Julian Sefton-Green

Digital Visions Children's 'Creative' Uses of Multimedia Technologies

This article describes some findings from recent research into young peoples creative uses of new technologies in the home. The first section considers a range of theoretical perspectives on childrens relationship with digital technologies. It interrogates popular and academic claims about the potential of the computer as a means for facilitating creativity. The main body of the article presents quantitative and qualitative data from the study, focusing on the ways in which children learn to use new technologies, parental regulation in the home and the role of new technologies in sustaining peer group cultures. The analysis therefore aims to situate the use of computers within wider social and cultural contexts and practices. This raises further questions about the relationship between digital technology and the formal educational system; the use of technology to define boundaries between childhood and adulthood; and assumptions about economic and vocational futures for young people in this area.

Reviewing Approaches and Perspectives on “Digital Literacy”

This paper explores the purchase and usefulness of the notion of digital literacy. Comparing and contrasting theoretical formulations of digital literacy from the “top-down” and “bottom-up”, it reviews how the concept has been used across three research fields in Europe and Australia. An introductory section situates the ways in which digital literacy offers itself as a mean of empowerment in the tradition of the “new literacy studies” but at the same time exposes contradictions in terms of access and power. The first domain explored is media discourse, and this section of the paper examines ideas which have been circulating in Australia since the early 1990s about the need for children to become digitally literate. The second section examines how the concept of digital literacy has developed over the last decade in the domain of school policy, curriculum documents and practices in Norway; and the third section reviews transnational research to explore how the term digital literacy is used in the domain of childrens and youths out-of-school cultural digital practices. We argue that the term “digital literacy” incorporates more notions of exclusion and division than is commonly supposed, and that it exposes the contradictory politics of literacy education in new and provocative ways.

Learning at Not-School: A Review of Study, Theory, and Advocacy for Education in Non-Formal Settings

Bibl iography: Bennett, Joanna: Learning at Not-School: A Review of Study, Theory, and Advocacy for Education in Non-Formal Settings, IJREE, Vol. 2, Issue 1-2014, pp. 135-136. https://doi.org/10.3224/ijree.v2i1.19538

Timelines, Timeframes and Special Effects: software and creative media production

Considerable attention has been paid to discussion about the creative possibilities of digital media production, the broader techno‐cultural environment and the pedagogy involved in learning with information and communication technologies. Yet there has been very little detailed discussion about how software actually functions within the learner–computer–product cycle. I argue that software frequently used in the production of digital media by young people (including ‘professional’ standard software like Photoshop or Flash), structures the way young authors conceptualise the medium. I analyse the fusion of analogue and digital ‘metaphors’ within the software interface and explore how common processes (cut ’n’ paste, filters, etc.) build up a repertoire of production ‘skills’, showing how the software influences the making process itself. The article mainly consists of discussion of software as ‘text’. It analyses the use of filters and layers in Photoshop, timelines in video and music editing programs and programming meta‐language in Flash. It aims to advance discussion about how digital production advances practical work in the media, suggesting that working in digital media encourages learners to find: (1) multiple ways of representing the same thing; (2) of representing the representation process; (3) a discourse which combines traditional and non‐traditional specialisms moving the producer away from guild knowledge towards a new language for defining multimedia; (4) reference to meta‐linguistic explanations, especially in the use of programming languages (Action Script, HTML) and how elements are constructed in units between programmes. The article concludes that digital media production creates three kinds of ‘learning effects’: (1) synaesthetic effect—representing one medium through another; (2) translation effect—moving between different ways doing same thing; (3) comparative effect—similar processes applied to different media; and that the particular kinds of learning ‘affordances’ offered by production software need to be integrated into any discussion about curriculum and pedagogy.

Researching creative learning: methods and issues

It is a common ambition in society and government to make young people more creative. These aspirations are motivated by two key concerns: to make experience at school more exciting, relevant, challenging and dynamic; and to ensure that young people are able and fit to leave education and contribute to the creative economy that will underpin growth in the twenty-first century. Transforming these common aspirations into informed practice is not easy. It can mean making many changes: turning classrooms into more exciting experiences; introducing more thoughtful challenges into the curriculum; making teachers into different kinds of instructors; finding more authentic assessment processes; putting young people’s voices at the heart of learning. There are programmes, projects and initiatives that have consistently attempted to offer such change and transformation. The UK programme Creative Partnerships is the largest of these, but there are significant initiatives in many other parts of the world today, including France, Norway, Canada and the United States. This book not only draws on this body of expertise but also consolidates it, making it the first methodological text exploring creativity. Creative teaching and learning is often used as a site for research and action research, and this volume is intended to act as a textbook for this range of courses and initiatives. The book will be a key text for research in creative teaching and learning and is specifically directed at ITE, CPD, Masters and doctoral students.

The Difference is Digital? Digital Technology and Student Media Production

a variety of philosophies and motivations, ranging from creative ’self expression’ through to technical and vocational training. Within formal Media Studies courses, student production has often been perceived as merely an adjunct to (or an illustration of) the theory; although most teachers would now recognise it as an indispensable aspect of the subject. Meanwhile, both in schools and in informal settings, media production has also been seen as a valuable means of developing young people’s social and communication skills. In practice, most media production courses are based on a combination of these different rationales albeit often an uneasy and contradictory one.2 2

Children, Young People and Digital Technology

Popular views of young people’s relationships with digital technology have often been characterised by a kind of schizophrenia. On the one hand, there are the victims: the delinquents incited to mindless violence by computer games, the helpless innocents depraved and corrupted by on-line pornography and the slack-jawed digital idiots, narcotised into inertia by the power of the screen. On the other hand, there are the

Cultural Studies Meets Action Research in the Media Classroom

ABSTRACT This article considers the role of classroom‐based action research in the development of media education in British schools. The first part of the article offers some general observations on the contribution of action research in this field, and on the relationship between action research and broadly ‘ethnographic’ approaches within media and cultural studies. It identifies shared dilemmas in the politics of such research, and in the relationships between researchers and their subjects. The second part of the article develops these themes through brief accounts of two contrasting forms of classroom practice, drawn from collaborative research between an academic (DB) and a classroom teacher (JSG) in a largely working‐class North London comprehensive school. First, there is an examination of the difficulties of ‘reading’ students’ creative media productions, with particular emphasis on questions of gender and subjectivity. Secondly, there is an account of classroom work in which students themselves...

Researching ‘learning lives’ – a new agenda for learning, media and technology

ABSTRACT In this article, we revisit the history of our interest in the term, ‘learning lives’ in order to explicate the meaning(s) of the phrase and to set up a series of challenges for research into young people’s learning. We suggest that a learning lives perspective depends on three areas for investigation. First of all is the challenge of how to capture, theorise and describe the travel and trajectories if researchers are truly to ‘follow’ learners through, around and in their learning across everyday life. Secondly, it means refusing what seems to be the most apparent levers of change, namely media and technology. And thirdly, learning lives approaches need to address the pedagogicization of everyday life and the schooled society. Learning lives approaches help us see the changing place of the meaning of education and institutional pedagogies across all the nooks and crannies of everyday life.

CULTURAL STUDIES AND EDUCATION: Reflecting on differences, impacts, effects and change

Based on experiences and research at virtually all levels of the English education system I will argue that we can observe the ‘impact’ of Cultural Studies on the forms and practices of Education as a system and as institutions as well as at the more micro-levels of individual learning and even theories of learning itself. These ‘impacts’ will be analysed along three dimensions: the institutionalization and/or incorporation of school subjects (like Media Studies); the way Cultural Studies has been used to frame an offer of schooling to resistant and disengaged youth; and the ways in which arts-type, practical and informal forms of pedagogy have supported identity-based theories of learning. I will use examples of each type of impact to explore each level of effect. My interest is in reflecting on how transformative these impacts have been. Do they pose lasting types of change or have they been incorporated by the status quo given the imperviousness of schooling to successive waves of educational reform? How have the more radical kinds of critique contained in Cultural Studies methods, thinking and approaches been absorbed at the different levels of the education system and at what cost and to whom? The final section of the paper will consider practical and theoretical prospects for future versions of Cultural Studies and Education. At the policy level I will question whether there are insuperable barriers within the forms of new public management in education or changes in labour market needs as determined by the economics of the knowledge economy in new times which will militate against such interventions – or (within the framework of current politics) can we imagine consistent system-wide effects of radical change? I will end by considering whether the destiny of Cultural Studies is to repeat its marginalized academic status as critique or ‘system-irritant’ or whether we could envisage a theoretical way of scaling up and mainstreaming how Cultural Studies works.