Ania Rolinska's List: MSc_Dissertation

• The goal is to move toward a theory of writing useful in analyzing how students and teachers within individual classrooms use the discursive tools of classroom genres to interact (and not interact) with social practices beyond individual classroomsthose of schools, families, peers, disciplines, professions, political movements, unions, corporations, and so on.
• These dialogic theories explain discourse, including writing, not in terms of some bracketed underlying conceptual scheme but as a dynamic, functional, intersubjective process of reciprocal negotiation among writers and readers, where discourse mediates interactions among conversants.
• the first step is to go beyond the conventional notion of genre as a set of formally definable text features that certain texts have in common across various contexts (however defined)important as these are to any principled analysisand consider genre in relation to systems or networks of social activity and action. From this perspective, genres can be defined, following Miller (1984), as typified tool-mediated ways of purposefully and dialectically interacting among people in some social practice (and across various linked social practices), some activity system(s).
• Activity theory demands that genres not be seen merely as texts that share some formal features but as shared expectations (perceptions, predictions) among some group(s) of people of how certain tools (including vocalizations and inscriptions) may be used to act together to accomplish shared purposes, to further the object/motive of the activity system. In this sense, genres, as Bazerman (1994, p. 1) says, are not best described as textual forms, but as "forms of life, ways of being, frames for social action. They are environments for learning" and teaching. As "forms of life," genres and the activity systems they operationalize are (temporarily) regularized, stabilized, through routinized, typified tool-use within and among (sub)groupsgenres.
• this activity theory view of genre differs from Martin/Rothery school of Hallidayan theory (Martin, 1993), from dialogism (Nystrand, 1986; Wertsch 1991), and from deconstruction (Derrida, 1980) in that it does not privilege linguistic tools over others
• The term genre in this analysis may apply to the typified use of material tools of any type by an activity system, often in conjunction with one another.
• Because of their particular material properties, the sounds people make with their mouths (language is etymologically "tongues," langues) and marks they make with their hands (writing and other inscriptions) are tools that have extraordinarily wide uses for (re)constructing systems of human activity. They are very quick and inexpensive to make and, in the case of writing, highly mobile. But there is nothing mysterious about these inscriptions or speech sounds. As widely useful as speaking and writing are, other tools
• However inscriptions are particularly suited to constructing long and powerful systems or networks of the modern world, through systems of written genres, as we shall see.
• a genre is the ongoing use of certain material tools (marks, in the case of written genres) in certain ways that worked once and might work again, a typified tool-mediated response to conditions recognized by participants as recurring
• The first time one or more persons in an activity system (or between activity systems) is confronted with a need to carry out a specific action, to achieve a specific goal, the person(s) must choose some means of action, using some tool(s). If the person(s) perceive(s) the choice of tools and their use in a certain way has accomplished the goal, they might choose it again. Over time, people may be confronted with what they perceive as a similar need to act in similar conditions, and pick up and useappropriatesome of the same or similar discursive tool(s) (form of words) in some of the same or similar ways for the same or similar use. That is, they appropriate and perhaps eventually operationalize what the participant(s) perceive(s) to be similar actions using what they perceive to be similar tools and uses of the tools (ways of writing). They create what I am calling a genre. If what they pick up is "inappropriate"does not workthen it does not become operationalized (unless of course conditions change so that it becomes "appropriate," i.e., appropriated by others).
• Texts recognized by participants in an activity system as belonging to some genre may not share a specific set of definable formal features (that is, what participants in that activity system [or another, such as linguists] point to when asked how they know this is one kind of text and not another). Participants may recognize these texts as belonging to the same written genre as long as these texts as operationalizing the actions of participants in the activity system.
• This need to interact using (dynamic) genres is not to say (as some critics of genre analysis argue [e.g. Dixon, 1987]) that change is one-directional and inevitably reproduces existing structures. Activity systems and genres are dialectically structured. To appropriate a tool-in-use, newcomers do not copy exactly the tool and/or its use. Because newcomers bring with them tools and ways of using them from other activity systems, when newcomers pick up and use the genres of the new activity system, those genres and the activity system may be changed in the process of appropriation, however slightly. In this sense, newcomers may change the conditions of an activity system as they expand their involvement with it over time.
• Through the actions of individuals and groups with tools, interactions between and among activity systems may dialectically change those activity systems over time. A newcomer(s) may pick up (appropriate) some tool from one activity system, carry it back to a familiar activity system, and put it to use (perhaps a very different use), transforming that activity system in the process. For example, a student in a general education course of some discipline might apply something they have learned to meet a need in a family or peer group unrelated to the work of that discipline
• Though the system of written genres in a family or small business or advocacy group, for example, may be very complex, it pales by comparison with the system of written genres in a modern university or comprehensive secondary school, which selects and (perhaps) prepares students for a wide range of social practices (activity systems). As the very names imply, these activity systems of formal schooling bring together a range of other activity systems with vastly different and often contradictory motives, and their written genres are myriad. A university or comprehensive secondary school actually functions at the boundary among a number of activity systems: those of students' family, peer, hobby, political activity systems, and so on, with those teachers' disciplinary, professional systems. Brandt (1994, 1995) has movingly traced the complexity of these involvements and their importance beyond the usual formulations of "prior knowledge." "Being literate in the late twentieth century has to do with being able to negotiate that burgeoning surplus" of literate involvements (p. ).
• From the point of view of many (perhaps most) students, the university is a place to expand their involvement, to a greater or lesser extent, with one or more of the activity systems that intersect with the university, an involvement which typically leads to becoming an active participant in one or more of them, to maintain and perhaps transform that activity system(s). Students come to position themselves within these systems to "make a difference," in Giddens' phrase (1984). To do so, one must literally be "enrolled" in the university and, simultaneously, the genre circulation, the curriculumetymologically, the cycleof some disciplinary activity system(s). One must come to recognize, appropriate, participate inand perhaps transform, in ways small or largethe system of genres that operationalizes this system, that makes this form of life work (all puns intended). That involves highly regularized genres of grade reports, transcripts, certificates, reports, as well as catalogs, admissions forms, and so on, that mediateoperationalizethe activity system in (usually) routine ways.
• Students typically do not have a sufficient history of interactions with the system to have much agency or power. They are not (yet) in a position pull the strings even if they knew where they are and which ones would be likely to effect the changes they desire. As Bazerman (1993), Berkenkotter & Huckin (1995), and Kress (1987) have pointed out, most students are not in a position to challenge the genres (and therefore forms of life) of powerful disciplinary systems. I would add the obvious: they will never be if they do not develop a history of interactions with the discipline, through its genres and the genres through which it interacts with other activity systems (including schools, governments, advocacy groups, etc.).
• But because an activity system constantly interacts with other activity systems, as participants themselves have many affiliations (identities, subject positions) with many other activity systems, ongoing social practices constantly change as tools-in-use are appropriated across boundaries and are eventually operationalized (sometimes in new written genres) to transform activity.
• The simplest actions in choosing discursive toolswriting a paper in a certain genre, for example, or even using a formal term from a discipline rather than a familiar one from family or friendsmay cause deep tension, and rightly so. These actions are linked to new objects and motives, to new and often strange people, to future and sometimes frightening changes in identity, to loss as well as gain. Many qualitative studies of students in activity systems of higher education describe students wrestling with identity conflicts and contradictions in learning to write in the disciplines
• The operations that students and teachers bring to the classroom as their legacy of involvement with other activity systems and their motives, the genres read and written and spoken and otherwise, are mutually appropriated (or resisted) in the ongoing dance of selection, depending on the stakes involved for the various stakeholders, the meaningfulness of the ways with words (and other tools).
• The development (reconstruction) of agency and identity means appropriating new object/motives, which requires the use (and often transformation) of certain genres (often written ones). Teachers may "pick up" students' ways with words. But students more often appropriate the discursive tools (and genres) of a discipline or profession, because those involvements, those affiliations, can yield greater power, agency, and identity ("empowerment," in the honorific phrase). The much longer and "better-disciplined" activity system of the discipline usually involves many more people and their tools than the activity systems of individual students (their family and peer networks, for example). Individual students or even groups of students have not typically marshaled the resources over time to require disciplines to appropriate their ways with words (though organizations of students have often done so through collective action, as in France in 1968 [Fraser, 1988]). Students are weak, but in time, through their interactions with organized others, they (may) become more powerful. One question for teachers/analysts/reformers, then, is which (written) genres at which points in students' histories of interaction will best facilitate (from some perspective[s]) those developing involvements? This is the question of scaffolding (Applebee, 1996 ). The question for students is, "How can picking up certain ways of writing (and not others) help me expand in new ways into systems I what to become more a part of?"
• I have suggested that dialogic theory is expanded in three ways: in a broader unit of analysis than text-as-discourse, in wider levels of analysis than the dyad, and in an expanded theory of dialectic that embraces objects and motives of collectives and their participants to explain reciprocal interactions among minds and texts, which dialogism theorizes as the heteroglossic interpenetration of social languages.

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• Scholarly Articles

• Russell Stannard at the University of Westminster (2006, 2007b) has further developed these ideas through his attempt to use screen capture to give feedback in language instruction. Stannard bases his study on Richard Mayer’s (2001) principles of combining oral and visual feedback in what is called “dual coding”. Mayer maintains that there is a tendency to overload the visual channel in the media and that a balanced use of picture and sound makes the two channels complement one another (see Clark & Mayer, 2003; Paivio, 1986). Moreover, Brick and Holmes (2008) claim that combining speech, picture/video and the printed word also has significance for various learning styles:
  
  

  The use of speech, graphics and the written word seems to cater to the widest variety of learning styles, reaching those with a preference for auditory and visual learning who are less likely to benefit from standard single mode written feedback. (Brick & Holmes, 2008, p. 340)
  

  
  Stannard (2007 b) and Lumadue & Fish (2010) indicate through their findings that this multimodal form of feedback has significant potential in higher education. Stannard (2006, 2007b) is willing to call it a new direction for higher education feedback, and Lumadue & Fish (2010) go as far as describing screen capture in feedback work as being “A Paradigm Shift for the 21st Century”.

  • Interesting to see the name 'multimodal feedback' when referring to feedback provided in form of screencasts which combine oral and visual feedback in what is called 'dual coding' . Interesting to see the optimistic proclamation that screencasting in feedback might e 'paradigm shift for the 21st century', this closely refers to multimodality. Could this refer to writing essays too?

• • A comprehensive definition of a screencast which distinguishes between the basic, initial uses and the more advanced uses aligned with the remix and collaboration culture. It places the screencast within a genre of 'documentary filmmaking that tells stories about software-based cultures like ... examples include social sites which focus on sharing and creative production, being a prosumer.
• A screencast is a digital movie in which the setting is partly or wholly a computer screen, and in which audio narration describes the on-screen action. It's not a new idea. The screencaster's tools—for video capture, editing, and production of compressed files—have long been used to market software products, and to train people in the use of those products. What's new is the emergence of a genre of documentary filmmaking that tells stories about software-based cultures like Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and content remixing. These uses of the medium, along with a new breed of lightweight software demonstrations, inspired the collaborative coining of a new term, screencast.
• Some screencasts are carefully produced works designed to educate, entertain, or influence an audience.
• ad hoc uses of the medium
• Screencast Genres

  • Quite a list of screencasting genres. Probably the ones of interest to me include: feature story and animated whiteboard. Nothing on recording the online reality or 'virtuality' but perhaps this was not common in 2005 yet? Maybe I need to expand this list. I wonder which category the documentary making mentioned in the definition at the very beginning falls into. He does mention enhancing screencast with a video and enhancing video with a screencast. Thinking of the screencasts produced for the analysed assignments, genres of screencasts can be mixed thus producing remixes of let's say an animated slideshow and a web tour.

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