3D virtual worlds as environments for literacy learning

Background: Although much has been written about the ways in which new technology might transform educational practice, particularly in the area of literacy learning, there is relatively little empirical work that explores the possibilities and problems - or even what such a transformation might look like in the classroom. 3D virtual worlds offer a range of opportunities for children to use digital literacies in school, and suggest one way in which we might explore changing literacy practices in a playful, yet meaningful context. Purpose: This paper identifies some of the key issues that emerged in designing and implementing virtual world work in a small number of primary schools in the UK. It examines the tensions between different discourses about literacy and literacy learning and shows how these were played out by teachers and pupils in classroom settings.Sources of evidence: Case study data are used as a basis for exploring and illustrating key aspects of design and implementation. The case study material includes views from a number of perspectives including classroom observations, chatlogs, in-world avatar interviews with teachers and also pupils, as well as the author’s field notes of the planning process with accompanying minutes and meeting documents.Main argument: From a Foucauldian perspective, the article suggests that social control of pedagogical practice through the regulation of curriculum time, the normalisation of teaching routines and the regimes of individual assessment restricts teachers’ and pupils’ conceptions of what constitutes literacy. The counternarrative, found in recent work in new litearcies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) provides an attractive alternative, but a movement in this direction requires a fundamental shift of emphasis and a re-conceptualisation of what counts as learning.Conclusions: This work on 3D virtual worlds questions the notion of how transformative practice can be achieved with the use of new technologies. It suggests that changes in teacher preparation, continuing professional development as well as wider educational reform may be needed

Digital archives, e-books and narrative space

In this paper we are concerned with the capacity of digital media to enable publics to tell their own environmental stories using digital broadcast archives (DBAs). We consider how digital media afford different ways of telling stories in relation to digital media archives. Central to this discussion is our experience of writing e‐books as part of the AHRC‐funded project “Earth in Vision: BBC coverage of environmental change 1960–2010”. The e‐book format has been adopted in order to explore some of the possibilities for writing environmental history and politics using DBAs

When culture meets digital platforms: value creation and stakeholders' alignment in big data use

Research on big data has highlighted that a crucial element to create value from data is the capability of aligning different stakeholders’ interests. However, it has not yet been investigated empirically how this process of alignment can be realized. We conduct a multiple case study on the two leading platforms involved in the online dissemination of cultural heritage – Europeana and Google Arts & Culture. Our findings reveal that a platform overtakes a rival one when it turns on multiple drivers of value creation in such a way that the drivers contribute to realigning the interests expressed by the stakeholders whose strategic objectives and beliefs were formerly divergent – or simply unrelated – to each other. This capability of realigning different stakeholders’ interests is independent of the level of industry-specific knowledge that the platform orchestrator has. The dynamics we document imply that Google has assumed a system integration role in the cultural ecosystem. This generates new trade-offs for museums in the way they generate value for the tourism industry. The paper enriches our understanding of what strategies digital platforms adopt to create value in big data contexts and provides a base to continue the investigation on other ecosystems driven by big data

Affordances-in-practice:an ethnographic critique of social media logic and context collapse

Drawing on data gathered during ethnographic fieldwork in Mardin, a medium-sized town in southeast Turkey, this article shows that social media users actively appropriate online platforms and change privacy settings in order to keep different social spheres and social groups apart. Keeping different online social contexts distinct from each other is taken for granted as a way of using social media in Mardin. By contrast, social media scholars have extensively discussed the effects of social media in terms of context collapse. The article highlights how context collapse is the result of patterns of usage within Anglo-American contexts and not the consequence of a platform's architecture or social media logic. It then suggests a theoretical refinement of affordances, and proposes the concept of affordances-in-practice

‘Media events’ reconsidered: from ritual theory to simulation and performativity

This paper re-examines the long-established notion of ‘media events’ by contrasting and critically appraising three distinct approaches to the question of media events. These are: ritual theory associated with Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, secondly, Jean Baudrillard’s approach rooted in his notions of simulation and ‘non-events’ and, finally, the more recent performative approaches to media and mediation. I take Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska’s reading of media events presented in Life After New Media (2012) as exemplary of the performative approach. An argument is made that the accounts of media events offered by performative approaches add very little, and, indeed, lack the critical insightfulness of the earlier approaches. Both ritual theory and Baudrillard’s thought are briefly reappraised and, against Nick Couldry, I try to show that these accounts are not characterised by binary and reductive thinking. The major misunderstandings concern the nature of the sacred and profane dualism and the further dualisms developed in Baudrillard’s thought, particularly the figures of implosion and reversibility. Finally, Baudrillard’s position on technology is addressed and the paper concludes with the suggestion that his account is not solely negative, since technological developments are not only at the mercy of ironic reversals they may also enable new rituals of disappearance

Exploring the affordances of smart toys and connected play in practice

What does children’s play look like in the smart toy era? What conceptual frameworks help make sense of the changing practices of children’s connected play worlds? Responding to these questions, this article re-frames discussions about children’s smart toy play within wider theoretical debates about the affordances of new digital materialities. To understand recent transformations of children’s play practices, we propose it is necessary to think of toys as increasingly media-like in their affordances and as connected to wider digital material ecosystems. To demonstrate the potential of this conceptual approach, we explore illustrative examples of two popular smart ‘care toys’. Our analysis identifies three examples of affordances that smart care toys share with other forms of mobile and robotic media: liveliness, affective stickiness and portability. We argue that locating discussions of smart toys within wider conceptual debates about digital materialities can provide new insights into the changing landscape of children’s play

“Cycles upon cycles, stories upon stories” : contemporary audio media and podcast horror’s new frights

During the last ten years the ever-fertile horror and Gothic genres have birthed a new type of fright-fiction: podcast horror. Podcast horror is a narrative horror form based in audio media and the properties of sound. Despite association with oral ghost tales, radio drama, and movie and TV soundscapes, podcast horror remains academically overlooked. Podcasts offer fertile ground for the revitalization and evolution of such extant audio-horror traditions, yet they offer innovation too. Characterized by their pre-recorded nature, individualized listening times and formats, often “amateur” or non-corporate production, and isolation from an ongoing media stream more typical of radio or TV, podcasts potentialize the instigation of newer audio-horror methods and traits. Podcast horror shows vary greatly in form and content, from almost campfire-style oral tales, comprising listener-produced and performed content (Drabblecast; Tales to Terrify; NoSleep); to audio dramas reminiscent of radio’s Golden Era (Tales from Beyond the Pale; 19 Nocturne Boulevard); to dramas delivered in radio-broadcast style (Welcome to Night Vale; Ice Box Theatre); to, most recently, dramas, which are themselves acknowledging and exploratory of the podcast form (TANIS; The Black Tapes Podcast; Lime Town). Yet within this broad spectrum, sympathies and conventions arise which often not only explore and expand notions of Gothic sound, but which challenge broader existing horror and Gothic genre norms. This article thus demonstrates the extent to which podcast horror uses its audio form, technology and mediation to disrupt and evolve Gothic/horror fiction, not through a cumulative chronological formulation of podcast horror but through a maintained and alternately synthesized panorama of forms. Herein new aspects of generic narration, audience, narrative and aesthetic emerge. Exploring a broad spectrum of American and British horror podcasts, this article shows horror podcasting to utilize podcasting’s novel means of horror and Gothic distribution/consumption to create fresh, unique and potent horror forms. This article reveals plot details about some of the podcasts examined

Crossing media boundaries: adaptations and new media forms of the book

t is necessary to continuously review the definition of the book moving from one bound by its material form to one determined by its function as a means of communication. The book’s social function as the high status vehicle for communicating new ideas and cultural expressions is being challenged by sophisticated systems of conveying meaning in other media. In this article, we report on two projects: electronic book (e-book) publication and reader forum for Nature Mage and the transmedia augmented reality (AR) fiction Sherwood Rise, which investigate these issues. Claudio Pires Franco’s work is based on the adaptation of a source work: Duncan Pile’s Nature Mage. The project aims to develop the book from e-book to a fan-produced enhanced digital book. Through this practice-based research, Franco investigates the definitions and classification of the e and i forms of the book and adaptation in new media; the role of the author in creative collaboration with readers through online forums; the extension of the story world through creative collaboration and reader participation while respecting and safeguarding creative properties. One remove from the traditional book, David Miller’s Sherwood Rise, research the user experience with AR to examine narrative problems and explore new storytelling aesthetics. These new media forms define the outer borders of the book system within which content is formed and moulded, and around which society is shaped

The (im)materiality of literacy : the significance of subjectivity to new literacies research.

This article deconstructs the online and offline experience to show its complexities and idiosyncratic nature. It proposes a theoretical framework designed to conceptualise aspects of meaning-making across on- and offline contexts. In arguing for the ‘(im)materiality’ of literacy, it makes four propositions which highlight the complex and diverse relationships between the immaterial and material associated with meaning-making. Complementing existing sociocultural perspectives on literacy, the article draws attention to the significance of relationships between space, mediation, materiality and embodiment to literacy practices. This in turn emphasises the importance of the subjective in understanding how different locations, experiences and so forth inflect literacy practice. The article concludes by drawing on the Deleuzian concept of the ‘baroque’ to suggest that this focus on articulations between the material and immaterial helps us to see literacy as multiply and flexibly situated