This article focuses on data collected from a project called 'Shared Spaces: Informal Learning and Digital Cultures'. The project aimed to build links between young peoples' leisure and learning experiences, by engaging with the content and styles of learning connected with digital cultures in homes and community centres. The article focuses on issues around technology and pedagogy by analysing data collected from computer games making course for young people aged 9-13. The data from the games class is analysed in relation to three models of learning: constructionism, constructivism and situated learning. The article focuses on how these different models explain varying components of the learning environment, and specifically how models work in relation to digital media. The article raises questions about types of software used with this age range and also discusses implications in terms of pedagogy for the use of different software packages.
This article investigates ways discourses which are present on the virtual world gaming websites and in popular press produce constructions of ‘good parents’ and ‘good websites’ for children, and in the process create distinctions which position other parental practices and online media as undesirable. The article includes a discussion of historical constructs of parenting in relation to screen media and an analysis of discourse surrounding three websites: Club Penguin, Poptropica, and Minecraft. The analysis shows that parents are positioned as evaluators, selectors, and monitors of children’s online activities, and virtual world games are constructed as providing protection from risks experienced in other spaces, including online stranger danger, commercial contact, and various negative effects on behavior. The article discusses ways these discursive constructs concerning virtual world games draw on earlier dominant discourses in relation to parenting and screen media, embedding discussions of parenting and virtual world gaming with social and cultural hierarchies.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.