The aim of this study is to gain knowledge about children's participation in digital communities and to develop a model that can be used as a tool for practitioners. The research question guiding the study is: What kind of participation emerges from children's shared experiences when engaging in digital communities? Lave and Wenger's theory about communities of practice, and their notion of legitimate peripheral participation, are used. The data consist of nine individual interviews with children. Through nexus analysis, four different kinds of participation are identified: friendship-driven, interest-driven, knowledge-driven and performance-driven. The study generates an empirical model that can be used for interpreting and understanding children's participation. The main findings are significant aspects of participation, linked to friendship, the connection between digital cultures, learning, literacy, identity and performativity, democratic implications and practices in constant change.
This is a study of how children represent themselves when performing participatory identities in social media communities with relevance to constructing a learning self. Children in contemporary society interact with tablets, mobile devices, and social media, consuming and producing multimodal representations as part of their "…powerful out-of-school teaching and learning journeys…"(Gee, 2018, p. xi), learning to be within particular local cultures (Gee, 2001). In order to enhance the possibilities of schools for educating learners for the changing world they are entering; the interest should be children's experiences guiding our understanding rather than a normative idea of childhood. Therefore, the following questions guide this study: How are children's learning trajectories expressed as self-representations in social media communities? What kind of participatory identities emerge in the process when children represent themselves in social media communities? The study is theoretically framed by Wenger's theory on learning as social participation (Wenger, 1998/2008), as the children participate in social media communities. A social media community is here used for a smaller entity of a participatory culture, sharing the same social media context but differ in the way the productions are being published. In a participatory culture, these are public for anyone to see. A participatory culture has low barriers to artistic expression, strongly supports creating and sharing creations to other people and make members believe that their contribution matters (Jenkins, 2007). As children now acquire and create information, outside of schools, new conditions for learning are introduced (Biesta, 2017; Stephen & Edwards, 2018). In this process, children use social media for self-representation, communication, friendship maintenance, information (Gleason, 2016; Ito et al., 2019) and share their productions with each other and often with a worldwide audience (Jenkins, Ito, & boyd, 2016; Wernholm, 2018). With multimodal self-representation I refer to narrative constructions using pictures, sound, movement and design to create digital productions, placing children in a social context with expressions of who they are and what they do as interrelated with where these actions are taken and the mediated means they use. The growing number of social media communities that children participate in and the multimodal character of digital technologies have in significant ways altered the communicational landscape (Ito et al., 2019; Jewitt, 2011) and added a complexity of interaction, representation and communication (Jewitt, 2011). Social aspects of learning have previously been connected with physical participation. But in social media communities, participation and presence need to be manifested digitally. Physical appearance in a physical place is interchanged for participation in social media communities, which requires active representation of the self, using different modes (for example a choice between word, voice, image, film, sp...
The aim of this study is to investigate children's out-of-school learning in digital gaming communities. This was achieved by exploring girls' participation in Minecraft communities. Data were generated through interviews, video-recorded play sessions and video-stimulated recall. Multimodal interactional analysis was applied in order to analyze children's mediated actions. The components of Wenger's Social Theory of Learning were used as a basis when exploring learning in children's out-of-school digital gaming communities. Five significant themes of what characterizes learning in digital gaming communities were identified: learning through experiencing, learning through belonging, learning through performing, learning through struggling and learning through enacting participatory identities. The main findings are presented in a tentative conceptual framework that can support teachers, school leaders and policymakers who are interested in connecting children's out-of-school learning experiences with their learning in school.
The aim of this article is to propose a theoretical framework for understanding children's learning at play in a hybrid reality. Metasynthesis is applied as a method for examining children's meaning making activities when playing in a hybrid reality. The data consists of 41 peer-reviewed articles. Through qualitative content analysis previous theoretical frameworks and theories are validated or extended and finally outlined as a theoretical framework. Five essential concepts for interpreting and understanding children's learning at play in a hybrid reality are identified and proposed: performing self, exploration, contribution, connection and multimodal participatory literacies. The framework is not fully applicable on digital play activities focusing on 'skill and drill'; rather, the framework should be applied on digital play activities where the outcome is not clear. In these kind of play activities, children can explore and make use of their imagination when creating multimodal representations together with their playmates.
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