Quest to Learn (Q2L) is a public school that opened in 2009 to respond to the needs of kids who are growing up in a highly networked, globally competitive, and complex world. The school was designed to include a game-based pedagogy that provides a dynamic, interdisciplinary curriculum, as well as immersive, challenge-based learning experiences. The present article reports the findings from a 20-month evaluation of Q2L. This research was launched when the school opened, with the main goal to identify and assess a set of key student competencies that are relevant and important to Q2L. This student-level evaluation focused on students’ development of three core skills—systems thinking, time management, and teamwork—over the 20-month time period. We found that students significantly improved their systems thinking skills over the duration of the study, and improved (albeit, not significantly) on their time management and teamwork skills as well.
This article summarizes the new media and literacy themes that inform the articles in this special issue of IJLM. The articles all address the topic of how new media are transforming what it means to be literate in today's society and how these media are creating new conditions and forms for learning. The articles come together around the view that digital media are fundamentally changing learning practices and that the transition to digital media is not just a transfer of class content to online venues, nor just an online-only effect, but instead represents a change in learning practice for the digital age. The articles and this special issue result from a workshop that provided the opportunity to integrate knowledge across multiple perspectives to address how new media affect how, where, and with whom we learn and what it means to be literate in the 21st century.
Through an approach I term virtual literacy ethnography I study interactions around archaeology in a virtual world. While archaeology was the thematic topic for a small group meeting to study a simulated shipwreck and associated artefacts, it also provides me with methodological inspiration. Distanced from the participants in time and space, never learning their real identities, I draw upon various kinds of multimodal records in order to establish a necessarily partial account. Recent work in ethnographies of archaeology uncovers its practices as historically and culturally constructed, seeing in turn how engaging in those practices constructs participants as archaeologists. Examining diverse evidence to study a particular site of engagement, I explore the activities through which we crafted new practices and identities as virtual archaeologists.
In the development of methods to explore student views on creative learning processes using digital media, Q methodology and its applications offer a promising framework. The method addresses the complexity of subjective viewpoints by applying a technique and analysis that combine materials to investigate shared patterns among students’ experiences. The integration of a qualitative approach with quantitative technique provides a special interview and ensures that the analysis remains focused on the students’ perspective. This approach offers a way to overcome problems with weak links between data materials in mixed-method studies, as the viewpoints expressed by study participants are initially mapped by a quantification procedure designed to integrate open-ended questioning and survey technique. The study presented here illustrates the use of this approach in an enquiry into students’ experiences of activities in digital media workshops in a Danish museum of contemporary art. Data were collected from 85 s...
This book constructively problematises the relation between digital communication, literacy, and learning in post-compulsory education, and establishes the need for a truly critical pedagogical research and development agenda that is capable of shaping the ‘digital university’ as an academic as well as an economic enterprise. The contributions in this volume make visible the complexity of the relationship between learning and social practice in a digital world. They expose the inadequacy of skills-based conceptualisations of literacy to support principled pedagogical approaches at this level, but equally they show that established perspectives on literacy as textual, as social action, and as ideological, face major challenges in accounting for the textuality of the digital domain, and its relationship to social power.
In contemporary societies communications technologies are constantly evolving under the pressure of digital innovation. Devices and software that allow learning, mediated communications, and the consumption of cultural products always, everywhere, and on every device are multiplying. OssCom (Centro di Ricerca sui Media e la Comunicazione) analyzed the cross-media practices of young Italians, the mediated communication activities of young digital users, the cross-media activities of Italian kids, and social networking use among Italians. The article presents these qualitative studies with a specific attention to the integration of different qualitative research methods—face-to-face interviews, “expanded ethnographies,” participatory methods—and the challenge of harmonizing qualitative research and the large social database retrievable from social networking software. The article describes how these methods can add layers to our understanding of young digital users’ practices that cross the boundaries of on...
This article focuses on a collection of public videos posted to YouTube by a teenage girl who calls herself “mememolly.” Drawing on case study observation and documentation of roughly 18 months of her posting life on YouTube, the article concentrates on how mememolly constructs her online self through the language-mediated practices of her YouTube communications. Applying notions of performance, simulation, and subjectivity, the article suggests that mememolly's case offers an instructive backdrop from which to take up the possibilities, effects, and consequences of creating oneself on YouTube. For mememolly, YouTube serves as a space to enact performances of a routinely changing and changeable self, to simulate fantasies and desires of becoming, and to explore a series of pleasures. More so, it allows her the opportunity to narrate various aspects of her life, to reflexively document these narrations for posterity, and to comment on her world in ways that coexist and compete with her ideas about her mate...
Motivated by the combination of knowing and doing in humanities curricula, this piece gives audiences a concrete sense of teaching and learning multimodal communications at the graduate level. Together with seven example prompts and multiple student responses to each, the piece also includes student analysis, reflection, and commentary on the processes of learning, composing, and circulating digital scholarship. In so doing, it demonstrates specific ways of using the authoring and publishing platform, Scalar, for collaborative research and writing in and beyond the classroom. The materials provided are drawn from a graduate seminar in the Department of English at the University of Victoria: “Digital Literary Studies: History and Principles.” Intended audiences for the piece include writing studies instructors, literary critics, cultural studies scholars, digital humanities and media studies practitioners, transmedia artists, and anyone who supports and facilitates university curricula and related infrastr...
Alternate reality games (ARGs) are a new genre of transmedia practice in which players collaboratively hunt for clues, make sense of disparate information, and solve puzzles to advance an ever-changing narrative that is woven into the fabric of the real world.This paper highlights the potential for ARGs to promote 21st-century literacy skills.We propose a meta-level framework for 21st-century literacies composed of seven core literacies: gather, make sense, manage, solve, create, respect, collaborate.We then describe how the unique properties of ARGs can be used to teach these core literacies, drawing upon expert interviews and examples from numerous ARGs.Finally, we outline the major challenges and opportunities for using ARGs in the service of education, focusing on reuse, budgetary issues, scale, and improvisation.We end with an outline of key research questions that need to be addressed to merge ARGs and education.
I present here a case study of using Twitter in a series of undergraduate college classes. All class communications outside of physical meetings were conducted via Twitter, in effect replacing a learning management system (LMS) such as Blackboard or Moodle with a public platform. Doing so had significant (and mostly positive) consequences for class dynamics and reminded me of the democratic teaching principles of French school reformer Celestin Freinet.
The term digital university is gaining in currency and “digital universities” are appearing around the world. However, whether everyone who uses the term intends the same kind or extent of changes to conventional institutional or pedagogical practices is unclear. In this article the authors take stock of the idea and consider three ways in which the divergent meanings the term have been used: first as a set of discourses; second, as an empirically observed phenomenon; and third, as a theoretical construct. We conclude that the main focus of research should be on the theoretical construction of “the digital” as sociomaterial and as a defining feature of emerging forms of practice in the university.
Moore's theory of transactional distance describes the communications and psychological gulf between learner and teacher in a distance education setting. The theory was formulated in a correspondence era of distance learning and matured in an era where discussion forums and virtual learning environments reduced transactional distance in a closed-group setting that enabled interactions akin to those in a traditional classroom. In recent years the growth of social networking and social interest sites has led to social forms that fit less easily in these traditional formal models of teaching and learning. When the “teacher” is distributed through the network or is an anonymous agent in a set or is an emergent actor formed by collective intelligence, transactional distance becomes a more complex variable. Evolved social literacies are mutated by new social forms and require us to establish new or modified ways of thinking about learning and teaching. In this missive we explore the notion of transactional dist...
This article engages with new research into digital academic practices in the university and argues that although significant advances have been made in understanding new literacy and media practices, a tendency remains for research both to reify “the digital” and to neglect the material dimension of text-making. In response, this article proposes a model for understanding the mechanics through which both digital and nondigital academic texts are assembled. Drawing on social semiotics and the material philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, this model employs the concepts of interest, semiotics resources, and affordances in an effort to undo the dichotomies between “digital”/“nondigital and “social”/“material.” The article concludes by reflecting on how journals such as the International Journal of Learning and Media are redefining the “conditions of possibility” of academic texts.
This paper explores the use of video to enhance teaching and learning, with a specific focus on business and economics education. The paper provides an overview of current trends in global video consumption and the benefits associated with video use in higher education before discussing challenges and opportunities associated with the in-house creation of video to support student learning. Three cases of in-house-created, course-specific video are presented as a means to explore practical aspects of video creation, the value in-house-created video can bring for academics and students, and the challenges that may be encountered when developing video. The paper argues that although in-house video production may appear to some to be a superfluous endeavor in a time when so much video is available on the Web and when amateur creation and dissemination of video has never been easier, a strong case can be made for in-house video production as a means to enhance student engagement and learning. Please view this ...
Mobile learning is an emerging paradigm in an unpredictable and shifting landscape of technological change. A technocentric focus is anathema to educators who prefer to believe that innovative pedagogy is the driving force behind educational developments. However, the proliferation of mobile devices may have an almost irresistible impact on teaching and learning. The focus of this article is on the concept of “smartness” in relation to mobile devices and people. As devices become smarter, their users are in danger of becoming less smart, or their agency may be at risk. Yet the key value of smart devices may be in how they can help develop essential skills and competencies in 21st-century learners—in particular, their self-direction—although this will not happen of its own accord.
One of the most significant challenges in researching the social aspects of contemporary societies is to adapt the methodological approach to complex digital media environments. Learning processes take place in this complex environment, and they include formal and informal experiences (learning in school, home, and real-virtual communities), peer cultures and intergenerational connections, production and creation as relevant activities, and personal interests as a focal point. Methods used in the study of learning and the social practices of young people must take into account four key issues: boundaries between online and offline experiences are blurring; young people act performatively; young people act knowingly or reflexively; and the activities of young people cannot be understood through the use of a single method but require the use of multiple tools of investigation. The article discusses three methodological issues: research design aimed at following people along their transmedia paths, the relev...
Paying attention to innovative methodologies used to research emerging forms of connected learning is a useful and important way of working out what is new about these kinds of educational settlements and what we do and do not know about the changing nature of learning. This brief article recounts the history of the initiative behind the authors collected in this special issue, making the case that bringing together the disciplines of media studies and education is a necessary way to approach any differences that might accrue from the digital—as medium and object of research. International comparative perspectives can play an important role in developing perspectives in social scientific research into these matters. The introduction describes the articles in the volume and explains how they relate to these central themes.
Efforts to understand the dynamic processes of learning situated across space and time, beyond the here and now, are presently challenging traditional definitions of learning and education. How can we conceptualize learning in a way that is able to respond to and explain the increasing complexity, connectivity, and velocity of our times? We elaborate on the notion of “connected learning” as a conceptual heuristic that has recently received recognition as a potential lens and a model through which to research and promote learning as a holistic experience that stretches beyond formal and informal communities. We reflect on the methodological challenges of describing, defining, and analyzing connected learning across young peoples’ everyday “learning lives” from the sociocultural and dialogic perspectives. We discuss such key notions for connected learning as understanding, tracking, and tracing learners; chronotopes; boundary crossing; intertextuality; and learning lives.
Research on the digital and online environment poses several ethical questions that are new or, at least, newly pressing, especially in relation to youth. Established ethical practices require that research has integrity, quality, transparency and impartiality. They also stipulate that risks to the researcher, institution, data and participants should be anticipated and addressed. But there are difficulties in applying these to an environment in which the online and offline intersect in shifting ways. This paper discusses some real-life ‘digital dilemmas’ to identify the emerging consensus among researchers. We note the 2012 guidelines by the Association of Internet Researchers, which advocates for ethical pluralism, for minimizing harm, and for the responsibility of the researcher where codes are insufficient. As a point of contrast, we evaluate Markham’s (2012) radical argument for data fabrication as an ethical practice. In reflecting on how researchers of the digital media practices of youth resolved their dilemmas in practice, we take up Markham’s challenge of identifying evolving practice, including researchers’ workarounds, but we eschew her solution of fabrication. Instead, we support the emerging consensus that while rich data is increasingly available for collection, it should not always be fully used or even retained in order to protect human subjects in a digital world in which future possible uses of data exceed the control of the researcher who collected them.
