Testing possibilities: on negotiating writing practices in a 'postdigital' age (tools and methods)

The exponential growth of new media technologies presents opportunities and challenges for writers. Fast-paced change - featuring what can seem like perpetual updates of hardware and software - undermines the possibility of growing attached to particular tools and practices. Collaboration is key to social media and many of the new technologies, and not something that sits easily with the traditional image of the writer as someone working alone. This article considers how writers can negotiate the demands of a ‘postdigital age’. Adopting a teacher-practitioner stance, it proposes that the remediation of a writer’s own practice is key. As well as considering how a writer can work to remediate his or her own practice, whereby - as new challenges and opportunities arise - a writer looks to existing skills and prior experience and adapts or applies them in new contexts as part of a process of, in effect, collaborating with him or herself, this article begins to explore whether such remediation can be taught. An aim is to reach a new theoretical position on how individuals can approach the creative potential of writing in the 21st century and more effectively embrace existing and emerging opportunities provided by interactive digital technologies

Live and public: one practitioner’s experience and assessment of Twitter as a tool for archiving creative process

This interdisciplinary article explores from a practitioner’s perspective, ways in which developments in Web 2.0 technology, in combination with mobile phones, facilitate and encourage new methods of archiving creative process that result in new experimental forms of writing. It takes the author’s use of Twitter as a case study. The research purpose is to consider the benefits of developments in new technology to creative writing practitioners. An aim will be to reach a new theoretical position on how social media and mobile technology can aid and generate creativity by enabling archiving of the creative process to be an ongoing, live, dynamic experience

Digital future: the new underclass

Dr Josie Barnard investigates the deep social divides created by the digital world. Whether booking a flight to go on holiday or ordering a takeaway, digital technology is so embedded in everyday life that it's easy to assume everyone is on a level playing field. Or that those who aren't are part of an older generation who didn't grow up with computers. But that's a dangerous assumption. 22% of the British population lack the digital skills they need to get by day-to-day. That's more than one in five people who struggle with signing their child up to school, filling in a tax return, or even using a smartphone to make a call. And as more and more essential services move online, falling behind the pace of change carries severe consequences. For young people., the risks of being left behind are buried under the assumption that they are digital natives - that they have supposedly grown up with an innate ability to use digital technology. But as the number of smartphone-only households grows, millions of children are in danger of their digital world shrinking around a tiny touchscreen. Dr Barnard asks if this is simply a question of affordability and motivation, or whether more complicated factors are at play. She speaks to people struggling to find space at public computer banks to complete their Universal Credit forms, and a group who are jumping hurdles to get online because of their severe dyslexia, and gets behind the screens of smartphone-only teenagers to find out how the kind of device and the way we use it can be just as detrimental as not having it at all

Cyber nuts and bolts: effective participatory online learning, theory and practice

open access articleThis article presents emergent findings from an empirical research study conducted during Covid lockdown with 52 undergraduate students at a UK university November 2020-April 2021. The research study, which adopts a teacher-practitioner stance, builds on a 2012-2019 programme of research (represented by publications including Barnard 2019) which explores the potentials and dangers that digital technologies hold for pedagogy and education. It is located in the field of Creative Writing and uses the discipline’s pedagogical practice of ‘workshopping’ as a case study. The Creative Writing workshop centres on the exchange of information and critically informed comment by participating students (generally in small groups), and, as such, has similarities with seminars in other disciplines. Hence it is hoped that this article will be of benefit both in the home discipline and more widely. The contention of this article is that, to maintain quality in the delivery of participatory online teaching, it is necessary to ensure an ongoing feedback loop between individuals’ bodily existence ‘IRL’ (‘In Real Life’) and the section of cyberspace that they carve out and inhabit collaboratively during virtual seminar groups. It considers how the cliché of the ‘digital native’ can inhibit learning and the role of affect in enabling productive online and engagement. In taking initial steps towards development of a pedagogy of affect in which a ‘neutral terrain’ is established that enables students to apply and develop close reading skills in an online environment, it presents a new theoretical position on what constitutes effective pedagogy in the context of participatory virtual classrooms

Twitter and Creative Writing: generating an “authentic” online self

In Creative Writing, it is considered important to have an ‘authentic’ voice, both in long form work (such as novels) and via online ‘author platforms’ that are intended to promote the work. However, if, as is often assumed, it is not possible for one person to have more than one ‘authentic’ voice, the task can look problematic. This chapter reports on a new small-scale pilot study in which Creative Writing students working on long form projects were invited to also generate online selves. With its low character-count, Twitter can free students to experiment. Thus, for the pilot study, Twitter was used from November 2017 to April 2018 with the aim of helping two groups of Creative Writing students at a UK University experiment with ideas of what constitutes an ‘authentic’ online self and develop skills in creating one. Student evaluation sheets enabled quantitative and qualitative assessment of the effectiveness of the proposed pedagogical method. The research, which adopts a teacher-practitioner stance, is located in the field of Creative Writing. However, confident and comfortable digital engagement is an important aspect of ‘digital inclusion’ more generally, and so the task of finding an appropriate, robust digital voice is relevant in other disciplines as well. Therefore, it is hoped that, in providing a pedagogical toolkit that can be replicated and ‘rolled out’, this chapter will prove to be a valuable contribution both in the field of Creative Writing and more widely

Written evidence submitted by Dr. Josie Barnard SFHEA to the House of Lords Communication and Digital Committee on Digital Exclusion.

Research led by Dr Barnard into how to enable ‘future-proofing’ (i.e. sustainable and resilient) digital upskilling demonstrates the need to a) support citizens’ development of digitally targeted creative flexibility and b) leverage ‘offline’ for online learning. ‘Online access is not the only factor in digital exclusion’, factors including ‘confidence in navigating the online sphere’ are ‘prerequisites to reaping the full benefits of the internet’.[1] Individuals’ levels of digital skills can go down as well as up. Accepting the possibility that all citizens could become digitally excluded and thus prioritising investment that empowers individuals for long-term digital upskilling will benefit individuals and society. To unlock value, we need an approach to digital exclusion by government and industry that responds robustly to the fact that access and basic training alone is not enough. We need that approach to embrace the fact that human responses such as lack of confidence and/or fear can be key. Overall, Barnard’s findings support the need for approaches to digital engagement by government and industry that embrace broadened understandings of digital exclusion and invest in space for and initiatives that enable citizens to a) develop digitally targeted creative flexibility and b) embed offline in online learning

Home Writer

Are we at home when we write? Ana Baeza, MoDA's Curator, talks to Josie Barnard (Assoc. Prof. in Creative Writing, De Montfort University) about practices of writing, the materials and tools we use, and how this has all changed with digital technology. We also discuss Josie's recent book, The Multimodal Writer