Abstract
This research focused on the study of learning ecologies utilizing digital technology. The qualitative methodology used has allowed the analysis of the interactions children establish with digital technologies and the manner in which they construct a learning ecology. A total of 46 12-year-olds, their families, and their teachers participated in this study. The children’s schools and homes were in neighborhoods where structural situations of poverty and social and cultural marginality concurred. The children integrated researchers into their digital community, which allowed access to the events that the community was developing through digital technologies for two years. This information was complemented by the development of systematic observations and interviews with each participant. The participants’ multimodal linguistic and literacy practices were analyzed using a social semiotics approach. The results of the research describe and interpret the interactions that took place between participants and digital technologies. The research has identified the processes of recontextualization, transduction, and transcontextualization of the discourses developed in the frame of the participants’ learning ecologies. Digital ethnography has been revealed as an adequate method for studying learning ecologies.
Highlights
The data analysis was based on the literacy-as-event concept and was focused on digital communication developed by children in informal learning contexts
Sought to analyze the extent to which the digital modes used by children in sign-making are realized in social interaction and become part of the semiotic resources of their learning contexts
We identified the semiotic modes and strategies that children used for meaning-making, as well as their respective potential as signifiers in each literacy-as-event
Summary
The impact of globalization on children has transformed literacy learning environments and made it possible to observe a continuous transfer (or ‘transcontextualization’) between cultural and linguistic materials across different places [6] This circumstance has distorted the conceptual description that allowed the delimitation of home and school; local and translocal; material and immaterial; and formal, informal, and nonformal learning [7,8]. Current research from an ecological approach addresses literacy processes as the study of events through space and time [9] This ecological approach requires considering the emergent learning of children and the interaction that they develop between human and nonhuman matter to weave a network [10]. González-Sanmamed et al (2018) [11] and González-Sanmamed et al (2019) [12] highlighted how a true metamorphosis has taken place in the ways of learning, with changes being accelerated by the connectivity of the networks, the empowerment of the student in decision making regarding their learning, the overcoming of where and how to learn, and the assumption that there is a type of learning (not perceived, informal, invisible, and silent) that allows one to acquire fundamental skills
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