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The making of digital educational futures raises pressing social justice concerns. Against this background, scholars face the challenge of bridging the tasks of investigation and critical engagement. Inspired by French pragmatic sociology, this article presents the notion of plural school worlds as analytical anchor point for dealing with this double-task coherently and productively. Varying understandings of what makes 'good and fair school education' are identified as defining features of different school worlds. These understandings (1) are historically entangled with social and political orders, (2) inform how we envision, enact, and evaluate possible educational futures, and (3) define a shared discursive space for exchange between various groups of actors. We claim that the notion of school worlds thus furthers both our understanding of persistent patterns of disadvantaging in digital education and our capacity for critical dialogue with involved actors through sensitizing explication, shifting problematizations and reflecting performativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article investigates use of digital storytelling as a learning activity in education about migration. Based on a study in two Norwegian schools and two adult education centers for refugees and migrants, the article analyzes student's digital stories and observations of the process of production. Counter to research on the promise of digital storytelling to promote diverse perspectives, personal experience and creativity, our findings show that digital stories as a learning activity includes powerful standardization drivers. The standardization limits diversity in students' knowledge and experience from coming into view in the final product. The identified standardization drivers are; (1) discursive blueprints of refugee experience, including the narrative about the 'Good Refugee' and idealization of the destination country, (2) challenges with representing traumatic experiences through photographic imagery, and (3) material affordances in the production process such as google algorithms. In conclusion, we argue that critical engagement with the involved modalities and standardization drivers is a condition for using digital stories to foster critical thinking about migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines critical digital literacy practices among 390 Black girls, ages 13–17. Through a data sharing initiative with a community organization, we conducted a qualitative analysis of 3120 narrative responses describing their views of technology. Grounded in Black feminist epistemologies, our study found that the girls reconciled their views of technology with their existing standpoints and desires for social change. Our findings highlight how Black girls leverage technologies to account for their ways of knowing and existing in the world, including using technology to author activist identities and express feelings of agency. Our findings challenge researchers and educators to expand their understanding of critical digital literacy in ways that honor Black girls' complex experiences and existing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the social utility of the concept, 'data literacy'. Recent developments in the processes of datafication challenge long-held assumptions about privacy and the role of both state and commerce in individual lives. Typically, these have been addressed through: regulatory legal constraints underwritten by the nation state but are difficult to enforce at a global level; tactical resistance through forms of self-regulation and technical innovations, and; educational interventions, typically as 'literacy', which brings understanding of the new forms of digital control. The article considers the benefit of theorising digital data as a 'text' and reviews current educational models of data literacy, categorised here as formal, personal and folk pedagogies of data. The article concludes that while the analogy between print and data has many inconsistencies, the term has rhetorical benefits. However, to become a meaningful strategy 'data literacy' requires both a more complete theorisation and complex practical development. [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]

This article shares research facilitated by a multinational technology provider, converging mobile networked technology (tablets) used across school and home, a technology enhanced community ‘third space’ providing workshops for students aged 6-9 with their parents/carers. The approach taken avoids the instrumental measurement of functional digital literacy competences, but instead seeks to negotiate a more nuanced and complex understanding of the ‘uses of literacy’ [from Hoggart, R. 1957. The Uses of Literacy. London: Pelican] in digital contexts and in a deeply situated, specific local setting. Working with our findings, we later put Amartya Sen’s concept of capability [Sen, A. K. 2005. “Human Rights and Capabilities.” Journal of Human Development 6 (2): 151-166; Sen, A. K. 2008. “Capability and Well-Being.” In The Philosophy of Economics, edited by D. M. Hausman, 3rd ed., 270-293. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] to work on our data in order to provide a discussion on how the digital literacy community might distinguish digital competences as functionings from the ‘uses’ of such competences for a broader range of capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to contribute new knowledge about the media literacies children assemble as they play the digital game Minecraft which it describes as a children's digital making platform. The article argues media literacy's tendency to use socio-cultural and humanist accounts of media participation limit its ability to fully explain digital making practices. Socio-material and performative literacy theories are used to introduce a framework for exploring digital media literacies across four nodes: digital materials, media production, conceptual understanding and media analysis [Dezuanni, M. 2015.“The Building Blocks of Digital Media Literacy: Socio-material Participation and the Production of Media Knowledge.”Journal of Curriculum Studies 47 (3): 416-419]. The article's second half outlines how the author uses digital ethnography in his home to understand children's Minecraft digital making and the article's theoretical claims are explored using empirical data. The conclusion considers the ramifications of digital making for media literacy research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is considerable enthusiasm in many quarters for the incorporation of digital games into the classroom, and the capacity of games to engage and challenge players, present complex representations and experiences, foster collaborative learning, and promote deep learning. But while there is increasing research documenting the progress and outcomes of game-based learning, relatively little attention is paid to student perceptions and voice. In order to effectively target game-based learning pedagogy, it is important to understand students' previous experience, if any, of the use of games in the classroom, and what they made of these. In this paper, we present findings from a survey of 270 primary and secondary school students in Year Levels 4–9 (aged 9–14) in 6 Queensland schools at the start of a 3-year Australian Research Council project researching the use of digital games in school to promote literacy and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Communication technologies are playing an increasingly prominent role in facilitating immigrants' social networks across countries and the transnational positioning of immigrant youth in their online language and literacy practices. Drawing from a comparative case study of the digital literacy practices of immigrant youth of Chinese descent, this paper examines the cross-border social relationships that are fostered between the youth and their peers in their natal country through the use of instant messaging and other online media. Using Pierre Bourdieu's capital and field theory, and the concept of social capital, this paper considers how literacy development in transnational contexts constitutes the production of social and cultural capital. It argues that the youths' online literacy practices need to be understood within the particular social fields in which they are situated and how they allow the youth to navigate and take up position within social fields that cross national boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

New technologies and developments in media are transforming the way that individuals, groups and societies communicate, learn, work and govern. This new socio-technical reality requires participants to possess not only skills and abilities related to the use of technological tools, but also knowledge regarding the norms and practices of appropriate usage. To be ‘digitally literate’ in this way encompasses issues of cognitive authority, safety and privacy, creative, ethical, and responsible use and reuse of digital media, among other topics. A lack of digital literacy increasingly implicates one's full potential of being a competent student, an empowered employee or an engaged citizen. Digital literacy is often considered a school-based competency, but it is introduced and developed in informal learning contexts such as libraries, museums, social groups, affinity spaces online, not to mention the home environment. This article recognizes and connects the ways and places we might conceptualize and realize an expanded view of digital literacy that fits today's changing reality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Digital literacies have fast become indispensable for productive engagement, competency, and citizenship in a rapidly changing world. After-school programs represent an important venue where many young people can develop a mastery of digital literacies, encompassing both the creative and responsible use of a broad range of new media. This paper discusses relational habitus (the configuration of self, tools, tasks, and others in a specific activity) in the development of digital literacies among youth in a network of after-school programs called University-Community Links (UC Links). A collaborative effort among university and local community partners throughout California, UC Links provides informal learning activities that enable underserved K-12 youth to develop their digital literacies. After presenting UC Links' approach to informal learning after school, we offer a cognitive ethnography, describing how a distinctive relational habitus configures the links among self, tools, tasks, and others in informal digital activities at one UC Links site in Sacramento, CA. We suggest how this relational habitus informs collaborative activities among university and K-12 students to provide a cognitive platform for an agentive engagement with various new media tools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explored informal (after-school) and formal (elective course in-school) learning contexts as contributors to middle-school student attitudinal changes in a guided discovery-based and blended e-learning program in which students designed web games and used social media and information resources for a full school year. Formality of the program context did not substantially influence attitude changes but did appear to influence learning outcomes. While intrinsic motivation did not change in the aggregate from pre- to post-program among students, positive changes in intrinsic motivation were found to be associated with engagement in almost all areas of student engagement inGlobaloria, with several at-home engagement changes measured. This finding challenges critiques of discovery-based learning as being de-motivating. Lower parent education among students was associated with positive changes in self-efficacy for online research indicating that disadvantaged students may stand to benefit from programs like this one. The study offers support for the need to more definitively explicate instructional design and context factors in educational technology research when investigating influences upon learning outcomes. The study holds implications for designing effective digital literacy interventions, and contributes to theory in the learning sciences and socio-technical systems research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Understanding the connections between scientific inquiry and digital literacy in informal learning environments is essential to furthering students' critical thinking and technology skills. The Habitat Tracker project combines a standards-based curriculum focused on the nature of science with an integrated system of online and mobile computing technologies designed to help students learn about and participate in scientific inquiry in formal classroom settings and informal learning environments such as science museums or wildlife centers. This research documents the digital literacy skills elementary students used while participating in the Habitat Tracker project, exploring the connections between the scientific inquiry practices they developed and the digital literacy skills they employed as they engaged with the Habitat Tracker curriculum. The results of this research have implications for researchers and practitioners interested in fostering both the scientific inquiry practices and digital literacy skills of elementary students in formal and informal learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Videogames, such asThe Sims, are a digital media passion drawing adolescents to online spaces where they create and share content. This article explores how discourses and expectations are taught in one online, videogame-related fan site of adolescents who read and writeSimsfan fiction. Using Bernstein's pedagogic discourse theory, data from a 2-year virtual ethnography are analyzed to study pedagogic interactions between moderators and members withinThe Sims Writers' Hangout, an online discussion forum. Findings point to the dominance of regulative discourse and how discourses relocated from other media sites serve as pedagogic discourse in this informal digital literacy learning space. This article contributes to our understanding of digital literacy and learning in online environments by focusing on the pedagogy used to teach expectations. The analysis also points to the utility of Bernstein's theory for studying informal online learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the widespread popularity of social networking sites (SNSs) amongst children and young people in compulsory education, relatively little scholarly work has explored the fundamental issues at stake. This paper makes an original contribution to the field by locating the study of this online activity within the broader terrain of social network theory in order to inform future educational debate and further research. The first section offers a way of classifying different kinds of online social networking and then places this within the context of the study of social networks. It is argued that relational networks create a sense of belonging and that online networks just as easily trace the contours of existing social divisions as they transcend or transform them. This analysis informs the second section which specifically addresses educational issues, including both the attractions and the limitations of such work. The paper concludes with an exploration of three possible approaches to using in SNSs in educational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we report on survey and focus group data relating to the activities and perceptions of learning with Web 2.0 technologies of students aged between 11 and 16 years in 27 UK secondary schools. The study confirms that these learners had high levels of access to Web 2.0 technologies and that Web 2.0 activities were prolific. However, patterns of use were complex. The types of activity evidenced by the study suggest that learners can be categorised into four main groups: (1) researchers: mainly in terms of reading with little evidence of critical enquiry or analytical awareness; (2) collaborators: mainly with respect to file sharing, gaming and communicating; (3) producers and (4) publishers: mainly in terms of sharing experience through social networking sites. Whilst most expressed an interest in using online technologies to support familiar school activities, such as presentations or for communication, learners seemed cautious about other values associated with Web 2.0 tools, such as the shared construction of knowledge in a public format. Few learners were familiar with the complete spectrum of Web 2.0 activities and only a small number were engaging in more sophisticated activities, such as producing and publishing self-created content for wider consumption. There was little evidence of groundbreaking activities and only a few embryonic signs of criticality, self-management or metacognitive reflection. The paper concludes that these higher order thinking skills need to be encouraged and supported in any attempt to use Web 2.0 for learning in formal education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]