Conceptualizing Learning from the Everyday Activities of Digital Kids

Abstract

This paper illustrates the intensified engagement that youth are having with digital technologies and introduces a framework for examining digital fluency—the competencies, new representational practises, design sensibilities, ownership, and strategic expertise that a learner gains or demonstrates by using digital tools to gather, design, evaluate, critique, synthesize, and develop digital media artefacts, communication messages, or other electronic expressions. A primary goal of this paper is to identify promising perspectives through which learning is conceptualized, and to share the methodological challenges in investigating digital fluency in both individual and collaborative learning activities that take place in complex naturalistic settings and socially constructed online worlds. A review is provided of the current and prospective research methods that researchers use to capture, document, and study the compelling ways in which children and young people are using digital technologies such as Information and Communication Technologies, social networking software, video games, multimedia authoring tools, and mobile phones in everyday life to learn and play. The paper argues for a need to study the authentic, inventive, and emergent uses of digital technologies and interactive learning environments among youth to contribute to advancement of theories of everyday learning and to build a deeper understanding of how learning occurs in out‐of‐school settings from a practise‐oriented perspective rather than a knowledge‐centred one. Implications for instructional practise are also discussed in addition to ethical and pragmatic issues that will need to be addressed in the study of digital kids.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by a grant to the author from the MacArthur Foundation to synthesize research on digital learning and play. This work also benefited from a roundtable discussion on the topic of informal learning and digital kids with many key people who attended the 2005 Bay Area Institute, an event of the Center for Informal Learning and Schools funded by the US National Science Foundation. The ideas in this paper do not necessarily reflect the views of these foundations.

Notes

1. This vignette is based on direct observations made by the researcher of youth in homes, museums, and conversations with parents of digital youth.