From digital native to digital apprentice. A case study of the transmedia skills and informal learning strategies of adolescents in Spain

ABSTRACT

This article presents the results of the Spanish context of a study carried out with adolescents within the Transmedia Literacy project (European Union). The aim of the article is to identify the transmedia skills that teenagers have and the informal learning strategies carried out to acquire them. The results show that teenagers have different transmedia skills, but they have them to very varying degrees. Their acquisition of these skills is conditioned by their motivations, attitudes and their context. YouTube is a key source of information and learning of transmedia skills among the Spanish adolescents of the study. The study findings show that young people rely mostly on ‘imitation’ and ‘learning by teaching’ strategies to learn new skills. Based on these results the myth of the digital native is deconstructed and the concept of ‘digital apprentice’ is considered.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescents
• transmedia skills
• informal learning
• digital native
• digital apprentice

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant No 645238.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maria-Jose Masanet is a postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her research interests are media literacy, adolescence and youth, TV series and gender. She was a visiting researcher at Loughborough University (2013) and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (2015). She has co-edited the book La educación mediática en la Universidad Española.

Mar Guerrero-Pico works as a research assistant at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She holds a PhD in Social Communication (UPF, 2016), and an MA in Communication and Creative Industries (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2010). Her research interests include transmedia storytelling, online fandom, narratology, television shows, social media and media education.

María-José Establés has a BA in Audiovisual Communication (UCM) and an MA in Communication and Learning in the Digital Society (UAH). She is working on her doctoral thesis at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. This work is funded by the ‘2015 Doctoral Training Grants Programme’ of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness.

ORCID

Maria-Jose Masanet http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1217-9840

Mar Guerrero-Pico http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4887-2348

María-José Establés http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9674-3981

Notes

1 http://transmedialiteracy.upf.edu

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme: [Grant Number Grant No 645238].