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Emerging scholarship has brought critical attention to the increasing influence of digital platform architectures on learning across disciplines and contexts. Allied with such scholarship, this study examines how the logics of social media platforms create the conditions for new formations of literacy to emerge at the intersection of digital capitalism and literacy expression. Examining data collected at the Giga-Games Camp (pseudonym), a series of video game design summer camps for adolescents, the author leverages topological methodology to show how Giga-Gamers' literacy engagements with Discord, a social media platform popular among gamers, were articulated as the platform practice of governance. The author argues that unraveling the processes by which literacy is platformized within digital media ecologies can help educational researchers and practitioners better attend to the social, political, and economic substrates shaping learning and literacy in the platform era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As new media spaces expand opportunities for engagement with geographically distant people and places, this article examines how communication practices within such spaces may construct cultural differences. The study's data source was a website on which people posted, watched, and discussed Asian dramas. Qualitative data included writing, visual images, and interactions created within the site's Korean dramas forum. Analyses of user-generated discussions revealed discourses about Korean distinctiveness. The forum functions as a virtual multicultural learning community where youth who lived outside of Korea imagined and negotiated an understanding of Korean culture. As these youth participated in Hallyu (the Korean Wave) through their engagements with its media, their discourses on Korean distinctiveness reinscribe Koreans as a global Other. Implications of this study include ways that online transnational engagements with Korean dramas in particular, and Hallyu media in general, shape current learning about Korea, as well as the possibilities and challenges of new media affordances for Internet-mediated multicultural learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the critical digital literacy practices of Latinx bilingual youth in the United States enrolled in a secondary ethnic studies course. Despite the expansion of digital tools in classrooms, empirical studies on the pedagogical affordances of such tools, and how they enhance youth’s critical digital literacies and understandings of themselves remain scarce. The author relies on participant observation, interviews, and the analysis of writing within a unit that incorporated students’ twenty-first century language and literacy practices via Vine’s social media platform to explore issues of power and privilege within an exacerbated sociopolitical climate. Findings reveal the ways in which students drew on a range of fluid linguistic and literate practices to make meaning of themselves, problematize oppressive dominant discourses, and negotiate more desired identities and literacies. Attention to young people’s translanguaging and multimodal codemeshing practices on social media platforms can harvest critical insight about what constitutes twenty-first century critical digital literacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is a project conducted in 2011, exploring the use ofYouTubein the classroom. The project conducted a number of focus groups for which highlighted a number of issues surrounding independent informal learning environments. The questions posed by this research are concerned with what constitutes learning in these spaces; how valid this is perceived to be by the students and how they engage with materials in this space. A question also posed was how cognisant the students are of their learning in these spaces and how they perceive the efficacy of the materials to support and enhance their learning. The research uncovered how the students interacted with each other in these informal spaces and the role thatYouTubevideo content plays in community formation and supporting informal peer learning. The nature of informal learning spaces being that their focus being not solely of education, but also of entertainment leads to a variation in quality, reliability and suitability of content. The research also explored the students' digital literacy, uncovering the strategies used to first navigate in these spaces and then critically engage, analyse and assess materials that they may find. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]