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This article investigates 8-and 9-year-old girls' use of the popular game Minecraft at home and school, particularly the ways in which they performatively 'bring themselves into being' through talk and digital production in the social spaces of the classroom and within the game's multiplayer online world. We explore how the girls undertake practices of curatorship to display their Minecraft knowledge through discussion of the game, both 'in world' and in face-to-face interactions, and as they assemble resources within and around the game to design, build and display their creations and share stories about their gameplay.

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Teachers' beliefs about what it is (or is not) possible to achieve with digital games in educational contexts will inevitably influence the decisions that they make about how, when, and for what specific purposes they will bring these games into their classrooms. They play a crucial role in both shaping and responding to the complex contextual factors which influence how games are understood and experienced in educational settings. Throughout this article the authors draw upon data collected for a large-scale, mixed-methods research project focusing on literacy, learning and teaching with digital games in Australian classrooms, to focus explicitly on the attitudes, understandings and expectations held about digital games by diverse teachers at the beginning of the project. They seek to identify the beliefs about games that motivated teachers' participation in a digital games research project while focusing, as well, on concerns that teachers express about risks or limitations of such a project. The authors' aim is to develop a detailed picture of the mindsets that teachers bring to games-based learning environments, and the relevance of these mindsets to broader debates about the relationship between games, learning and school.

Social media use has redefined the production, experience and consumption of news media. These changes have made verifying and trusting news content more complicated and this has led to a number of recent flashpoints for claims and counter-claims of ‘fake news’ at critical moments during elections, natural disasters and acts of terrorism. Concerns regarding the actual and potential social impact of fake news led us to carry out the first nationally representative survey of young Australians’ news practices and experiences. Our analysis finds that while social media is one of young people’s preferred sources of news, they are not confident about spotting fake news online and many rarely or never check the source of news stories. Our findings raise important questions regarding the need for news media literacy education – both in schools and in the home. Therefore, we consider the historical development of news media literacy education and critique the relevance of dominant frameworks and pedagogies currently in use. We find that news media has become neglected in media literacy education in Australia over the past three decades, and we propose that current media literacy frameworks and pedagogies in use need to be rethought for the digital age.

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