This article shares research facilitated by a multinational technology provider, converging mobile networked technology (tablets) used across school and home, a technology enhanced community 'third space' providing workshops for students aged 6-9 with their parents/carers. The approach taken avoids the instrumental measurement of functional digital literacy competences, but instead seeks to negotiate a more nuanced and complex understanding of the 'uses of literacy ' [from Hoggart, R. 1957
This article highlights the necessity of considering socio-cultural values and attitudes when designing digital media, through presenting a study that explores parental attitudes toward play and digital media in childhood. Here we present a study examining the effectiveness of a mobile application designed to encourage real-world play between parents and their children (aged three to five years old). A series of quasi-naturalistic play spaces were created in child-centric organisations with parents visiting these organisations invited to use the play space -including tablet devices loaded with the application. Surveys -including open and closed questions -were collected from 28 parents along with observational data focusing on parent-child-screen interactions. The research highlights a tension between the physicality and preconceptions of digital devices and parent-child play. We also note the mobilisation of the notion 'quality time' as somewhat antithetical to digital play -indeed, expectations of digital devices in childhood, alongside a presumed developmental purpose of certain forms of play, impacted the capacity of this application to facilitate real-world play. These findings and resulting methodological discussion have implications for both the design of mobile applications and future research. Moreover, this article highlights some of the values and assumptions that influence parental expectations of purposing play and digital media.
This article describes the development and implementation of Jenny Moon’s ‘Graduated scenarios’ (2004, 2001, 2009) in the disciplinary context of media production. Graduated scenarios have previously been used to model different levels of critical thinking and reflection
and have been based on situations and experiences that can be related to by a wide range of people. Our development of them in a specific creative disciplinary context, for use by students within that context, represents an evolution of the process, but we also consider the possible reception
of such models in the context of debates around academic literacies and the degree to which they may be seen and used as contributing to an orthodoxy of expression. We acknowledge that this experiment in writing and pedagogy may be perceived as providing ‘exemplars of standards’,
but argue that it actually models differing depths of thinking, and also opens up discussion about orthodoxies of academic writing. Our four models of different levels of critical reflective writing are provided as appendices, and may be used or adapted as necessary. The production of such
graduated accounts is ‘effortful work’, but the process can help us (academics) to better understand our own, as well as facilitating learners’, concepts of depth and ‘good practice’.
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