Digital Literacy Practices Research Articles

An Ethnographic Study on the Digital Literacy Practices of Role-Players in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game

An Ethnographic Study on the Digital Literacy Practices of Role-Players in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game

Presenting a new hybrid model of ludic authorship: reconceptualising digital play as ‘three-dimensional’ literacy practice

ABSTRACTInvestigations into the digital literacy practices supported by new forms of play can pose significant challenges insofar as researchers and educators lack theoretical frameworks nuanced or flexible enough to map the terrain being explored. In this paper the author presents a new hybrid model of ludic authorship which reconceptualises the relationship between digital play and literacies and uniquely serves both pedagogical and theoretical purposes; it provides a tool through which educators and policy makers may begin to articulate the value of digital literacies involved in digital play, whilst also allowing them to plan and evaluate such learning opportunities in educational settings. This model emerged from an innovative empirical study into Alternate Reality Game (ARG) design in a primary school classroom which demonstrated that digital play is a literacy practice requiring three dimensions of literacy: operational; critical; and cultural.

Adolescents’ Digital Literacies in Flux: Intersections of Voice, Empowerment, and Practices

This article features a collaborative autoethnographic examination of three adolescent-researchers’ digital literacies. The participatory design punctuates the role of the adolescent-researchers as they explored their meaning-making practices. Such collaborative research, which included three adolescents and their parents, not only resurfaces parent-inquiry, but also brings the adolescent-researcher voice to the forefront of literacy research. Two research questions guided the investigation: (a) What do adolescent-researchers tell us about their digital and nondigital literacy practices? and (b) In what ways do adolescent-researchers’ retrospective examinations of their own practices reveal their perspectives of these practices and the power (and power struggles) that underlie them? The research team engaged in two rounds of coding, embracing first dramaturgical coding and then versus coding. Results suggested that Perspective/Attitude was the most prevalent attribute in the adolescent-researchers’ discourse. Moreover, versus coding revealed strong relationships between “then versus now.” Overall, the voices of the adolescent-researchers offer ongoing authenticity to discussions of their practices, creating continued opportunities to rethink the implications and applications of digital and nondigital practices in adolescents’ lives.

Power, Ideology and Identity in Digital Literacy: A Sociolinguistic Study

This study investigates the significance of digital media in terms of social implications. It draws its theoretical insights from the Darvin and Norton model of investment (2015) as it gives purely a new dimension to the concept of digital literacy. The study is designed in order to evaluate some important aspects of Social media, particularly Facebook, as an important digital literacy practice. Firstly, the study examines the way power is operated in the digital mediated construction of social identities. Certain social identities position other identities and accord or refuse them power. These even shape social ideologies and identities as English-language speakers hold a privileged position in society while Urdu-language speakers are marginalized all over the world. Secondly, it explores the role of digital media in the investment of language and digital literacy practices to represent social ideologies at three different angles of marriage, adulthood and family. Having established a sampling frame consisting of nine Facebook pictorial postings from three Facebook pages, the findings suggested that the text and visual representations of Facebook postings use various linguistic features like literary devices that are playing an evident role in the representation of social ideologies.

Multidimensional Approaches to Examining Digital Literacies in the Contemporary Global Society

Literacy scholars have offered compelling theories about and methods for understanding the digital literacy practices of youth. However, little work has explored the possibility of an approach that would demonstrate how different perspectives on literacies might intersect and interconnect in order to better describe the multifaceted nature of youth digital literacies. In this conceptual article, we adopt the idea of theoretical triangulation in interpretive inquiry and explore how multiple perspectives can jointly contribute to constructing a nuanced description of young people’s literacies in today’s digitally mediated global world. For this purpose, we first suggest a triangulation framework that integrates sociocultural, affective, and cognitive perspectives on digital literacies, focusing on recent developments in these perspectives. We then use an example of discourse data from a globally connected online affinity space and demonstrate how our multidimensional framework can lead to a complex analysis and interpretation of the data. In particular, we describe the substance of one specific case of youth digital literacies from each of the three perspectives on literacy, which in turn converge to provide a complex account of such literacy practices. In conclusion, we discuss the promise and limitations of our integrative approach to studying the digital literacy practices of youth.

Video Production in Elementary Teacher Education as a Critical Digital Literacy Practice

This article reports on a two-year, funded, qualitative inquiry into the challenges and possibilities of integrating video production into pre-service teacher education as a critical digital literacy practice. This includes the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that lead to ability to critique and create digital texts that interrogate the self, the other, and the world (Ávila & Zacher Pandya, 2013). Video making holds out enormous potential given our increasingly diverse classrooms and the growing need to have students connect and collaborate within their own communities and globally (Dwyer, 2016; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015, 2016; Spires, Paul, Himes, & Yuan, 2018; Watt, 2017, 2018; Watt, Abdulqadir, Siyad, & Hujaleh, 2019). Video is especially significant in light of the fact that it is replacing print text as a dominant mode of communication (Manjou, 2018). Multimodal composing such as video production is, in fact, considered by some to be the essential 21st century literacy (Miller & McVee, 2012), but much remains to be done to bring digital technologies as literacy into the elementary classroom. Qualitative data includes a focus group, questionnaires, observations, and content analysis of teacher candidate videos and instructional plans. This study considers how video production can be integrated into teacher education programs to engage cross-curricular expectations and critical digital literacy perspectives. It responds to the pressing question of how to do teacher education differently in the digital age.

Categorization Activities in Norwegian Preschools: Digital Tools in Identifying, Articulating, and Assessing.

The article explores digital literacy practices in children’s everyday lives at Norwegian preschools and some of the ways in which young children appropriate basic digital literacy skills through guided participation in situated activities. Building on an ethnomethodological perspective, the analyses are based on 70 h of video recordings documenting the activities in which 45 children, aged 5 and 6, and 8 preschool teachers participated. Through the detailed analysis of two categorization activities – identifying geometrical shapes and identifying feelings/thoughts – the use of digital tools in the social organization of the activities is examined. The article finds that children’s digital literacy activities encompass visual, verbal, audio and embodied competencies that become relevant, and thus accessible for learning, in the interaction between the children and between the adults and children by serving as norms and guidelines for what constitutes correct categorizations (geometrical shapes and green and red feelings) in the situated activities, and that are appropriated and actualized by the children in interaction with their peers. The findings also show how the categorization practices in preschools deal with symbols and labels in ways that create and sustain socially organized ways of knowing, seeing, and acting upon the world. Digital media are embedded in routines, procedures, and socialites that are part of these categorization practices; they are part of how children are instructed to experience, interpret, understand, and act in the world. Moreover, the different technologies created different conditions for the children’s participation. It was found that peer interaction was part of the digital literacy activities that involved such mobile technologies as smartphones and tablets, while when using non-mobile technologies, e.g., smartboards, the activities were structured more as ‘classic’ classroom activities, primarily guided by the teacher and the didactic material presented through the smartboard.

A escrita acadêmica no fórum de discussão do Facebook

Neste texto, analisamos a escrita acadêmica e digital desenvolvida por participantes de um curso de especialização em Linguagem e Tecnologia (LINTEC). Exploramos uma perspectiva etnográfica e proposições teóricas apontadas pelos Novos Estudos do Letramento para examinar o fórum de discussão de um curso de pós-graduação lato sensu realizado durante a disciplina Novos Letramentos, que utilizou o Facebook como Ambiente Virtual de Aprendizagem (AVA). A análise das condições de produção da escrita nesse contexto de formação evidenciou aspectos composicionais de um fórum de discussão em que se destacam a sequencialidade e a temporalidade dos turnos (postagens), o registro formal e informal da língua portuguesa e o uso de recursos multimodais.

PLURILINGUAL SOCIAL NETWORKS AND THE CREATION OF HYBRID CULTURAL SPACES

ABSTRACT Although plurilingualism is a well-established topic in the international literature, especially in situations of transnational mobility, we still know little about the learning and appropriation of non-standard forms of English by young Brazilians online. Unlike the instrumental uses that predominate in formal English language teaching, digital literacy practices often focus on identity construction and expression, posing questions of race, gender, sexuality, and social status. Based on a digital ethnography of a Facebook page focused on American black popular culture, we analyze the linguistic resources and cultural references drawn upon by participants. The research seeks to understand the perspectives and online practices of young Brazilians, mobilizing theoretical resources from New Literacy Studies to understand the processes of discursive construction and resignification. The results show the importance of virtual spaces for the affirmation of subaltern identities, and at the same time the spatial restriction of some discursive expressions of identity, isolated from other educational and social environments in which the participants circulate. The article concludes by considering the implications for the democratization of foreign language learning in Brazil.

Connecting Language, Gender, Literacy and Facebook: A Case Study with Multilingual Teenagers in Pakistan

The aim of this research is to examine the interrelationship among language, gender, and literacy practices of multiling ual y outh on F acebook in P akis tan. T he data, c ollec ted primarily thr ough obs er vations , c ompris ed the participants literacy practices on Facebook which was observed for three months. A convenience sampling technique was used for drawing the sample. Ten participants, five boys and five girls, participated in this research. Data analysis reveals that social media is widely used by young boys and girls to exhibit their gendered identity through language choices, content and purpose of using social media. The research is informed by recent research on the ethnogr aphy of digital literacy pr actices .

Just Google it! Digital literacy and the epistemology of ignorance

ABSTRACTIn this paper we examine digital literacy and explicate how it relates to the philosophical study of ignorance. Using data from a study which explores the knowledge producing work of undergraduate students as they wrote course assignments, we argue that a social practice approach to digital literacy can help explain how epistemologies of ignorance may be sustained. If students are restricted in what they can know because they are unaware of exogenous actors (e.g. algorithms), and how they guide choices and shape experiences online, then a key issue with which theorists of digital literacy should contend is how to educate students to be critically aware of how power operates in online spaces. The challenge for Higher Education is twofold: to understand how particular digital literacy practices pave the way for the construction of ignorance, and to develop approaches to counter it.

Adolescents' Agentic Work on Developing Personal Pedagogies on Social Media

AbstractWhile current research points out that young people are developing emerging culture of learning in informal spaces, less is known about such digital literacy practices in the Asian contexts where the notion of literacy tends to refer to school literacy. Research on young people's online participatory culture continues to suggest that social media offer affinity spaces where extensive knowledge is acquired, constructed and produced outside of schools. In this paper, we use two case studies on social media as illustrative examples to understand how adolescents shape their learning online. We aim to contribute to the ongoing dialectics on social media and learning by examining how adolescents exhibit agency online. We argue that social media such as Facebook offer high learner agency environments for adolescents to participate in self‐initiated enterprise and allow them to develop personal trajectories for learning. The case studies presented in this paper suggested that the adolescents' pursuit of their passions on online affinity spaces gave rise to intellectual friendships and the development of personal pedagogies.

The myth of sharing publicly as 21st century literacy

PurposeThis paper highlights the fluidity with which youth make decisions about engaging with digital technologies including online social media. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities that literacy curriculum that centers digital technologies can have for students from immigrant communities through tracing the case of a Bangladeshi–American girl named Sabina.Design/methodology/approachGrounded in a transliteracies frame, this qualitative case study explores the digital literacy practices of youth in an urban public secondary school in the USA. Data collection included participant observation across various spaces including an eighth grade digital media studies class, school cafeteria and hallways, participants’ homes and online communities. Further data included formal interviews, informal conversations and digital and print artifact collection. Data were analyzed through the lenses of flow and space–time path.FindingsThe findings of this paper highlight how Sabina made space for social networking using digital technologies on her own terms as well as how the ways that she collaborated through the use of digital technologies created opportunities for her to be an active participant in her social worlds across home and school contexts.Originality/valueAnalyzing Sabina’s digital literacy practices across diverse social spaces offers insights for educators to create opportunities for diverse youth to leverage digital technologies to support skills such as collaboration and civic engagement, which have been identified as defining characteristics of twenty-first century literacies. This case points to the imperative for teachers to create connected learning classrooms that offer opportunities for youth to use digital technologies to support their efforts to make change in the world on their own terms.

Exploring patterns of technology use in UK college students: a cluster analysis of learners’ digital practices

ABSTRACT This study assesses the use of various technologies, from institutional virtual learning environments to Web 2.0 tools, amongst learners studying at six general Further Education colleges in the UK. The study surveyed 218 students from a range of disciplines and qualifications. Cluster analysis revealed distinct patterns of engagement with technologies in both personal/social and educational contexts. Some support was found for a connection between personal/social and academic uses of technology. In contrast to the dominant narrative of learners as digitally fluent technology users, the analysis showed the majority of learners were using educational technologies in fairly simplistic ways that satisfy the demands of their course. Significant relationships were found between digital practices in college and subject studied and gender. The discussion draws on the literature of digital literacy practices in order to interpret the findings and inform the planning and development of learning technologies.

Letramento digital em Curso Técnico em Informática: considerações acerca do Projeto Pedagógico de Curso

Considerando a relevância da promoção do letramento digital em curso técnico de nível médio integrado, o objetivo deste artigo é analisar as relações entre as dimensões do letramento digital e o Projeto Pedagógico de Curso (PPC) do curso técnico de nível médio integrado em informática ofertado no Instituto Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (IFRN). Assim, desenvolvemos uma pesquisa de natureza exploratória, em que analisamos a seção dos objetivos e perfil do egresso, partes constituintes dos PPC do IFRN, tomando como base as dimensões do letramento digital propostas por Shetzer e Warschauer (2000), a saber, comunicação, construção e pesquisa, confrontando-as com as informações descritas no PPC de informática. Nossos resultados apontam que o PPC de informática apresenta indícios ainda muito tímidos das categorias de letramento digital, sobretudo na seção dos objetivos. No entanto, há carência das dimensões do letramento digital na seção que trata do perfil do profissional formado, visto que essa seção muito se volta para o letramento computacional, apresentando lacunas no que diz respeito ao letramento digital. Defendemos que deva haver uma maior aproximação das práticas de letramento digital no perfil do aluno egresso, em função da garantia, em potencial, de sua maior participação na sociedade em que atua.

Young Children's Engagement With Digital Technologies in the Family Context

Although more and more children engage in daily online activities with digital technologies, the roles that online technologies play in children's lives are still understudied. This article aims at identifying the role of digital devices as well as practices in which young children are engaged at home. It also strives to explore digital literacy practices and to research how these are embedded into the family context. The case study of Lithuania discussed in this article contributes with new knowledge about the local contexts and may help to understand the main problems to be further worked upon with on a global and European scale. The research of young children and their engagement with digital technology in Lithuania comes as part of the EC JRC project “Young Children (0–8) and Digital Technologies.” The findings reveal that although children perceive online technologies and the use of smart devices as entertainment and relaxation, they are not addicted. Several factors affect young children's uses and skills of digital technologies, including family constitution and parental styles.

Digital Literacy-Practice among Academicians: A study conducted in a B-School

Digital Literacy-Practice among Academicians: A study conducted in a B-School

Developing Elementary Students’ Digital Literacy Through Augmented Reality Creation: Insights From a Longitudinal Analysis of Questionnaires, Interviews, and Projects

This mixed-method case study investigated digital literacy (DL) development among 32 elementary-level students who created multimodal, contextual, and interactive augmented reality (AR) artifacts in a 20-week after-school program in Northern Taiwan. The instructional design combined situated and spiral learning experiences with AR, implemented through a blended learning environment. Data sources included pre- and post-program digital learning student surveys, student and teacher interviews, classroom observations, and AR artifact assessments. Results indicated statistically significant increases with moderate effect sizes in five areas of students’ DL practices: information management; collaboration; communication and sharing; creation; and evaluation and problem-solving. Students did not increase DL in one area: ethics and responsibility. The situated and spiral learning-by-design approach offered increasingly complex AR creation projects in which students developed and transferred their DL. The face-to-face and online learning settings offered multiple ways to collaborate and facilitated the development of students’ DL. The AR technology enabled students to develop DL through designing AR using three types of representation features: multimodal, interactive, and contextual. Practical and theoretical implications for adapting or enhancing this instructional design in future DL programs and for future research are discussed.

Understanding young children’s attitudes towards reading in relation to their digital literacy activities at home

The effect of digital literacy practices upon young children’s learning is a contentious and growing area for research and debate. Nowadays, children encounter many different types of texts through their everyday engagement with digital technologies. The study reported here investigated the relationships between 6 and 7-year-old children’s home digital literacy practices, parental views about the use of technology and children’s attitudes towards reading as perceived by the children and their parents. A total of 105 children and their parents, from two primary schools in Istanbul participated in this study. Parents completed a questionnaire about their views on the use of technology, their children’s digital literacy experiences and their perceptions of their children’s reading attitudes, while the children engaged in individual interviews. The results from this study indicate that children’s attitudes towards reading are significantly related to both the frequency of their engagement in digital literacy activities in their homes and their parents’ perception of their child’s attitudes to reading. The findings suggest that parents can support children’s enjoyment in reading by engaging in both digital and non-digital print experiences with their children.

Bilingual Vine making: problematizing oppressive discourses in a secondary Chicanx/Latinx studies course

ABSTRACTThis 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.