers.
1. Understanding missing identifiers
Signs may be called symbols where signs are available to convey social information that is frequently and steadily available and routinely sought and received (Goffman, 1963). In e-portfolio curation, students might be unable to add information to particular identifying categories. This could result in their online identities missing identifying information that audiences would typically expect in a showcase digital portfolio.
There is a research gap concerning audience expectations of teenagers' online disciplinary identities. However, research into professional branding (van der Land & Mutinga, 2014. Van der Land, Willemsen & Unkel, 2015. van der Land, Willemsen & Wilton, 2016) is suggestive of how profile creators might increase their credibility by making particular choices in the information they provide. For example, human resource departments might expect to see prospective employees' self-portraits on LinkedIn (Sharone, 2017) and users who post theirs are perceived to be more socially attractive and competent than ones who don't (Edwards, Stoll, Faculak & Carman, 2015). In such portraits, smiling and eye-contact (looking in the camera) appear to increase perceptions of credibility (van der Land, Willemsen & Wilton, 2016).
Digital self-presentation as an online exhibition
Impression management is the term used to describe how a performer tweaks his or her performance to consciously give details or unintentionally give off details that leak off without any intention (Goffman, 1963). Notions of impression management have proved a useful theoretical foil for understanding online behavior (boyd, 2007. Marwick & boyd, 2011. Mendelson & Papacharissi, 2010. Lewis, Kaufman & Christakis, 2008. Quan-Haase & Collins, 2008. Schroeder, 2002. Tufekci, 2008). Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor situates impression management within a specific bounded place, drawing on the concept of a behaviour setting (Barker, 1968) in which behaviour is driven by the norms and goals of specific settings. This delimited place is distilled into a dichotomy between front- and back regions, colloquially front stage and back stage. In the front stage, the actor tries to present an idealised version of the self that accords to a specific role. In my research, pupils were assessed on their front stage self-presentation as visual arts students. Students' curations of digitally disciplined personas drew on varied repertoires from a backstage, where the real work necessary to keep up appearances is done.
Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor is focused on synchronous performance in a situation where the performer is co-present with a live audience and can adjust his or her behaviours in response to their feedback. However, many social media sites provide communicative situations that are dissimilar to face-to-face ones. These situations do not depend on being bounded in space and time, nor supporting co-present, real-time observation between individuals (Miller, 1995). Consequently, it is more appropriate to use an exhibition metaphor than a stage play (Hogan, 2010), for social media artefacts. E-portfolios, for example, are presented asynchronously in space for many possible audiences:
Hogan defines an exhibition site as a site (typically online) where people submit reproduced artifacts (read: data). These artifacts are held in storehouses (databases). Curators (algorithms designed by the site's maintainers) selectively bring artifacts out of storage for particular audiences. Audience in these spaces includes those who have used the artefact or make use of it. There are two components of an exhibition space; in the first, information signifying an individual is delivered to the audience on demand by a third party. In the second, the reproducibility of the content and the database curator's role in distributing it means that the submitter does not continually monitor the data as the audience receives it. Nor may the contributor fully know his or her invisible audience(s).
The exhibition metaphor is highly appropriate for describing visual arts showcase e-portfolios, since these are exhibitions that are doubly curated; being self-curated by students, who organise digital content, that is redistributed via the virtual curatorship of an online portfolio service's database(s). The context of this exhibition space can stand in for the dramaturgical context of a specific setting (Schroeder, 2002). In contrast to the latter situation, the artist and his exhibit's viewers are not co-present in space in real-time, but may still monitor and react to each other. Furthermore, while the artist may order artefacts with a particular audience in mind, those who view and react to the content may be different from those for whom it was intended. This exhibition approach expands, but does not replace, the dramaturgical approach since each artist may adjust his or her self-presentation on an ongoing basis in response to audience feedback. An advantage of this expanded approach is that it can support a clearer articulation of the potential and perils of self-presentation in an age of digital reproduction (Hogan, 2010).
The expanded approach is also helpful for addressing the major difference between an embodied actor with a pre-existing physical presence, versus the disembodied e-portfolio exhibition space. Its creators must enter, select and upload information to create their digital presences. In e-portfolio production, students should have greater opportunity to exercise impression management and make strategic choices in what information they might provide through different modes. These modes provide different resources that students can use to control their information and affect not just what young people are able to reveal, but also what they are able to conceal (Jones, 2005).
Linking missing information to marginalised students' limited infrastructural access
Software both enables and constrains users' communications (van Leeuwen & Djonov, 2013) through posing particular kinds of representational and communicational choices. The degree of design and customisation afforded by Carbonmade, as well as what software does not offer users (van Leeuwen, 2008), shaped students' e-portfolio styles. For example, free Carbonmade users had very limited options for customising portfolio layout. Unlike paid users they cannot upload a custom logo or feature big images.
In curating online personas, few keen students would set out to produce digitally disciplined identities that were incomplete showcases, since this might potentially compromise their credibility. Nevertheless, for first-timers, the task of e-portfolio design work can be overwhelming (Yancey, 2004) as it may involve many unfamiliar tasks. These can include: identity work; remediation of creative productions and their arrangement for diverse online audiences; and being ‘web sensible’ in exploiting the affordances of the digital space (such as hyperlinks). While the on-going maintenance of e-portfolios may involve seemingly simple processes, their quantum contributes to it being a complicated medium for novices to manage. They often needed to do several updates for achieving currency and coherence.
Such a requirement placed marginalised students at the greatest disadvantage in being under-resourced in not having home computer and internet access. They had to make choices during e-portfolio lessons, where they were hampered by their inexperience with computers and the internet. Highly constrained access to digital information infrastructure limited these teens' development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio production. The concept of a digital hexis was proposed by Fanny Georges (2007) to designate a scheme of user self-representations. These self-representations are transformed like a body that is shaped by habit or by repetitive practice. Thus, the notion of hexis bears analogy with the shaping of meaning and body. The extent to which digital identities are produced is drawn from repetitive interactions and continuous perception of self-representations on the screen (Georges, 2009, p.1). Participants as e-portfolio curators, thus evidenced a digital hexis in their e-portfolio's self-description, imagery and level of organisation. These young people's accomplishments in evidencing digital hexeis via e-portfolio styles were thus closely linked to opportunities for regularly accessing and using digital information infrastructures.
In analysing all research participants' e-portfolio styles, different patterns between the two sites suggested that young people's material circumstances were reflected in the extent of their digital self-descriptions and portfolio organisation. In particular, inequalities in histories of digital infrastructure's access and use (for example "free" internet Wi-Fi) led to large differences in the levels of modal density (Norris, 2009) of e-portfolios at either site. Students’ multimodal texts can be dense in meaning, given that each mode adds its particular layer of complexity. According to a Multimodal (inter)action analysis approach (Norris, 2004, 2014), each students’ e-portfolio had a particular level of modal complexity. The more intricately intertwined a webpage’s multiple disembodied modes (such as image, text and layout), the higher the density. Differences in the densities of e-portfolios were linked to the digital hexis for e-portfolio curation that teens could exercise. Thus, class and digital divides were evident in the extent to which digital personas and imagery was curated.
Youth’s development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio curation benefitted from digital infrastructures available outside class: No independent school student lacked extra-mural internet access, but a few government school pupils did. Without such privilege, these students had to do e-portfolio work in class. Their inexperience with desktop computers and internet browser use often resulted in slower progress and needing to play ‘catch up’ in class with peers. Overall, students with the least internet access created e-portfolio styles that featured fewer roles and had a lower modal density than those of their peers. Such self-presentations and portfolios seemed to be hampered by absent information that reflected its curators not having the resources or time required for providing all the details that the e-portfolio curriculum requested. Consequently, marginalised students' e-portfolios seemed disorganised and less polished than affluent peers who benefitted from additional production periods outside class.
Under-resourced students had to be highly resourceful to participate in e-portfolio production, given such costs and their difficulties in accessing digital cultural capital (Selwyn, 2004; Seale, 2012). Such marginalised youths reported not being able to produce e-portfolios to their satisfaction. By contrast, privileged students at both schools expressed dissatisfaction with the limitations of the 'visual arts showcase' e-portfolio as a school genre. Students who had “free” home internet could do e-portfolio work at their leisure, which tended to result in these teens sharing not only extensive information about their classroom roles, but their informal ones, using better production values and modally denser styles. Such teens pushed Carbonmade’s free online portfolio storage to the limit and some took advantage of their out-of-class infrastructural advantages for creating extra-mural portfolios that overcome storage limitations and provided a forum to circumvent the e-portfolio guidelines. A few students linked such "unofficial" portfolios from their e-portfolios.
2. Describing disidentifiers
In addition to students' e-portfolio styles missing social information, they also evidenced disidentifiers (Goffman, 1963), whereby signs broke-up the coherence between self-presentation and portfolios that students had tried to create. Teens' feedback suggested that they did not deliberately select signs that resulted in misrepresentation on their webpages. The presence of disidentifiers suggested novel self-presentation and content production problems when young people's multimodal choices become remediated online:
Just as Potter highlighted about children's' video-making (2012, p. 33), not every video, 'ends up as the coherent, fully designed, literate and realised use of meaning-making resources envisaged by some semiotic theorists'. My research likewise highlights the constraints of teenagers as multimodal designers. In particular, it is important to understand the (often hidden) role of digital infrastructure as an influence on their design process. Inequalities in the access and use to such infrastructures may enable certain styles of self-presentation or act as a gatekeeper, especially for marginalised teens. Non-internet connected students described being unable to publish the social information or artwork showcases they wanted to. In the absence of information on digital infrastructure in their e-portfolios, it was difficult for viewers to appreciate how differing contexts shaped the quantum and styles of visual and social information that users provided. For example, it is hard to spot that under-resourced students had put a lot of effort in making workarounds to overcome slow and unreliable ICT infrastructures. Another concern lay in students not deliberately choosing multimodal ensembles: default software values created disidentifiers that inexpert teenagers missed editing or forget to change, which resulted in misrepresentation of teens' interests.
Scholars who celebrate accounts of teaching contemporary digital media production with new media literacies (Jenkins, 2006. Burn and Durran, 2007. Lankshear and Knobel, 2009. Ito et al, 2010. Jenkins, Ito & Boyd, 2015) would tend to promote the integration of such like arts e-portfolios at schools. Likewise, teachers believed that publishing the prescribed style would be beneficial for all. By contrast, the content analysis and case studies of a range of students' e-portfolio styles revealed the exclusionary impact of infrastructural inequality. My content analysis and case studies for twelve teens revealed how highly constrained access to digital information infrastructure limited marginalised teens’ development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio production.
When analysing digital curators' productions, semiotic theorists should not assume that incoherence, outdated information and the low modal density that results from missing social information solely reflects unmotivated students’ disinterest. Rather, it is important to consider how low production values might also result from keen youths who face infrastructural constraints that prevent online content curation and digital remediation.
Future research into missing social information and disidentifiers
Describing the infrastructural constraints that students experienced is consequential as it shows educators and other decision makers that youths’ differential resourcing must be accommodated in curricular design. For example, lessons should aim to prioritise infrastructure use by under-connected students. Teens’ mobile infrastructures must be better accommodated and students should be encouraged to describe infrastructural enablers and constraints in their e-portfolios. Future researchers should look at the outcomes of specific changes in class and whether they help promote greater equity, or not?
The absence of expected signs in an e-portfolio are missing identifiers that may reduce its value when viewers interpret a prospective apprentice or student's digital portfolio to be incomplete and not a 'proper showcase'. The prestige of the symbolic capital that students may develop via digital curations is linked both to the quality of the artworks they remediate and their organisation. Where students choose to be online, but produce partial, disorganised portfolios that do not reflect their best works, such curations may be judged to be inadequate and discredited by assessors or prospective employers. Audience research needs to be done concerning the reception of young people's e-portfolios. For example, how do assessors grade for missing identifiers and disidentifiers when evaluating digital arts portfolios for university access.
My research took place in two relatively well-resourced English secondary schools that could provide the visual arts subject, but future research could be done into the choices that young people make in the less well-resourced environments that are more common in South Africa. For example, how do non-dominant teens negotiate their cultural exclusion at school in creating digital personas that remediate their mother tongues and other repertoires?
More research also needs to be done concerning young adults' development of varied digital portfolios as they enter tertiary education, the workforce and other spaces. For example, how do young peoples' online portfolio styles change as youth become professionals or hobbyists?
People use multiple profiles to support job searches that may involve switching from one profession to a new one. There is an opportunity to research how young adults manage multiple profiles with limited internet access. Researchers must also explore how other constraints influence young adults' design of digital personas. For example, while online spheres are increasingly considered public, they are a source of tension for prospective employees. Older people voiced fears about being screened out of potential work interviews if they post self-image photos on LinkedIn (Sharone, 2017). The ease with which HR recruiters can search young adults' "Google resumes" and their attendant fears of evaluation is likely to inhibit certain expressions online. Researchers could examine the extent to which young adults remain silent about their political and social justice views to 'fit in' with prospective employers.
I submitted 'Inequality in Digital Personas- e-portfolio curricula, cultural repertoires and social media' in mid-February. Some of my thesis' findings and recommendations were removed to meet the 80,000 word restriction. This redacted writing may still have some value to researchers, so I'm sharing them as blog posts. Here's the first (all will be labelled 'PhD' for ease-of-finding):
Missing social information and disidentifiers
Research background and three key contributions
Moving image media have become central to the learning and everyday life experiences of young children (Buckingham, 2003, 2013). However, such media are largely ignored in multimodal research, despite its acknowledgement of the importance of computer games, film and television (Kress, 2010). My research made a novel contribution by focusing on visual arts e-portfolio styles. This benefits research into the broad range of texts in the classroom that have resulted from the impact of digital media in the last decade (Bazalgette and Buckingham, 2013).
My action research project (2009-13) enabled students at two sites, an independent and a government school, to be taught the creative appropriation of online portfolio software, Carbonmade, for curating their electronic learning portfolios (e-portfolios). The two very different sites were chosen for the following reasons: first, I wanted to explore a wide range of students' choices that economic, cultural and social differences might contribute to; secondly, the bandwidth costs of online publication are significant in under-resourced settings (Donner and Walton, 2013), and thirdly, there are massive differentials in South Africans' general levels of access to, and familiarity with, online media (Goldstuck, 2010, 2017).
Aside from assisting students with developing new media literacies as digital curators, my investigation also made valuable contributions through two other methodological innovations. Its longitudinal nature is unusual amongst multimodal studies in spanning three years (2010-12) at an independent school and two years (2012-2013) at a state one. Diachronic changes in students’ digital designs were examined through the novel methodological contribution of a screenshot analysis. My third contribution is an original description of how young people’s access to digital infrastructures influenced their development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio curation and the modal density of their e-portfolio styles.
Although multimodal content analysis proved highly useful, my thesis did not focus on contributing to social semiotics. Nevertheless, interesting findings emerged that contribute to multimodal theory: Researchers have described the dangers of stigma (Trottier, 2013) and oversharing (Agger, 2012) in peoples' digital self-presentations, but little has been written on the absence of social information as missing identifiers (Goffman, 1963) or concerning disidentifiers.
1. Understanding missing identifiers
Signs may be called symbols where signs are available to convey social information that is frequently and steadily available and routinely sought and received (Goffman, 1963). In e-portfolio curation, students might be unable to add information to particular identifying categories. This could result in their online identities missing identifying information that audiences would typically expect in a showcase digital portfolio.
Digital self-presentation as an online exhibition
Impression management is the term used to describe how a performer tweaks his or her performance to consciously give details or unintentionally give off details that leak off without any intention (Goffman, 1963). Notions of impression management have proved a useful theoretical foil for understanding online behavior (boyd, 2007. Marwick & boyd, 2011. Mendelson & Papacharissi, 2010. Lewis, Kaufman & Christakis, 2008. Quan-Haase & Collins, 2008. Schroeder, 2002. Tufekci, 2008). Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor situates impression management within a specific bounded place, drawing on the concept of a behaviour setting (Barker, 1968) in which behaviour is driven by the norms and goals of specific settings. This delimited place is distilled into a dichotomy between front- and back regions, colloquially front stage and back stage. In the front stage, the actor tries to present an idealised version of the self that accords to a specific role. In my research, pupils were assessed on their front stage self-presentation as visual arts students. Students' curations of digitally disciplined personas drew on varied repertoires from a backstage, where the real work necessary to keep up appearances is done.
Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor is focused on synchronous performance in a situation where the performer is co-present with a live audience and can adjust his or her behaviours in response to their feedback. However, many social media sites provide communicative situations that are dissimilar to face-to-face ones. These situations do not depend on being bounded in space and time, nor supporting co-present, real-time observation between individuals (Miller, 1995). Consequently, it is more appropriate to use an exhibition metaphor than a stage play (Hogan, 2010), for social media artefacts. E-portfolios, for example, are presented asynchronously in space for many possible audiences:
Hogan defines an exhibition site as a site (typically online) where people submit reproduced artifacts (read: data). These artifacts are held in storehouses (databases). Curators (algorithms designed by the site's maintainers) selectively bring artifacts out of storage for particular audiences. Audience in these spaces includes those who have used the artefact or make use of it. There are two components of an exhibition space; in the first, information signifying an individual is delivered to the audience on demand by a third party. In the second, the reproducibility of the content and the database curator's role in distributing it means that the submitter does not continually monitor the data as the audience receives it. Nor may the contributor fully know his or her invisible audience(s).
The exhibition metaphor is highly appropriate for describing visual arts showcase e-portfolios, since these are exhibitions that are doubly curated; being self-curated by students, who organise digital content, that is redistributed via the virtual curatorship of an online portfolio service's database(s). The context of this exhibition space can stand in for the dramaturgical context of a specific setting (Schroeder, 2002). In contrast to the latter situation, the artist and his exhibit's viewers are not co-present in space in real-time, but may still monitor and react to each other. Furthermore, while the artist may order artefacts with a particular audience in mind, those who view and react to the content may be different from those for whom it was intended. This exhibition approach expands, but does not replace, the dramaturgical approach since each artist may adjust his or her self-presentation on an ongoing basis in response to audience feedback. An advantage of this expanded approach is that it can support a clearer articulation of the potential and perils of self-presentation in an age of digital reproduction (Hogan, 2010).
The expanded approach is also helpful for addressing the major difference between an embodied actor with a pre-existing physical presence, versus the disembodied e-portfolio exhibition space. Its creators must enter, select and upload information to create their digital presences. In e-portfolio production, students should have greater opportunity to exercise impression management and make strategic choices in what information they might provide through different modes. These modes provide different resources that students can use to control their information and affect not just what young people are able to reveal, but also what they are able to conceal (Jones, 2005).
Linking missing information to marginalised students' limited infrastructural access
Software both enables and constrains users' communications (van Leeuwen & Djonov, 2013) through posing particular kinds of representational and communicational choices. The degree of design and customisation afforded by Carbonmade, as well as what software does not offer users (van Leeuwen, 2008), shaped students' e-portfolio styles. For example, free Carbonmade users had very limited options for customising portfolio layout. Unlike paid users they cannot upload a custom logo or feature big images.
In curating online personas, few keen students would set out to produce digitally disciplined identities that were incomplete showcases, since this might potentially compromise their credibility. Nevertheless, for first-timers, the task of e-portfolio design work can be overwhelming (Yancey, 2004) as it may involve many unfamiliar tasks. These can include: identity work; remediation of creative productions and their arrangement for diverse online audiences; and being ‘web sensible’ in exploiting the affordances of the digital space (such as hyperlinks). While the on-going maintenance of e-portfolios may involve seemingly simple processes, their quantum contributes to it being a complicated medium for novices to manage. They often needed to do several updates for achieving currency and coherence.
Such a requirement placed marginalised students at the greatest disadvantage in being under-resourced in not having home computer and internet access. They had to make choices during e-portfolio lessons, where they were hampered by their inexperience with computers and the internet. Highly constrained access to digital information infrastructure limited these teens' development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio production. The concept of a digital hexis was proposed by Fanny Georges (2007) to designate a scheme of user self-representations. These self-representations are transformed like a body that is shaped by habit or by repetitive practice. Thus, the notion of hexis bears analogy with the shaping of meaning and body. The extent to which digital identities are produced is drawn from repetitive interactions and continuous perception of self-representations on the screen (Georges, 2009, p.1). Participants as e-portfolio curators, thus evidenced a digital hexis in their e-portfolio's self-description, imagery and level of organisation. These young people's accomplishments in evidencing digital hexeis via e-portfolio styles were thus closely linked to opportunities for regularly accessing and using digital information infrastructures.
In analysing all research participants' e-portfolio styles, different patterns between the two sites suggested that young people's material circumstances were reflected in the extent of their digital self-descriptions and portfolio organisation. In particular, inequalities in histories of digital infrastructure's access and use (for example "free" internet Wi-Fi) led to large differences in the levels of modal density (Norris, 2009) of e-portfolios at either site. Students’ multimodal texts can be dense in meaning, given that each mode adds its particular layer of complexity. According to a Multimodal (inter)action analysis approach (Norris, 2004, 2014), each students’ e-portfolio had a particular level of modal complexity. The more intricately intertwined a webpage’s multiple disembodied modes (such as image, text and layout), the higher the density. Differences in the densities of e-portfolios were linked to the digital hexis for e-portfolio curation that teens could exercise. Thus, class and digital divides were evident in the extent to which digital personas and imagery was curated.
Better-off teens exercised their advantages in digital information infrastructure to curate e-portfolios with extensive information about multiple personas. These students typically enjoyed pre-exposure to publishing their artworks to social networks via mobile phones and/or home internet. These students could readily use mobile-centric and/or home internet access (Rideout and Katz, 2016) in developing a digital hexis for e-portfolio curation. Although students who had mobile phones were advantaged in being able to circumvent slow internet speeds in class, this was undermined when their airtime ran-out or the incompatible ecologies between contemporary phones and old computers slowed or prevented them from downloading artworks and self-imagery.
High ad-hoc broadband rates serve as gatekeepers to data intensive practices by mobile-centric users, such as e-portfolio curation. In South Africa, pay-as-you-go mobile phone contracts prioritize use of voice and SMS services. For affluent consumers, able to afford big data bundles, data can be amongst the cheapest in the world, at eight cents per megabyte upfront (Goldstuck, 2016). By contrast, the punitive ceiling rate of up to R2 per megabyte for “out of bundle” mobile data can be subtracted from ad-hoc users’ airtime, putting it amongst the highest rates in the world. Data bundles are not perceived as an essential purchase by the poor and so are rarely bought. They consider bundles as cheap as R25 to be unaffordable, despite these enabling major savings in the cost of ad hoc data (Goldstuck, 2016).
High ad-hoc broadband rates serve as gatekeepers to data intensive practices by mobile-centric users, such as e-portfolio curation. In South Africa, pay-as-you-go mobile phone contracts prioritize use of voice and SMS services. For affluent consumers, able to afford big data bundles, data can be amongst the cheapest in the world, at eight cents per megabyte upfront (Goldstuck, 2016). By contrast, the punitive ceiling rate of up to R2 per megabyte for “out of bundle” mobile data can be subtracted from ad-hoc users’ airtime, putting it amongst the highest rates in the world. Data bundles are not perceived as an essential purchase by the poor and so are rarely bought. They consider bundles as cheap as R25 to be unaffordable, despite these enabling major savings in the cost of ad hoc data (Goldstuck, 2016).
Under-resourced students had to be highly resourceful to participate in e-portfolio production, given such costs and their difficulties in accessing digital cultural capital (Selwyn, 2004; Seale, 2012). Such marginalised youths reported not being able to produce e-portfolios to their satisfaction. By contrast, privileged students at both schools expressed dissatisfaction with the limitations of the 'visual arts showcase' e-portfolio as a school genre. Students who had “free” home internet could do e-portfolio work at their leisure, which tended to result in these teens sharing not only extensive information about their classroom roles, but their informal ones, using better production values and modally denser styles. Such teens pushed Carbonmade’s free online portfolio storage to the limit and some took advantage of their out-of-class infrastructural advantages for creating extra-mural portfolios that overcome storage limitations and provided a forum to circumvent the e-portfolio guidelines. A few students linked such "unofficial" portfolios from their e-portfolios.
2. Describing disidentifiers
In addition to students' e-portfolio styles missing social information, they also evidenced disidentifiers (Goffman, 1963), whereby signs broke-up the coherence between self-presentation and portfolios that students had tried to create. Teens' feedback suggested that they did not deliberately select signs that resulted in misrepresentation on their webpages. The presence of disidentifiers suggested novel self-presentation and content production problems when young people's multimodal choices become remediated online:
The use of default software values created disidentifiers that inexperienced teenagers missed editing: some choices were not specified by them and their display simply reflected default settings. For example, in organising their portfolio folders, the navigation styles could vary between those they specifically chose and those that were the initial defaults. Such discrepancies were not deliberate and would create an odd navigational experience for portfolio viewers.
Teens could make choices that were later forgotten and their meanings no longer intended. For example, while "Kyle" was interested in graffiti in grade 10, by matric he described this as just a 'phase'. Nevertheless, graffiti remained listed as one of his skills, but there were no examples of such work under his portfolio.
A common example across students' work were copyright statements that featured the year they were written (i.e. 2010 /11). These could become disidentifiers when not updated to the current year they are viewed at (i.e. 2012 and later). By contrast, the author's intention would always be to assert their copyright for the current year as the most accurate form of legal statement.
Conclusion
Missing identifiers and disidentifiers point to the constraints that young digital curators face in infrastructure and practicing ongoing e-portfolio curation. In highly-constrained material and technological contexts, the concept of a signmaker expressing his or her interest is worthy of critique.Just as Potter highlighted about children's' video-making (2012, p. 33), not every video, 'ends up as the coherent, fully designed, literate and realised use of meaning-making resources envisaged by some semiotic theorists'. My research likewise highlights the constraints of teenagers as multimodal designers. In particular, it is important to understand the (often hidden) role of digital infrastructure as an influence on their design process. Inequalities in the access and use to such infrastructures may enable certain styles of self-presentation or act as a gatekeeper, especially for marginalised teens. Non-internet connected students described being unable to publish the social information or artwork showcases they wanted to. In the absence of information on digital infrastructure in their e-portfolios, it was difficult for viewers to appreciate how differing contexts shaped the quantum and styles of visual and social information that users provided. For example, it is hard to spot that under-resourced students had put a lot of effort in making workarounds to overcome slow and unreliable ICT infrastructures. Another concern lay in students not deliberately choosing multimodal ensembles: default software values created disidentifiers that inexpert teenagers missed editing or forget to change, which resulted in misrepresentation of teens' interests.
Scholars who celebrate accounts of teaching contemporary digital media production with new media literacies (Jenkins, 2006. Burn and Durran, 2007. Lankshear and Knobel, 2009. Ito et al, 2010. Jenkins, Ito & Boyd, 2015) would tend to promote the integration of such like arts e-portfolios at schools. Likewise, teachers believed that publishing the prescribed style would be beneficial for all. By contrast, the content analysis and case studies of a range of students' e-portfolio styles revealed the exclusionary impact of infrastructural inequality. My content analysis and case studies for twelve teens revealed how highly constrained access to digital information infrastructure limited marginalised teens’ development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio production.
When analysing digital curators' productions, semiotic theorists should not assume that incoherence, outdated information and the low modal density that results from missing social information solely reflects unmotivated students’ disinterest. Rather, it is important to consider how low production values might also result from keen youths who face infrastructural constraints that prevent online content curation and digital remediation.
Describing the infrastructural constraints that students experienced is consequential as it shows educators and other decision makers that youths’ differential resourcing must be accommodated in curricular design. For example, lessons should aim to prioritise infrastructure use by under-connected students. Teens’ mobile infrastructures must be better accommodated and students should be encouraged to describe infrastructural enablers and constraints in their e-portfolios. Future researchers should look at the outcomes of specific changes in class and whether they help promote greater equity, or not?
The absence of expected signs in an e-portfolio are missing identifiers that may reduce its value when viewers interpret a prospective apprentice or student's digital portfolio to be incomplete and not a 'proper showcase'. The prestige of the symbolic capital that students may develop via digital curations is linked both to the quality of the artworks they remediate and their organisation. Where students choose to be online, but produce partial, disorganised portfolios that do not reflect their best works, such curations may be judged to be inadequate and discredited by assessors or prospective employers. Audience research needs to be done concerning the reception of young people's e-portfolios. For example, how do assessors grade for missing identifiers and disidentifiers when evaluating digital arts portfolios for university access.
My research took place in two relatively well-resourced English secondary schools that could provide the visual arts subject, but future research could be done into the choices that young people make in the less well-resourced environments that are more common in South Africa. For example, how do non-dominant teens negotiate their cultural exclusion at school in creating digital personas that remediate their mother tongues and other repertoires?
More research also needs to be done concerning young adults' development of varied digital portfolios as they enter tertiary education, the workforce and other spaces. For example, how do young peoples' online portfolio styles change as youth become professionals or hobbyists?
People use multiple profiles to support job searches that may involve switching from one profession to a new one. There is an opportunity to research how young adults manage multiple profiles with limited internet access. Researchers must also explore how other constraints influence young adults' design of digital personas. For example, while online spheres are increasingly considered public, they are a source of tension for prospective employees. Older people voiced fears about being screened out of potential work interviews if they post self-image photos on LinkedIn (Sharone, 2017). The ease with which HR recruiters can search young adults' "Google resumes" and their attendant fears of evaluation is likely to inhibit certain expressions online. Researchers could examine the extent to which young adults remain silent about their political and social justice views to 'fit in' with prospective employers.
Cite this page
Noakes, T. (2018). Missing social information and disidentifiers in digital self-presentation. Retrieved from http://www.travisnoakes.co.za/2018/03/missing-social-information-and.html.
Updates
This blog post was updated on the 13th of March with additional insights from my 8ICOM talk and presentation (12 December, 2016).
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Tuesday, 13 December 2016
Multimodal education for inequality: exploring privilege in visual arts students’ e-portfolio personas #8ICOM
Written for researchers interested in how technological and material inequalities become evidenced in young people's digital personas.
Here's the 19 minute 8ICOM conference talk that accompanied my Multimodal education for inequality presentation. This talk aimed to be a concise overview of my PhD research and its contribution:
"My research serves as a cautionary
tale concerning the inequalities evidenced in visual arts students’
curation of digital personas. By contrast to often celebratory accounts of
teaching contemporary digital media literacies, I describe how the technological
and material inequalities between students at a government and an
independent school became mirrored in digital portfolios.
My thesis’ research
contributions are as an Action Research project that enabled the recording
and analysis of students' differing negotiations of arts studio personas
for up to three years. It included students from very different social
backgrounds with contrasting access to media ecologies for digital
curation. I explore how young people’s e-portfolio styles mirror inequalities
in their digital curations and connections to varied affinity spaces. I also
highlight other challenges youths faced in articulating interest via
e-portfolios. For example, remediating “unofficial” cultural repertoires, such
as fashion and Manga.
In South Africa, just
doing ICT, visual arts or visual design subjects is a rare privilege. The
Department of Education’s technical report on the National Senior Certificate
reveals that a low percentage of students do subjects likely to support
access to study options in visually creative industries. In 2012, Equal Education reported that Cape Town’s schools offering
art or design until grade 12 (Matric) are predominately those serving the middle-
and upper-classes. Anecdotal
experience suggests that very few students have curricular opportunities to
experiment with online content creation. A narrow subject focus tends to
exclude inter-disciplinary productions, such as visual arts students
using ICT technologies to curate their productions. Such rigid silos ignore the
importance of hybridity in domains such as contemporary art or graphic
design. My action research project makes a small contribution to building
bridges between silos.
I helped teachers
develop syllabi that appropriated online portfolios for e-portfolio curation. Online
portfolios emerged in 2003 and visual creatives increasingly use such
services to reach web audiences. Digital portfolios are
used for varied forms of capital exchange: For example, securing academic
and vocational trajectories. Some portfolios also support commercial
transactions, such as auctions or art catalogues. Portfolio portals
provide a resource to develop extensive knowledge about the numerous
domains in visual culture. Visual creatives can also develop in-depth
knowledge by learning from others in digital affinity groups. For
emergent creatives, experimenting with portfolios can help with developing
intent around who they want to be.
My action research
project aimed to enfranchise students with fair opportunities for formally
experimenting with online content creation. I helped two educators appropriate
Carbonmade for their students to produce e-portfolios. E-portfolios were taught
conservatively as an aid to prepare for matric exhibitions. A
Bourdieusian field analysis reveals why: it was easy to source the well-resourced
sites supporting digital media prosumption. By contrast, e-portfolio curricula
had to dovetail with the DOE’s visual arts syllabus requirements. It was
a process to gain approval from the DOE, WCED and to secure buy-in from
educators.
Youth were taught and
assessed on their self-presentation as visual arts students (or
"disciplined" identities) and in organizing curricular showcases.
Students' Carbonmade entries were used by the service’s database in creating
four types of page: A 'homepage', ‘artwork project folder’ pages, an ‘about’
page and ‘search page’ results.
Carbonmade’s use was
part of a broader digital curation process, which Potter defines as new
media literacy involving intertextual meanings and strategies for different
audiences. E-portfolio curricula saw students practice the steps A. to C. of
collation, production and sharing in their digital curations. Twenty nine
students curated e-portfolio; seventeen pupils came from an elite,
all-boys, independent school’s Class of 2012. They were taught
e-portfolios from grades 10 to 12. Twelve volunteers came from a less
well-resourced, mixed sex, government school, where ICT broadband
failure delayed the bulk of my lessons to grade 11 in 2014.
The independent school’s
speedy adoption mirrored its material and technological advantages
versus the government school. van Dijk identifies five different types of
inequality and their properties shaping digital media’s usage. My research
focuses on the material and technological aspects:
Technology wise, the
independent school had a one-laptop-per-learner-policy and conspicuous
consumption of electronics was evident. Varied societies, workshops and
extra-mural leisure activities received the independent school’s
support. By contrast, the media infrastructure available to government school
learners in its Khanya computer lab were old. As an Arts and Culture
Focus school it offered some co-curricular activities, but most students
needed to leave early for safe public transport.
The results from my
sites are not comparable due to these large differences, as well as the
shorter e-portfolio syllabus at the government school. There were also
important differences in students’ vocational interests, with the
government school volunteers being more motivated to pursue visual creative
studies. Working in a creative industry seemed a prized social trajectory to
them. By contrast, many independent school students perceived such choices to
be low in prestige, versus say, finance or medicine.
After four years of
fieldwork I amassed a lot of data and my analysis followed Potter’s (2015) example. He
researched digital curation through a combination of Social Semiotics
and Cultural Theory. Given the potentially strong role of ICT
infrastructure and capital resources on youth’s curation, I added insights from
Digital Materialism (especially Infrastructure studies) and also Social
Interactionism. I also adopted Sen’s (1992) inequality approach.
I did a multimodal
content analysis on the representational and communicational choices of all
students. I then wrote 12 case studies, covering student’s diverse
circumstances and e-portfolio styles. The content analysis revealed particular
patterns in the disciplinary, extra mural visual creative and other
personas at each site. For example in
self-presentation, no government school students wrote self-descriptions
over 10 sentences long or used formal genres. Similarly, informal
mobile genres were used for self-representation in their images. Here,
youth tended to differentiate themselves through the “unofficial” visual
culture personas they shared.
Notable patterns at the independent school included the impact
of strong assessment on students’ presentation of their disciplined
identities, which predominately featured formal styles. Most students added
lifestyle personas to differentiate themselves. Several drew on differentiated
practices in tourism, watersports and music for subject matter.
Students’ contrasting e-portfolio styles marked
their unequal access to ICT infrastructures. The
content analysis showed that youth did not have equal opportunities, but
the formal and extra-mural advantages of the better-off were amplified at both
schools. For example, students from homes supporting “free”
internet access created better organized and more extensive showcases than
under-, or non-, connected classmates. Young people’s disciplinary and
“unofficial” e-portfolio personas evidenced privilege. Youth’s online access for developing academic
cultural capital online could be likened to museum visits. As can be seen
across all these digital curation practices, limited internet access
seriously hampers one’s opportunities to engage with exhibits or in developing
one’s own.
This points to the importance of each young
person’s digital hexis in developing e-portfolio styles. Young
people with a history of access and use of ICT were advantaged in having foundational
digital literacies for e-portfolio curation. By contrast, those
inexperienced with scanners, desktop computers, internet browser use and local
area networks, had to play ‘catch up’ in class.
To situate how
material and technological inequalities become evidenced in e-portfolio
curation, my research links young people’s habituses to their affinity spaces. Each
individual's habitus comprises different habituses. My research focuses on four;
the secondary school habitus, a primary home habitus, a vocational habitus and the mediated
preferences in the digital information
habitus. The secondary habitus links directly to the legitimated affinity
spaces supported in classroom arts studio practices. Other affinity spaces tend
to relate to “unofficial” personas.
Here follows case
studies for five enthusiastic students, who differed in terms of the
material and technological resources available in their habituses and affinity spaces:
A White, independent school
student, George went beyond want his educator expected by using a fine arts
gallery metaphor while closely reproducing the disciplinary identity. His
benchmark example evidenced a fandom for fine art, which was unusual
amongst his peers. George was privileged to attend both international and local
galleries, and also pursued this fandom in online affinity spaces. Keen to do Medicine,
George’s assessment strategy foregrounded his observational drawer and painter
personas to achieve the best possible grades from his markers. Although he
published extra-mural photography and designs to Instagram, Deviantart and
shared them via social networks, George’s assessment strategy avoided
mentioning such “unofficial” accounts in his e-portfolio.
Nathan, was a Black,
government school student. Despite also being a fan of art, Nathan could not
do visual art or e-portfolio production outside class. His digital
information habitus was heavily constrained and this was mirrored in an
e-portfolio curation of four images and a brief self-description. Privacy
concerns also shaped his concise profile and decision not to add a self-image.
Unusual in expressing dissatisfaction with his
e-portfolio at the curriculum’s end, Nathan did ‘not really’ believe his
e-portfolio might support his vocational objectives in design.
Masibulele also attended
the government school. His case highlights some assimilatory challenges that
Black students might face in producing visual arts e-portfolios: a first-language
isiXhosa speaker, Masibulele chose to use English instead for an
international audience. He did not share traditional mixed-media productions
as he perceived that these productions were not what was expected in arts
class. For the same reason, he also did not initially share his fashion
labels’ creations. Despite his educator’s inclusive approach, exclusion
of traditional and fashion repertoires shows how students might conceal
cultural capital from home. This suggests strategies of assimilation in
respect of the predominately taught Western fine arts canon and observational
drawing and painting studio practices. His case also highlights how particular
types of visual culture (surface, media and genre) embody social distinction,
albeit moderated within “multi-cultural” repertoires.
Melissa’s case
illustrates the influence of global youth culture and gendered
strategies on self-naming practices. She used a well-resourced home environment
to explore “unofficial” Japanese Manga, Anime and calligraphy practices.
The influence of Japanese pop-culture was also evident in the pseudonymous
identity choices she made. Such privacy choices reflected shared concerns
with her female classmates about unwanted audiences and the dangers of
cyber-bullying and sexual harassment. Her well-developed digital hexis had a
downside; while she did use a pseudonymous identity, her contact email address
featured her full name. Melissa linked to a separate deviantArt profile
to share Gothic and other interests with potential to be misinterpreted by a
religiously conservative audience.
Kyle’s case highlight
the ease of extra-mural interests dovetailing with dominant cultural capital
being remediated into e-portfolios. A White, independent school student, Kyle shared exclusively resourced sports and
photographic productions that dovetailed with his school's institutional
cultural capital. Kyle could easily access professional photographic and
videographic equipment and focused on ‘point-of-view’ work in extra-mural
productions from grade 11. He took travel photography and combined his
enjoyment of wave-boarding with technicity to shoot and edit professional-looking
videos. YouTube was used to research video techniques, such as
achieving the right frame rates to show a giant wave break. Kyle also used
Flicker to research productions by photographers with similar lenses and
cameras to him.Kyle linked to his Flicker and Vimeo accounts from his
e-portfolio. After matric, Kyle became the most successful prosumer amongst his
peers with over 30,000 followers of his Instagram account and high quality
prints of his work are available to buy via society6.com. While Kyle and
Melissa’s examples show what is possible for young people as prosumers, it also
suggests the reproduction of advantage via high volumes of capital needed to
develop a prosumer identities as a semi-professional photographer or aspirant
animation producer.
I had hoped that my
action research would support new literacies and equality. By contrast,
it seemed to contribute to the reproduction of symbolic advantage: Under-resourced
students did not create disciplinary showcases and faced challenges in
adding cultural repertoires. Well-resourced students created showcases,
adding distinctive prosumer identities, while negotiating their disciplinary
personas with more exclusive ones. While e-portfolio production is still being
taught at the private school, it’s NOT for government school students. That is a pity; both
Masibulele and Melissa used their e-portfolios to successfully apply for tertiary
studies - Masibulele did surface design and Melissa Fine Art. Despite her
passion for animation, Melissa went on to study Fine Art, evidencing the
importance of educational investment in dominant high culture.
Similarly, Masibulele's parents would like him to transfer to studying
architecture.
Both Melissa and
Masibulele are fortunate relative to their government school peers in being
able to progress into tertiary habituses rather than being unemployed. Ironically, despite facing the least challenges in e-portfolio curation, Kyle
and George went on to study outside visually creative industries: George
entered medicine and Kyle business science.
My content analysis and
case studies suggest the importance of material and technological resourcing
in young visual artists’ e-portfolio curations. In
particular, resource-intensive communications may not accurately reflect
young peoples’ intensions and abilities: inequalities in some
teenagers’ digital information habituses meant that under-resourced sign-makers could not fully
express their curricular interests. In addition to missing social
information, inexperience with software also led to mis-identifiers misrepresenting
what youths wanted to express.
As a pathfinder project,
mine has opened up much to explore:
> How can the middle-class underpinnings of the initial pedagogy be adjusted to better accommodate all students?
> How do online portfolio styles change as youth become professionals or hobbyists?
> My research took place in relatively well-resourced English secondary schools, but what about other languages and resourcing?
> Digital portfolios increasingly serve to access tertiary education, but how are they assessed?
> How can the middle-class underpinnings of the initial pedagogy be adjusted to better accommodate all students?
> How do online portfolio styles change as youth become professionals or hobbyists?
> My research took place in relatively well-resourced English secondary schools, but what about other languages and resourcing?
> Digital portfolios increasingly serve to access tertiary education, but how are they assessed?
To close with a
speculative proposition; Bourdieu foregrounded disinterested aesthetic
dispositions as a key marker of Distinction in 1979. As prosumers increasingly make both their
tastes and work digitally visible, are we not witnessing an emergent form of
social distinction, a ‘Distinction 2.0’? Perhaps researching individuals’
distinctive curations of digital personas can provide as interesting insights
into Postmodern societies, as understanding French people’s contrasting
aesthetic dispositions once did in the Modern!
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