Sara Cortés

Creative Collaboration in Young Digital Communities

We recently attended several video game fairs in different European cities. Some researchers, such as Wortley (Simul Gaming 44(2–3):452–465, 2013), refer to these contexts as a starting point for exploring creativity and innovation. These fairs are quite similar to film festivals, even if there are no real actors or celebrities there. Instead, we find large screens, consoles, new forms of entertainment, and the players (the visitors to the fair) take precedence. While walking around the different stands, they don’t just observe; they play and discover the novelties created by the industry of these cultural objects. Wandering around people of all ages, families, and groups of friends (more boys than girls), the thought came to us that we are witnessing the result of innovation, the ability to create in contemporary society.

Public and Private Adolescent Lives: The Educational Value of Entertainment

In this chapter we explore the educational value of entertainment to build bridges between young people’s everyday scenarios, when commercial video games and other digital tools mediate their practices. The research focuses on the interaction between the private and public lives of a group of teenagers, 12 girls and 6 boys aged 16 to 18, in the process of building their identities when they use social media and play commercial videogames. Participants played The Sims. We focus on informal educational contexts, an extra-curricular scenario, and examine how teachers and children use commercial video games. Adopting an ethnographical and action research point of view, the analysis of the adolescents’ blogs and multimedia productions are the main focus to explore private and public sphere. Our results show how youth identity today is built around virtual and real worlds, public or private, where differences between them matter less than a need to communicate with other people, far away in space and time, which was unthinkable a few years ago. All this sets up a real or virtual world that educators, parents and researchers often forget.

Notebooks, blogs and commercial video games as evocative objects in classrooms

From the theoretical perspective offered by socio-cultural psychology and the concept of evocative objects, the main goal of this paper is to explore what happened in a primary education classroom where digital objects (commercial video games and blogs) coexisted with more traditional objects such as notebooks. Adopting an ethnographic and action research point of view, we explored the conversations and practices that took place during the school year, when three consecutive workshops were organised around three commercial video games. We focus on one second year elementary school group and their teacher. Three main results were obtained. First, the number of references to notebooks, the internet and video games made by the participants differed depending on the role they played in the workshop. Second, mediated by evocative objects the children, the teacher and the researchers created several innovative scenarios in which specific abilities emerged in relation to particular video games. Finally, evocative objects were mediators in the collaborative situations arising in the classroom.

Los medios de comunicación entran en las aulas

En este articulo se presenta reflexiones acerca de las investigaciones realizadas por el grupo de investigacion Imagenes, Palabras e Ideas que han permitido introducir medios distintos a los utilizados en las aulas, pero bien conocidos por los ninos y ninas que asisten a ellas. Asi estos medios se convirtieron en nuevos vehiculos y motivaciones para el aprendizaje de la escritura y para nuevas formas de comprender. Las teorias que inspiraron este trabajo fueron las de John- Steiner para los conceptos de aprendizaje, Gee para entornos virtuales y videojuegos, Jemkins para las nuevas formas de alfabetizacion.