Communications around the Olympic torch on Everest

With a news blackout at Everest base camp, some blogs are attracting considerable attention chronicling the Chinese government's attempts to get the torch up the mountainside. Jim Curtin has posted a photo of a sign at Camp II, handwritten on improvised materials, telling climbers they cannot go forwards. I can't help noticing it is in excellent standard English, by someone with a very good eye for the conventional layout of such notices.

Books

Yesterday the Literacy Research Discussion Group had an open discussion of books. Here are the titles people brought along, and succeeded in making some interesting links among:

Writing on the Plaza: mediated literacy practices among scribes and clients in Mexico City. Judy Kalman (Hampton Press, 1997)
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See. (Penguin, 2006)
Illuminating Disadvantage: profiling the experienes of adults with entry level literacy or numeracy over the lifecourse: research report. John Brynner & Samantha Parsons. National Research and Development Centre for adult literacy and numeracy research report (NRDC, 2008).
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Jerome Bruner (Harvard University Press, 1986)
Pies and Prejudice - in search of the North. Stuart Maconie (Ebury Press, 2008)
Les ecrits de septembre 11: New York 2001. Beatrice Frankel (Textual, 2002)
Introducing Bakhtin. Sue Vice. (Manchester University Press. 1997)
Birds without Wings. Louis De Bernieres. (Vintage 2005)
Doce Cuentos Peregrinos. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Grupo Editorial Norma USA, 1998)
Someday you will no all about me. Anne Robinson, Leslie Crawford, Nigel Hall. Heinemann, USA (1990).

Some of these books may have been published before or since as well in various editions . I'm sorry I haven't always inserted accents where they should be too.
JG

Changing Literacies, Changing Technologies

This is the title of a collaborative research project I am involved with at Lancaster through the Senior Learners Forum.
We have been meeting since December to document the experiences of older people in relation to changing practices of literacy and technologies across the lifespan - both positive and negative.

It is still possible for people to join the project.
You need to choose two people to interview who are contrasting in some way. For example, they might be:
Older or younger
Use new technologies or don’t use them
Live in an urban or a rural area
Be male or female;
Have different past experiences of education and employment;
Have a positive or negative attitude to new technologies.

Overall we are interested in making a contribution to wider research with older adults that is looking at why and how they use new communications technologies (ICTs), how uses are changing , what ICTS offer people and the choices people make to use new technologies or not. I have circulated some articles by Stephen Gorard that describe the larger-scale research he has been doing and that our research can fit into.

We agreed that our particular theme will be: do new communication technologies increase isolation or do they increase social contact for older people?

If you are interested in joining us or keeping in touch with what we are doing, please let me know!

Mary

Nothing to Write Home About

Thanks to Fiona Frank for this link to a great book of postcards from the time before emails and mobile phones when everyone sent cards, whether they had anything to say or not.....

http://www.abadie.co.uk/postcards/aboutthebook.htm

Mary