Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected

Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
Author: Tara McPherson
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2008
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0262134950

How emergent practices and developments in young people's digital media can result in technological innovation or lead to unintended learning experiences and unanticipated social encounters. Young people's use of digital media may result in various innovations and unexpected outcomes, from the use of videogame technologies to create films to the effect of home digital media on family life. This volume examines the core issues that arise when digital media use results in unintended learning experiences and unanticipated social encounters. The contributors examine the complex mix of emergent practices and developments online and elsewhere that empower young users to function as drivers of technological change, recognizing that these new technologies are embedded in larger social systems, school, family, friends. The chapters consider such topics as (un)equal access across economic, racial, and ethnic lines; media panics and social anxieties; policy and Internet protocols; media literacy; citizenship vs. consumption; creativity and collaboration; digital media and gender equity; shifting notions of temporality; and defining the public/private divide. Contributors Steve Anderson, Anne Balsamo, Justine Cassell, Meg Cramer, Robert A. Heverly, Paula K Hooper, Sonia Livingstone, Henry Lowood, Robert Samuels, Christian Sandvig, Ellen Seiter, Sarita Yardi

Connected Play

Connected Play
Author: Yasmin B. Kafai
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2013-10-11
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262317850

How kids play in virtual worlds, how it matters for their offline lives, and what this means for designing educational opportunities. Millions of children visit virtual worlds every day. In such virtual play spaces as Habbo Hotel, Toontown, and Whyville, kids chat with friends from school, meet new people, construct avatars, and earn and spend virtual currency. In Connected Play, Yasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields investigate what happens when kids play in virtual worlds, how this matters for their offline lives, and what this means for the design of educational opportunities in digital worlds. Play is fundamentally important for kids' development, but, Kafai and Fields argue, to understand play in virtual worlds, we need to connect concerns of development and culture with those of digital media and learning. Kafai and Fields do this through a detailed study of kids' play in Whyville, a massive, informal virtual world with educational content for tween players. Combining ethnographic accounts with analysis of logfile data, they present rich portraits and overviews of how kids learn to play in a digital domain, developing certain technological competencies; how kids learn to play well—responsibly, respectfully, and safely; and how kids learn to play creatively, creating content that becomes a part of the virtual world itself.

Young People in Digital Society

Young People in Digital Society
Author: Amanda Third
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2019-12-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137573694

This book adopts a critical youth studies approach and theorizes the digital as a key feature of the everyday to analyse how ideas about youth and cyber-safety, digital inclusion and citizenship are mobilized. Despite a growing interest in the benefits and opportunities for young people online, both ‘young people’ and ‘the digital’ continue to be constructed primarily as sites of social and cultural anxiety requiring containment and control. Juxtaposing public policy, popular educational and parental framings of young people’s digital practices with the insights from fieldwork conducted with young Australians aged 12–25, the book highlights the generative possibilities of attending to intergenerational tensions. In doing so, the authors show how a shift beyond the paradigm of control opens up towards a deeper understanding of the capacities that are generated in and through digital life for young and old alike. Young People in Digital Society will be of interest to scholars and students in youth studies, cultural studies, sociology, education, and media and communications.

Connected Gaming

Connected Gaming
Author: Yasmin B. Kafai
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2024-03-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262551551

How making and sharing video games offer educational benefits for coding, collaboration, and creativity. Over the last decade, video games designed to teach academic content have multiplied. Students can learn about Newtonian physics from a game or prep for entry into the army. An emphasis on the instructionist approach to gaming, however, has overshadowed the constructionist approach, in which students learn by designing their own games themselves. In this book, Yasmin Kafai and Quinn Burke discuss the educational benefits of constructionist gaming—coding, collaboration, and creativity—and the move from “computational thinking” toward “computational participation.” Kafai and Burke point to recent developments that support a shift to game making from game playing, including the game industry's acceptance, and even promotion, of “modding” and the growth of a DIY culture. Kafai and Burke show that student-designed games teach not only such technical skills as programming but also academic subjects. Making games also teaches collaboration, as students frequently work in teams to produce content and then share their games with in class or with others online. Yet Kafai and Burke don't advocate abandoning instructionist for constructionist approaches. Rather, they argue for a more comprehensive, inclusive idea of connected gaming in which both making and gaming play a part.

Academic Writing, Real World Topics - Concise Edition

Academic Writing, Real World Topics - Concise Edition
Author: Michael Rectenwald
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2016-07-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1554813301

Academic Writing, Real World Topics fills a void in the writing-across-the-curriculum textbook market. It draws together articles and essays of actual academic prose as opposed to journalism; it arranges material by topic instead of by discipline or academic division; and it approaches topics from multiple disciplinary and critical perspectives.With extensive introductions, rhetorical instruction, and suggested additional resources accompanying each chapter, Academic Writing, Real World Topics introduces students to the kinds of research and writing that they will be expected to undertake throughout their college careers and beyond. This concise edition provides all the features of the complete edition in a more compact and affordable format. Key Features: - Contemporary, cutting-edge readings on relevant topics - Extensive cross-referencing between the rhetoric and the reader to help students make connections - Full-length essays rather than excerpts - Chapter introductions that put readings in context and promote interdisciplinary connections - Sample student essays to demonstrate student contribution - “As You Read” guides to each chapter that encourage readers to locate points of contact among readings - Questions after each reading that enable comprehension, help students identify rhetorical moves, and prompt oral and written response

Digital Capital

Digital Capital
Author: Sora Park
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2017-11-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137593326

This book describes and understands the many factors that influence a person’s behavior towards digital technologies, and how that affects the person’s potential to benefit from digital society. The ability to adapt to these new technological environments - and the extent to which an individual embraces them - has become critical to an individual’s well-being and quality of life, the underlying assumption being that only by effectively engaging with digital technologies can the user accrue benefits from the experience. By introducing the concept “digital capital,” which refers to the conditions that determine how people access, use, and engage with digital technology, Park examines how the digital ecosystem of the user lead to new forms of digital inequality. Using numerous empirical studies on internet users and non-users, as well as recommending small localized solutions to the big global problem, a critical and alternative perspective of the digital divide is provided.

The Digital Is Kid Stuff

The Digital Is Kid Stuff
Author: Josef Nguyen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2021-12-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452966214

How popular debates about the so-called digital generation mediate anxieties about labor and life in twenty-first-century America “The children are our future” goes the adage, a proclamation that simultaneously declares both anxiety as well as hope about youth as the next generation. In The Digital Is Kid Stuff, Josef Nguyen interrogates this ambivalence within discussions about today’s “digital generation” and the future of creativity, an ambivalence that toggles between the techno-pessimism that warns against the harm to children of too much screen time and a techno-utopianism that foresees these “digital natives” leading the way to innovation, economic growth, increased democratization, and national prosperity. Nguyen engages cultural histories of childhood, youth, and creativity through chapters that are each anchored to a particular digital media object or practice. Nguyen narrates the developmental arc of a future creative laborer: from a young kid playing the island fictions of Minecraft, to an older child learning do-it-yourself skills while reading Make magazine, to a teenager posting selfies on Instagram, to a young adult creative laborer imagining technological innovations using design fiction. Focusing on the constructions and valorizations of creativity, entrepreneurialism, and technological savvy, Nguyen argues that contemporary culture operates to assuage profound anxieties about—and to defuse valid critiques of—both emerging digital technologies and the precarity of employment for “creative laborers” in twenty-first-century neoliberal America.

Digital Playgrounds

Digital Playgrounds
Author: Sara M. Grimes
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2021
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1442615567

Digital Playgrounds makes the argument that online games play a uniquely meaningful role in children's lives, with profound implications for children's culture, agency, and rights in the digital era.

Playful Disruption of Digital Media

Playful Disruption of Digital Media
Author: Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2018-04-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 981101891X

This book starts with the proposition that digital media invite play and indeed need to be played by their everyday users. Play is probably one of the most visible and powerful ways to appropriate the digital world. The diverse, emerging practices of digital media appear to be essentially playful: Users are involved and active, produce form and content, spread, exchange and consume it, take risks, are conscious of their own goals and the possibilities of achieving them, are skilled and know how to acquire more skills. They share a perspective of can-do, a curiosity of what happens next? Play can be observed in social, economic, political, artistic, educational and criminal contexts and endeavours. It is employed as a (counter) strategy, for tacit or open resistance, as a method and productive practice, and something people do for fun. The book aims to define a particular contemporary attitude, a playful approach to media. It identifies some common ground and key principles in this novel terrain. Instead of looking at play and how it branches into different disciplines like business and education, the phenomenon of play in digital media is approached unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries. The contributions in this book provide a glimpse of a playful technological revolution that is a joyful celebration of possibilities that new media afford. This book is not a practical guide on how to hack a system or to pirate music, but provides critical insights into the unintended, artistic, fun, subversive, and sometimes dodgy applications of digital media. Contributions from Chris Crawford, Mathias Fuchs, Rilla Khaled, Sybille Lammes, Eva and Franco Mattes, Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Michael Nitsche, Julian Oliver, and others cover and address topics such as reflective game design, identity and people's engagement in online media, conflicts and challenging opportunities for play, playing with cartographical interfaces, player-emergent production practices, the re-purposing of data, game creation as an educational approach, the ludification of society, the creation of meaning within and without play, the internalisation and subversion of roles through play, and the boundaries of play.

Digital Humanities in Practice

Digital Humanities in Practice
Author: Claire Warwick
Publisher: Facet Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2012-10-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1856047660

This cutting-edge and comprehensive introduction to digital humanities explains the scope of the discipline and state of the art and provides a wide-ranging insight into emerging topics and avenues of research. Each chapter interweaves the expert commentary of leading academics with analysis of current research and practice, exploring the possibilities and challenges that occur when culture and digital technologies intersect. International case studies of projects ranging from crowdsourced manuscript transcription to computational reconstruction of frescoes are included in each chapter, providing a wealth of information and inspiration. QR codes within each chapter link to a dedicated website where additional content, such as further case studies, is located. Key topics covered include: • studying users and readers • social media and crowdsourcing • digitization and digital resources • image processing in the digital humanities • 3D recording and museums • electronic text and text encoding • book history, texts and digital editing • open access and online teaching of digital humanities • institutional models for digital humanities. Readership: This is an essential practical guide for academics, researchers, librarians and professionals involved in the digital humanities. It will also be core reading for all humanities students and those taking courses in the digital humanities in particular.