Not just playing games: moving on from hobbies to digital jobs

Julian Sefton-Green shares insights from his research on young people’s interest in digital technologies and how their formal and informal learning journeys helped them transformed their passions into genuine creative and digital opportunities. Julian is an independent scholar working in education and the cultural and creative industries. He is currently principal research fellow at the Department of Media & Communication, LSE, a research associate at the University of Oslo and visiting professor at The Playful Learning Centre, University of Helsinki, Finland

What is ‘play’ and ‘playfulness’, and what does it mean to join either term together with learning?

Julian Sefton-Green explores what play is and what play is not, and whether it truly is ‘the work of the child’. Julian is an independent scholar working in education and the cultural and creative industries. He is currently leading the project Preparing for Creative Labour and is a principal research fellow at the Department of Media & Communication, LSE, a research associate at the University of Oslo and visiting professor at The Playful Learning Centre, University of Helsinki

What (and Where) is the ‘Learning’ When We Talk about Learning in the Home?

In this paper, I will build on the proposal that we need to pay attention to both of these frames through characterizing the metadiscourse surrounding learning in the home. I suggest that this metadiscourse is made up of several elements. I will show how a number of families — the subjects of a larger research project that investigates learning across time and contexts — adopt and use folk “ theories of learning,” and I will consider, in particular, how such theories relate to dominant discourses around learning in school. Second, I will explore how media technologies — and in particular, how the ways that they are purchased and how they are located in the home— also contribute to dominant conceptualizations of learning and at times almost seem to stand for a proxy measure of it. Third, I will draw on observations and accounts of how learning is enacted as a discipline and as a habit within the ebb and flow of family life

Researching “learning lives” – a new agenda for learning, media and technology

In this article, we revisit the history of our interest in the term, ‘learning lives’ in order to explicate the meaning(s) of the phrase and to set up a series of challenges for research into young people’s learning. We suggest that a learning lives perspective depends on three areas for investigation. First of all is the challenge of how to capture, theorise and describe the travel and trajectories if researchers are truly to ‘follow’ learners through, around and in their learning across everyday life. Secondly, it means refusing what seems to be the most apparent levers of change, namely media and technology. And thirdly, learning lives approaches need to address the pedagogicization of everyday life and the schooled society. Learning lives approaches help us see the changing place of the meaning of education and institutional pedagogies across all the nooks and crannies of everyday life

YouTube in the class

Most children love YouTube, but what do they love about it? Sonia Livingstone unpacks the individual stories behind the shared fascination. Together with Julian Sefton-Green, she followed a class of London teenagers for a year to find out more about how they are, or in some cases are not, connecting online. The book about this research project¹, The Class: living and learning in the digital age, just came out. Sonia is Professor of Social Psychology at LSE’s Department of Media and Communications and has more than 25 years of experience in media research with a particular focus on children and young people. Lead investigator of the Parenting for a Digital Future research project, she was recently asked to give a keynote lecture to the YouTube Conference 2016, and so wrote this post to capture some key points

Media activities in the class

Sonia Livingstone, together with Julian Sefton-Green, followed a class of London teenagers for a year to find out more about how they are, or in some cases are not, connecting online. In this post, Sonia discusses the diverse patterns of media use and digital engagement that counter the common narrative of screens simply dominating teenagers’ lives. The book about this research project, The Class: living and learning in the digital age, just came out. Sonia is Professor of Social Psychology at LSE’s Department of Media and Communications and has more than 25 years of experience in media research with a particular focus on children and young people. She is the lead investigator of the Parenting for a Digital Future research project

Watch our new video about ‘the class’

The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age tells the story of a year in the lives of an ordinary class of 13 to 14-year olds in a suburban, multi-ethnic London school. In classic ethnographic form, the book follows them at home, at school and with their friends and shows how the young people negotiate the pressures, opportunities and constraints of these intersecting worlds

The class: living and learning in the digital age

Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green spent one year with a class of 13 year olds – at school, at home, with their friends, and online. Their book about this research project, The Class: living and learning in the digital age, will come out in early May and this is the first in a series of posts in which Sonia shares highlights from the book. Sonia is Professor of Social Psychology at LSE’s Department of Media and Communications and has more than 25 years of experience in media research with a particular focus on children and young people. She is the lead investigator of the Parenting for a Digital Future research project

Conclusions : Future directions of multiliteracies scholarship and practice

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book considers the role of multiliteracies in the education of young children living and learning in contemporary societies in the global North. It illustrates curriculum innovation and reform efforts situated in Finnish early childhood and primary education. The book presents some of the challenges and opportunities for enhancing professional development opportunities of early years practitioners. It shows how more established classroom practices interact and come into tension with new ways of teaching and learning multiliteracies. The book also considers how teacher agency and the conditions for its emergence are important drivers of transforming classroom practice. It provides rich descriptions how multiliteracies standards be benchmarked and meaningful learning progressions mapped from a sociocultural practice perspective. The book examines the cultural practices around reading and literacy in the United States, and considers how theory of multiliteracies might inform these practices.Peer reviewe