Leisure Is Hard Work: Digital Practices and Future Competencies

Part of the Volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital Media This chapter is based on two claims, namely that digital media are fundamental in nurturing human competencies for the future and that children's leisured media practices are critical catalysts in that process. These claims are documented by results from a recent case study on children's content creation of digital animation. Based on these results, the chapter discusses some of the fundamental challenges posed to educational institutions if they are to nurture future-directed competences for all pupils. These challenges include pupils' understanding of knowledge, their attitudes to learning resources and contexts of use, and the distribution of power relations. Like 300 million other kids around the globe, every Dane under the age of 20 knows that the protagonist of The Little Mermaid is Ariel, a fiesty redhead who manages to shape her fate and fortune. This fact is noteworthy only because Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, the author of the orignal fairy tale, composed a tragic tale of loss and redemption. The narrative and experiential discrepancies raise fundamental questions about the ways in which global and local media products frame children's everyday culture and the ways in which media operate as identity markers in a variety of sociocultural contexts. Moreover, Disney's figures, like many other media elements, are routinely appropriated by children in their own, increasingly digitized, media productions, from simple drawings to blogs, screen dumps, and home pages. These practices raise important issues about the role played by digital forms of media production for children vis a vis the more conventional and widespread forms of media reception

Discourse and Digital Practices

Discourse and Digital Practices shows how tools from discourse analysis can be used to help us understand new communication practices associated with digital media, from video gaming and social networking to apps and photo sharing. This cutting-edge book: draws together fourteen eminent scholars in the field including James Paul Gee, David Barton, Ilana Snyder, Phil Benson, Victoria Carrington, Guy Merchant, Camilla Vasquez, Neil Selwyn and Rodney Jones answers the central question: "How does discourse analysis enable us to understand digital practices?" addresses a different type of digital media in each chapter demonstrates how digital practices and the associated new technologies challenge discourse analysts to adapt traditional analytic tools and formulate new theories and methodologies examines digital practices from a wide variety of approaches including textual analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, object ethnography, geosemiotics, and critical discourse analysis. Discourse and Digital Practices will be of interest to advanced students studying courses on digital literacies or language and digital practices

That’s more like they know me as a person": one primary pre-service teacher’s stories of her personal and ‘professional’ digital practices

In contributing to debates about how student-teachers might draw from personal experience in addressing digital literacy in the classroom, this paper explores the stories that one primary student-teacher told of her digital practices during a larger study of the role of digital literacy in student-teachers' lives. The paper investigates the 'recognition work' this student-teacher did as she aligned herself with different discourses and notes how themes of 'control' and 'professionalism' seemed to pattern her stories of informal and formal practices both within and beyond her professional education. The paper calls for further research into how student-teachers perceive the relevance of their personal experience to their professional role and argues for encouraging pre-service and practising teachers to tell stories of their digital practices and reflect upon the discourses which frame them

Digital places: location-based digital practices in higher education using Bluetooth Beacons

The physical campus is a shared space that enables staff and students, industry and the public, to collaborate in the acquisition, construction and consolidation of knowledge. However, its position as the primary place for learning is being challenged by blended modes of study that range from learning experiences from fully online to more traditional campus-based approaches. Bluetooth beacons offer the potential to combine the strengths of both the digital world and the traditional university campus by augmenting physical spaces to enhance learning opportunities, and the student experience more generally. This simple technology offers new possibilities to extend and enrich opportunities for learning by exploiting the near-ubiquitous nature of personal technology. This paper provides a high-level overview of Bluetooth beacon technology, along with an indication of some of the ways in which it is developing, and ways that it could be used to support learning in higher education

Discourse and Digital Practices

Discourse and Digital Practices shows how tools from discourse analysis can be used to help us understand new communication practices associated with digital media, from video gaming and social networking to apps and photo sharing. This cutting-edge book: draws together fourteen eminent scholars in the field including James Paul Gee, David Barton, Ilana Snyder, Phil Benson, Victoria Carrington, Guy Merchant, Camilla Vasquez, Neil Selwyn and Rodney Jones answers the central question: "How does discourse analysis enable us to understand digital practices?" addresses a different type of digital media in each chapter demonstrates how digital practices and the associated new technologies challenge discourse analysts to adapt traditional analytic tools and formulate new theories and methodologies examines digital practices from a wide variety of approaches including textual analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, object ethnography, geosemiotics, and critical discourse analysis. Discourse and Digital Practices will be of interest to advanced students studying courses on digital literacies or language and digital practices

Promising digital practices for nondominant learners

This case study took place during an after-school program in a public Texas school district along the U.S./Mexico border. We explore a focal participant’s technology access and use as part of our larger digital literacy research. We asked: What in- and out-of-school digital literacy skills, access, and experiences did Robot Boy (pseudonym) possess? How did he behave as a rhizome? Overarching theoretical frameworks were postmodernism and New Literacy Studies; within these theories, we focused on rhizomic principles and digital literacies. This research is part of a larger mixed methods research study (Bussert-Webb & Henry, 2016) focused on an exploration of Latino children’s digital literacy and online reading. Data sources included participant observation, interviews, and the Digital Divide Measurement Scale for Students (DDMS-S). Interviewees included 16 children (including Robot Boy) and six Latino staff; 310 children (87% Latino) responded to the DDMS-S. Emerging qualitative themes were Robot Boy’s responses to rhizomic rupture. Robot Boy, a bilingual and biliterate middle school youth, demonstrated promising digital practices, which we can apply to other nondominant learners. He assigned rupture by reworking restrictive maps, collaborating with others, and valuing diversity to create multiple pathways

Traveling imagery: Young people’s sexualized digital practices

How is the sexualized digital imagery that young people engage in enacted and spread? How are negotiations of normativity reshaped by analogue-digital involve- ment? This study travels through shady as well as easily accessible parts of the web, combining insights with analogue research approaches in trying to contemplate these questions in new ways. We use digital ethnography, analogue fieldwork, inter- views, and helpline cases to study how young people’s sexualized imagery moves through and transforms across boundless networks, and also across digital and analogue space. Thinking with new materialist analytics, we show how these move- ments blur the distinction between mundane and abusive practices, and how the opaque and indeterminate character of the material functions as a game changer and affects what it means to be young in gendered communities. Although the effects vary among different young people and among different social groups, in all cases they infiltrate conditions for becoming, positioning, and relating