Suchergebnisse

As global development agencies and governments seek to address the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 4 for Universal Education, evidence of the real impacts of digital literacies interventions in local contexts are needed. This critical review of the designs, impacts and markers of quality of six literacies interventions offers new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of fixed and open approaches to literacies learning in contexts of development. Open interventions offered greater promise for learning a range of digital literacies practices than fixed interventions, even though fixed interventions, based on mobile and web-based apps were inherently digital. This raises important questions about the ways literacies have been conceptualised in development research.

Literacy scholars have offered compelling theories about and methods for understanding the digital literacy practices of youth. However, little work has explored the possibility of an approach that would demonstrate how different perspectives on literacies might intersect and interconnect in order to better describe the multifaceted nature of youth digital literacies. In this conceptual article, we adopt the idea of theoretical triangulation in interpretive inquiry and explore how multiple perspectives can jointly contribute to constructing a nuanced description of young people's literacies in today's digitally mediated global world. For this purpose, we first suggest a triangulation framework that integrates sociocultural, affective, and cognitive perspectives on digital literacies, focusing on recent developments in these perspectives. We then use an example of discourse data from a globally connected online affinity space and demonstrate how our multidimensional framework can lead to a complex analysis and interpretation of the data. In particular, we describe the substance of one specific case of youth digital literacies from each of the three perspectives on literacy, which in turn converge to provide a complex account of such literacy practices. In conclusion, we discuss the promise and limitations of our integrative approach to studying the digital literacy practices of youth.

Videogames have long been lauded for their potential to increase engagement and enhance learning when used in classrooms. At the same time, how to best evaluate learning presents challenges, especially when the game does not have standardized assessments built-into it and when games are taken up in a wide variety of ways in quite diverse contexts. This article details the use of a geography game to support learning in 32 diverse classrooms in Ontario, Canada, alongside challenges with evaluating student learning using a game that did not have a built-in assessment system. In total, 795 students participated in the study. Classroom observations and interviews with teachers were triangulated with student pre and post evaluations. Results demonstrated that students did learn from gameplay, as demonstrated through multiple choice and short answer change scores in the pre to post evaluation, despite variations in duration of play and how the game was integrated in the classroom more generally.

Preface -- Pedagogical Orientations. The Practice of Reading Good Books: A Plea to Teachers and Students -- Learning about Education Metaphors: Study as a Way of Life -- Explorations in General Semantics. Playing With Bateson: Denotation, Logical Types, and Analog and Digital Communication -- A Levels Orientation to Abstraction, Logical Typing, and Language More Generally -- Korzybski and Bateson: Paradoxes in 'Consciousness of Abstracting' -- Is There a Territory Without Maps? -- The Thing Is Not Itself: Artefactual Metonymy and the World of Antiques -- Media Ecological Studies. History, Orientations, and Future Directions of Media Ecology -- Early Western Writing, Sensory Modalities, and Modern Alphabetic Literacy: On the Origins of Representational Theorizing -- Clocks, Synchronization, and the Fate of Leisure: A Brief Media Ecological History of Digital Technologies -- Resources and Meditations. Words to Live By: Scholarly Quotations as Proverbial Theories -- Aphorisms, Insights, and Other Comic Resources for Modern Intellectuals

Digital youth work is an emerging field of research and practice which seeks to investigate and support youth-centred digital literacy initiatives. Whilst digital youth work projects have become prominent in Europe in recent years, it has also become increasingly difficult to examine, capture, and understand their social impact. Currently, there is limited understanding of and research on how to measure the social impact of collaborative digital literacy youth projects. This article presents empirical research which explores the ways digital youth workers perceive and evaluate the social impact of their work. Twenty semi-structured interviews were carried out in Scotland, United Kingdom, in 2017. All data were coded in NVivo 10 and analysed using thematic data analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Two problems were identified in this study: (1) limited critical engagement with the social impact evaluation process of digital youth work projects and its outcomes, and (2) lack of consistent definition of the evaluation process to measure the social impact/value of digital youth work. Results of the study are examined within a wider scholarly discourse on the evaluation of youth digital participation, digital literacy, and social impact. It is argued that to progressively work towards a deeper understanding of the social value (positive and negative) of digital youth engagement and their digital literacy needs, further research and youth worker evaluation training are required. Recommendations towards these future changes in practice are also addressed.

This research analyses the discourse on Twitter surrounding the "Ferrerasgate" scandal involving the Spanish journalist Antonio García Ferreras, director and host of the television show Al Rojo Vivo (La Sexta, Spanish TV channel). It examines the main object of criticism, the tone of the discourse, the argumentation made by users, as well as the existence of hate in their rhetoric. The tweets included in the study's sample (N = 2,846), posted between 5 and 15 July 2022 and extracted on 16 July 2022, were examined in two complementary phases. The first entailed a quantitative content analysis of the messages and the second analysed whether hate speech was found in the sample as a whole. The Sketch Engine tool was used to determine whether "crypto hate speech" existed in the sample as a whole, and to whom it was targeted. The results reveal that "Ferrerasgate" sparked a debate that spilt over into journalism across the board, calling into question the media's role in a democracy. The most prominent arguments were the condemnation of misinformation, lack of independence, and absence of professionalism in the journalism sector. It should be noted that most of the messages were destructive in tone; hate was found in the tweets analysed, although these did not represent a high percentage in relation to the total sample.

Although diminishing newsrooms - and gaping holes in community news coverage - have been acknowledged in the US for over a decade, the term "news desert" did not widely emerge in discourse among industry professionals to refer to places that lacked news outlets until the fall of 2018. While much work in various disciplines, including journalism studies, aims to uncover the causes behind news deserts and the effects of their proliferation, scant research attempts to understand how journalists themselves see these issues. Utilizing metajournalistic discourse analysis of journalism trade magazines, this study examined seven publications and found 97 articles published between January 1, 2017, and September 30, 2022, that used the term "news desert." The aim is to understand how industry insiders constructed the concept and explained the repercussions of the phenomenon to other journalists. This has broader implications for understanding how journalism as an interpretive community constructs the field and the issues confronting it, particularly in times of crisis. This study found that industry leaders cannot agree on a clear definition of news deserts, have only recently begun to acknowledge the ethnic and socioeconomic communities most affected by a lack of news coverage, and rarely articulate, beyond generalities, the effects news deserts have on citizens. These results are then considered through the lens of journalistic reflexivity, national audience response, and potential solutions.

This article examines how the concepts of digital literacies and digital competence are conceptualized in curricula for compulsory education within the Nordic countries. In 2006, the European Union defined digital competence as one of eight key competences for lifelong learning. The terms digital literacies and digital competence have since been used interchangeably, particularly in policy documents concerning education and the digitalization of educational systems and teaching. However, whether these concepts carry similar meanings, and are understood in a similar way, across languages and cultures is not self-evident. By taking the curricula in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway as examples, this article attempts to clarify similarities and differences in how the concepts are interpreted, as well as what implications this has for the digitalization of education. The analyses reveal that different terms are used in the curricula in the different countries, which are connected to themes or interdisciplinary issues to be incorporated into school subjects. The conceptualizations of the terms share a common emphasis on societal issues and a critical approach, highlighting a particular Nordic interpretation of digital literacies and digital competence.

This article deals with recent Spanish and Portuguese political television series. Within this sub-genre, it is pertinent to consider the symbolic construction of politics, as well as the differences caused by each series' geographical adscription. Six Spanish productions have been selected - Isabel (Isabella the Catholic), Carlos Rey Emperador (Charles the Emperor King), La Embajada (The Embassy), Crematorio (Crematorium), Vamos Juan/Venga Juan (Come on, Juan/Let's go Juan), and El Partido (The Party) - along with three Portuguese productions - A Rainha e a Bastarda (The Queen and the Bastard), Teorias da Conspiração (Conspiracy Theories), and Os Boys (The Boys). The narrative of these audio-visual stories has been examined utilising qualitative content analysis, looking at the plotlines and characters involved. The type of characterisation of politics has been identified by means of the deconstruction of the main characters. The conclusion is that the evaluation is eminently negative, although differential frameworks are present, depending, in particular, on the fiction's genre, either historical drama, drama-thriller, or comedy.

News source attribution in selective exposure has been examined in many contexts, but rarely in the context of selecting news from distrusted sources. As such, 800 US adults were asked to select one of two headlines attributed to CNN and/or Fox News. Results showed some people selected news from a distrusted source, but only under very specific circumstances. Others avoided the awkward moment of siding with a distrusted source, even when that meant selecting news from a trusted source that was counter-attitudinal to the source's typical slant on global warming.

Literature suggests that while without doubt people engage in selective exposure to information, this does not entail that they also engage in selective avoidance of opinion-challenging information. However, cross-cutting exposure does not always lead to dispassionate deliberation. In this commentary I explore psychological conditions as they apply to attitude-based selection and make an argument that selectivity does not stop at exposure but continues as audiences engage with information they encounter and incorporate in their decision-making. I propose the theory of motivated reasoning as a rich theoretical underpinning that helps us understand selective exposure and selective information processing.

This article compares digital arenas such as Twitter with the principles prescribed by the bourgeois public sphere, to examine how close or far these arenas are from Habermas' original concept. By focusing on one of the criteria, the current influence of elites on political debate, it discusses the Habermasian principles of general accessibility and non-dominance of the elites as prerequisites for a functioning public sphere. This study finds that even though there are few access restrictions on Twitter and despite the fact that no one, in principle, is excluded from the platform, there is no apparent elimination of privileges and the elites maintain their elite status within its borders. Methodologically, the article relies on empirical research of hashtagged exchanges on Twitter during the General Elections in the United Kingdom in 2015. Through the mapping of Twitter as a synthesis of dialogic arenas, it explores the elite-focused discourse and the vocal actors in the stream, underscoring that the presence of the elites, even in an indirect way. Drawing on these elements, the article argues for a reconceptualization of the normative perception of the public sphere, suggesting the notion of exclusion is a complex issue that includes expanding notions of publics to also include those topics being discussed. Finally, it focuses on the significance of journalism in relation to political dialogue and argues that the move towards less elite-centered arenas largely depends on journalism.

The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the 'passivation' of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage's heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system.

Recalling the well-known strategy of "following the money" when investigating the underlying power structures and business models of legacy media, this article argues that studies of digital political economies can benefit instead from following the data. Combining perspectives from critical data studies and infrastructure research, we first discuss how direct money flows can be difficult to trace in digital ecosystems, creating a need for alternative analytical approaches for studying and scrutinising contemporary power configurations in digital societies. As a theoretical backdrop, we elaborate on the concept of infrastructural power and apply it in a walkthrough of critical data infrastructures. To illustrate the efficacy of this strategy, we provide perspectives and examples from the political economies of internet infrastructures in Northern Europe and discuss how control over data is translated into economic profit and societal power. In doing so, we argue that increased attention to data infrastructures is needed to advance both critical data and infrastructure studies, improve digital market monitoring, and ground future regulation and policy.