Where do you stand?
According to The LondonPaper, research conducted in California has revealed that SNS’s are creating a social divide. Myspace, Bebo, Facebook and Linkedin are each stated as being frequently used by particular social groups.
Read the article below to decide where you stand.
Journeying through Visual Design: GridClub
GridClub is an educational website for children aged 5 – 12 years which offers a variety of learning activities through game play. A brief textual analysis will highlight the visual design and elements of multimedia employed in presenting the site’s ‘multiple-user pathways’. Using the functional categories of Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen (Reading Images, The Grammar of Visual Design) adopted by Andrew Burn and David Parker in their website analysis ‘Chocolate Politics’, I will explore how the website’s design, language and hypertext links represent the content of the site, the relationship constructed between the text and audience and produces models of learning.
I must say at this point that this analysis is conducted as a user participating in the site without subscription rights or accessing the free trial offer.
GridClub provides learning activities through curriculum areas English, Maths, Science, History, Geography, Art, Music and Modern Foreign Languages. The website is designed for children to use at school with their teachers or at home with parents. The site is heavily governed by a discourse of education, childhood and play and therefore informed by a combination of ideologies presented both viually and textually - a bold, colourful layout wih animated characters to represent a “space for kids”, parental involvement in children’s education and as ‘GridClub learning doesn’t feel like learning at all’, exciting opportunities which aid education. The site is supported by the DFES, Curriculum online, Becta (British educational Communications and Technology Agency), and the Scottish Executive.
Organisation – how learning is designed
When accessing the website, the “front-door” page provides options to log in or subscribe to the site. Salience is afforded to the animated characters and icons which are textually organised using both static and dynamic relations. The icons with ‘hypertextual depth’ are visually realised by rollover action and increase their salience for as long as the cursor remains positioned over them. Some of the static characters display particular movements when triggered by a rollover so as to assist in the concept of “things to do” on the front page. 
These dynamic icons present the ‘explicit trajectory’ of the site’s semiotic text, directing users’ to the site’s learning activities. Although users have a choice in navigating meaning, this is significantly limited in contrast to, for instance, the commercial children’s site Nickelodeon, which presents a wide reading path enabling the user to design their own reading and interact at whichever point they choose. The route mapped out by the GridClub website is determined by the functional load of each icon expressing hypertextual depth. Users are invited to: - Log into the site with username and password,- Take part in the free trial or purchase a subscription- Find out more about the site and sample some of the activities.
When finding out more about the site, users are presented with a signpost icon which has dynamic status to direct the three types of user – teachers, parents and kids.
The pages constructed for teachers and parents differ to the one constructed for children. Teacher and parent pages are presented more as text based with a side bar of categories each with dynamic status allowing them to learn more about how GridClub can benefit children educationally. Moving from left to the right of the screen, or as Kress and Van Leeuwen would suggest – moving from the ‘given’ to the ‘new’, the right side of the page offers information in support of GridClub’s credibility. A brightly coloured box containing a series of animated award logos won by the club (each with dynamic status taking the user to the awarding body’s website) is displayed to highlight ‘new’ recognition of the site’s approach and delivery to children’s learning. Below this ‘symbolic representation’ is a testimonial from a user with the word ‘Approved’ stamped across, thus providing evidence of the site’s credibility.
The children’s page on the other hand has far less printed text than the adult page – a sign which indicates that GridClub is re-ordering the child’s world of print based learning and placing salience on creative learning or learning through play. Again, as on the adult pages, the left hand side bar enables children to find out more about the many games they can access if they were to subscribe. This page is hierarchically organised in that navigation is highly controlled and icons have limited hypertextual depth, allowing children to change the sequence of static screenshots only. The ‘let me try’ page has six free games for children to try; this is separate from the 14 day free trial on offer.
The six games offered each relate to a particular curriculum area, ‘Ray X in eliminate the bugs’ is a science activity where children are asked to help Ray X identify moulds, fungi and bacteria. ‘Cyber Café’ can be viewed as a cross between a PSHE and ICT activities as it encourages internet safety through topics such as web browsing, online forums, instant messaging, mobile phones and email. ‘Master Class’ is an art activity introducing children to famous artists and then providing the opportunity to recreate the work in the ‘art factory’. ‘Make a million’ is a maths game where children can play on their own or with a friend. The aim is to make a £million by giving the answers to a series of times table in as fast a period as possible – the faster you are the more money you win. ‘Egyptian pyramid’ is a history activity allowing children to explore inside a pyramid and click on artefacts to play games or find out information. The final game is ‘Finding Zeebo’, a geography activity where children take on the role of a ‘world famous bird detective’ to find a rare Scarlet Macaw and fight the illegal trade of exotic birds. Children can navigate through these free games and play what they like, when they like, as many times as they like.
Each game employs rollover action to determine the static and dynamic status of icons and provides print based information within game play (external to any rules or offer of help). Game play is afforded a high degree of salience on the children’s page alongside the free trial and subscription offer to join the club. This again is part of the sites hierarchical organisation which tells children to either play the games or sign up.
Orientation – Teaching and Selling
The type of communication set out by the GridClub website has what Kress and Van Leeuwen would call a particular type of ‘mood’, the mood of ‘offer’ or ‘demand’. The children’s page uses both of these moods, firstly by offering the free games trial and then by the ‘instruction’ or ‘demand’ to join the club. In the ‘how do I join’ page, the discourses present are one of children’s empowerment – similar again to Nickelodeon’s rhetoric of ‘kid power”, characterised by three salient and dynamic symbols where children can send emails or letters to their teacher or parents (pre-written by GridClub) requesting adults to pay for a subscription.
Representation – Education and Childhood
The site displays three purposes, firstly to engage children in locating site interaction, secondly to engage parents in their child’s education and thirdly to empower children to learn through playful activities. These are characterised by the site’s functional load – its capacity for carrying meaning, which is achieved through its visual design and textual language. The visual design of bright colours, rollover triggers and animated cartoon characters represents a fun environment for children so that children first and foremost won’t recognise the site as a learning environment. Also, the visual and textual design gives children a degree of “inter-active agency” in choosing how to interact on particular pages i.e. trigger animation or access activities. Parents are able to view the site as child friendly and packed with things for their child to do. In terms of textual language, the comic book font signifies fun, allowing the name “Club” to inform children that this is their space so as to empower and motivate learning. For parents, the information provided by textual language is used to communicate the educational benefits the site offers their child , so by viewing the site through the context of education parents will hopefully subscribe.
Bibliography
Burn A & Parker D (2003) Analysing Media Texts, Continuum: London &New York.
GridClub http://www.gridclub.com/
Kress G & Van Leeuwen T (2006) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, Routledge: London and New York
Kress G & Van Leeuwen T (2000) Multimodal discourse: The modes and Media of Contemporary Communication, Arnold: London
Writing to Communicate
Prior to my current course and blogging, I had no previous experience of learning through VLE’s (Virtual Learning Environments). In a sense, VLE’s are “contextualised” SNS’s which provide the opportunity to read the views of others and post responses to share knowledge or assist learning.
In terms of blogging, incorporating multimedia links into blog entries adds meaning to the text so that topics discussed can be cross referenced by examples in order to reiterate and demonstrate meaning. Writing to express thoughts/ ideas discuss topics, share knowledge through blogging has taken the internet by storm since Jorn Barger in 1997 created a site linking news articles and websites, coining the term ‘weblog’ (this date and author has been contested). The popularity of blogging is evident of a dynamic, pro-active and fun way to discuss topics or share knowledge across spatial and temporal boundaries.
There still remains a great deal to discover, I feel my journey via Digital Play has only just begun, therefore this blog will serve to represent a multimodal approach in the production of meaning…and gossip about Eastenders from time to time!
Performance politics in the world of social networking – should teachers get involved?
Ok …So now I’ve taken social networking to the next level…crossing over into a virtual social world is something that had never crossed my mind previously!
After setting up an account on Facebook, I was presently surprised to find some old friends from university. Exactly as Helen Pidd stated in the Guardian article – Are you connected? Face book is similar to a ‘souped-up free version of Friends Reunited’, surpassing the old idea of just finding friends, here you can make them as well. Aside from my personal pleasure, are social networking sites appropriate for use within an educational context?
Facebook has similarities with another networking site – Myspace, which has been viewed by many (including me prior to this Reflective Narrative) as simply a site to construct networks through music affiliations. Although music can have a particular function for Myspacers, such as providing space for up & coming or established singer/songwriters to showcase their talent and achievements, as well as conversing with new and old friends, Myspace is a means of telling the world “this is who I am”, “this is what I do” and “these are the people that I know or who want to get to know me”. It is a place to reflect on lessons in life, should it really be used as a place to reflect on lessons in school?
Although Myspace pages are a public way for young people to collect and converse with friends, many Myspacers use it as much more than a popularity contest, (even though many members request to be added to the ‘top friends list’ of others). Creating a page on this site is great for developing media literacy as members are able to post picture presentations, videos, messages and blogs whilst positioning their social networks through categories such as Myspace Music, Myspace Film and Myspace Comedy.
What also becomes interesting is alongside the networking preferences set by Myspacers when “genre-ising” personal sites, their conversations and blog posts can indicate the types of audiences these members are looking to attract.
L Scheidt (2006) discusses five audience typologies (set by K.M Langellier, 1998) which social networkers “perform” to. According to this article, online audiences are characterised as either:
1- Witnesses who testify to the experience
2- Therapists who unconditionally support emotions (the research shows that this category is a
position mainly adopted by females!)
3- Cultural theorists who assess the contestation of meanings, values and identities in the performance
4- Narrative analysts who examine genre truth or strategy
5- Critics appraising the display of performance, knowledge and skill
An example of a Myspace blog outlining a member’s experience can be said to fit quite neatly into the first category of audience types, which according to Scheidt (2006) is a popular category bloggers use when interacting with audiences. Out of the 89 blog entries Scheidt studied, 50.6% of them fitted into the first category.
Censorship and privatisation are continually present themes on social networking sites, enabling members to gauge just how much information they are prepared to show or share with others. Myspacers and the Facebook Community are able to toggle between what information is made available for public consumption and what is retained in the private sphere. Students can therefore control the privacy of their information. On Facebook, private networking takes place behind the “front door” of the site’s face page:
Public/private boundaries remain quite distinct behind the site’s front door, friends are categorised by network regions and passers by can be limited in what aspects of a person’s profile they see (dependent on the privacy settings set). This is similar to Myspace, yet the difference lies in the fact that non-myspacers can be part of the audience and view members’ pages without setting up an account. Therefore educators choosing to use Myspace as an educational resource are able to view their students’ public pages to check on tasks set or blog posts. However how will students feel when teachers face their “front door” page? Do they need to worry about their own or their friends frank use of language? Have they lied about their age on their profile? Can privacy settings be placed against their photos? Actually, student blogs can be searched for in Myspace, so accessing the front door page may not be necessary but educators should be prepared to sift through thousands of blogs, unless students have tagged their Myspace page with an unusual name. An important consideration for educators is the fact that student’s sites can be accessed from their blogs; this would then involve the educator’s morality and the trust of the student. Educators approaching a students’ front door page may be faced with content which they find disturbing which would therefore place the educator in an ethical dilemma – whether to involve parents or consider issues of child protection. What then does this mean in terms of trust?
Educators choosing to use Facebook or Myspace as an educational resource will need to create an account in order to interact with their students. What are the implications when building a profile? Will students be invited onto the educator’s site as ‘friends’? What will this mean to the young person and how will this change the dynamics of teacher/student relations?
From a completely different perspective, in terms of the public/private distinction, surely censorship must also be perceived as the right of the anonymous user? Audience members who wish not to get involved in the pages they view (such as educators) may soon be forced to take a position – either get involved or leave this area! Social network communities such as Myspace are utilising monitoring software in order to track anonymous audience members who literally show no “business” on these sites apart from being a spectator or voyeur. Of course, some may view this favourably considering the social climate of undesirable internet users, but tracking site visitors may intimidate and put off potential audiences.
It seems that social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Bebo) used in an educational context have no place in the school setting. Unless being used for a group media project to learn visual design, content usability and the integration of particular tools (media player, hit counter etc) on a page set up solely for this reason, these sites should remain for personal pleasure and not be used when assessing the learning of students. Young people, who use these sites, do so for a particular reason – to express to others who they are or how they choose to perform their identity. Although students may or may not be aware of the extent of their audience, privacy controls allow them to restrict specific information to their social circle whilst allowing other virtual acquaintances to access different areas. It therefore becomes difficult to see why educators would want to use such sites with their students. When considering the blogging facilities on either of these sites (as mentioned above), student’s personal pages are only a “click” away and here students will express themselves in a way which may be considered inappropriate for formal organised settings such as schools. If blogging is to be used as an educational tool, then it should be done so away from Myspace, Facebook and Bebo…crumbs, is there no place left sacred for the student?
