Digital communication has transformed literacy practices and assumed great importance in the functioning of workplace, recreational, and community contexts. This article reviews a decade of empirical work of the New Literacy Studies, identifying the shift toward research of digital literacy applications. The article engages with the central theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic challenges in the tradition of New Literacy Studies, while highlighting the distinctive trends in the digital strand. It identifies common patterns across new literacy practices through cross-comparisons of ethnographic research in digital media environments. It examines ways in which this research is taking into account power and pedagogy in normative contexts of literacy learning using the new media. Recommendations are given to strengthen the links between New Literacy Studies research and literacy curriculum, assessment, and accountability in the 21st century.

Amid the big claims of big data, analytics, datification, and data mining, this article answers central questions for qualitative research. In the debates about the enormity and ubiquity of data in the digital world, qualitative research endeavors are seemingly threatened. But is big data necessarily better? Can big data answer the fundamental questions that qualitative researchers ask? This article interrogates the key issues for qualitative researchers in the big data era, positioning big data in its historical context. This article offers a critique of assumptions about access to big data, and uncovers the dark side of big data and privacy in a risk society. The potentials of big data for qualitative research are examined, providing recommendations to bring together complementary research endeavors that map large scale social patterns using big data with qualitative questions about participants' subjective perceptions, rich expression of feelings, and reasons for human action.

Recent research has emphasized the multimodal and digital nature of adolescent literacy practices. These practices cross multiple social spaces, particularly settings outside of schools. This article re‐examines current research to yield three caveats that counter assumptions about the pervasiveness, relevance, and spontaneity of youths' multimodal practices in the digital communications environment: (1) It is incorrect to assume that today's adolescents are all “digital natives” (2) Engaging adolescents in multimodal textual practices must involve more than conforming the curriculum to their interests and practices—it should extend students' repertoire of skills and genres; and (3) Although some new multimodal practices are taken up by adolescents with minimal instruction in informal contexts, greater emphasis should be placed on expert scaffolding of these literacies in school settings.

No abstract

YoUNG CHILDrEN SHIFt mEANINGS across multiple modes long before they have mastered formal writing skills. In a digital age, children are socialised into a wide range of new digital media conventions in the home, at school, and in communitybased settings. This article draws on longitudinal classroom research with a culturally diverse cohort of eight-year-old children, to advance new understandings about children's engagement in transmediation in the context of digital media creation. The author illuminates three key principles of transmediation, using multimodal snapshots of storyboard images, digital movie frames, and online comics. Insights about transmediation are developed through dialogue with the children about their thought processes and intentions for their multimedia creations.

No abstract

This paper demonstrates, following Vygotsky, that language and tool use has a critical role in the collaborative problem-solving behaviour of school-age children. It reports original ethnographic classroom research examining the convergence of speech and practical activity in children's collaborative problem solving with robotics programming tasks. The researchers analysed children's interactions during a series of problem solving experiments in which Lego Mindstorms toolsets were used by teachers to create robotics design challenges among 24 students in a Year 4 Australian classroom (students aged 8.5-9.5 years). The design challenges were incrementally difficult, beginning with basic programming of straight line movement, and progressing to more complex challenges involving programming of the robots to raise Lego figures from conduit pipes using robots as pulleys with string and recycled materials. Data collection involved micro-genetic analysis of students' speech interactions with tools, peers, and other experts, teacher interviews, and student focus group data. Coding the repeated patterns in the transcripts, the authors outline the structure of the children's social speech in joint problem solving, demonstrating the patterns of speech and interaction that play an important role in the socialisation of the school-age child's practical intellect.

Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status school. A new writing program taught students how to design multimodal and digital texts across a range of genres and text types, such as web pages, online comics, video documentaries, and blogs. The authors use Bernstein's theory of the pedagogic device to theorize the pedagogic struggles and resolutions in remaking English through the specialization of time, space, and text. The changes created an ideological struggle as new writing practices were adapted from broader societal fields to meet the instructional and regulative discourses of a conventional writing curriculum.