As we progress in the 21st century, children learn to become proficient readers and writers of both digital and non-digital texts. Knowledge, skills, and understandings of literacy emerge through ...sociocultural interactions with non-digital tools (e.g., paper-printed books) and digital tools (e.g., touch screen tablets). However, debate is ongoing over the role that digital experiences play in emergent literacy development. Researchers have voiced the need to conceptualise a common framework for literacy development that considers the emergence of digital literacy skills alongside conventional literacy skills and how these skills might interact during development. This is particularly important in light of the increasing use of digital texts used by young children, such as E-books and digital games. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework that might guide research and practice by examining the relationships between emergent literacy skills, emergent digital literacy skills, and proficiency in reading and writing.
This paper explores thumb-typing as a cultural technique stemming from the mutual development of typing interfaces and practices. Focusing on the work of the typing fingers, it examines how the ...assignment of thumbs to be the primary writing digits is an innovation that correlates—and in some respects causes—textual and social changes that are central to digital culture. It argues that thumb-typing embodies recursive relations between behavioral patterns, technological infrastructure, and textual creation. The analysis shows how the invention of the typewriter keyboard introduced the fingers to typing, and how developments of digital media refined the finger-work in interacting with the device, resulting in thumb-typing. The new functionality of the thumb as an executing rather than supporting finger, promotes a novel equivalency and interchangeability in finger employment to typing. This, I propose, problematizes traditional concepts of textuality, its performance, and authorship.
The article presents the evolution of the Digital Library of the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies of the University of Bologna (DL FICLIT) as a case study of the transition from ...a digital repository to a tool for research, teaching, and dissemination in the digital ecosystem. Designed to publish the department’s digital collections, initial requirements have progressively been expanded and the ability to integrate content with critical contributions emerged. Additionally, there has been a growing request to offer targeted reading perspectives for different user profiles. This prompted a reconsideration of the DL’s role beyond implementation, management, and maintenance methodologies, identifying its renewed role in the department’s activities in the coming years. This resulted in changes to the DL’s editorial process, new requirements for the software platform, and a multi-year development program. A program involving several players: lecturers and researchers, technicians and librarians, students, and the public. By reframing the path taken so far, and displaying the program for the future, the article aims to contribute to the debate on the role that the DLs of Italian university departments will be able to assume in the emerging Cultural Heritage ecosystem that the Ministry of Culture foresees with the National Digitisation Plan.
In the last three decades, the development of digital technology, and not least the Internet, has affected how we communicate, make meaning, and learn, both on an individual and on societal levels. ...Changes in communication patterns also coincide with increased globalization, changes in production and economic conditions. What drives what is difficult to ascertain, but all factors impact the educational system and contribute to the changing conditions for teaching and learning. Teaching nowadays involves the use and incorporation of digital technologies where learning increasingly becomes a matter of student-active participation, collaboration and sharing. Moreover, students need to be able to interpret information from a diversity of sources and media, formulate questions for this content and solve problems (Binkley et al., 2012; EU, 2017; Godhe et al., 2020). This special issue aims to showcase digital approaches to communication with the help of case studies that illuminate how text, information and multimodality in the digital age shape and influence education.
This article combines critical theory from children’s literature studies with research methods from games studies to explore the connection between silence and childhood in two digital texts. Little ...Nightmares (2017) and INSIDE (2016) are wordless video games that feature nameless, faceless children as their avatars. Weak and weaponless, the children must avoid detection and stay silent if they are to survive. By slinking and skulking, crouching and cowering, the children navigate their way through vast, brutal adult environments in order to reach safety – or so the player thinks. Both games, in fact, end in shocking, unexpected ways, prompting the disturbing realisation that silent children have secrets of their own. The games use scale, perspective, and sound to encourage close identification between the player and avatar, and position the silent, blank-faced child as a cipher onto which the player can project their own feelings of fear, dread, and vulnerability. The child-character’s quiet compliance with the player’s commands also situates the player as an anxious parent, orbiting, assisting, and protecting a dependent child as it moves through a dangerous world. For both subject positions, the child-character’s silence closes the distance between the player and avatar. However, when it is revealed that the child-characters have hidden, unknowable, and potentially sinister motivations, the meaning of their silence is wholly transformed. Using aetonormative theory (Nikolajeva; Beauvais; Gubar) in conjunction with studies of ideologies surrounding childhood (Jenks; Kincaid; Meyer; Balanzategui; Stockton; Lury), this article examines the extent to which these digital texts affirm or subvert cultural constructions of “the Child.” It employs a close reading approach proposed by games scholar Diane Carr to argue that the player-avatar relationships in these games shed new light on some of the fundamental contradictions that characterise adult normativity and child alterity, and concludes by suggesting some ways in which video games might productively expand and disrupt conceptions of aetonormative power relations.
Esta investigación se realizó con los estudiantes del programa de Licenciatura en Humanidades y Lengua Castellana de la Universidad de Pamplona, quienes se encontraban desarrollando sus prácticas ...pedagógicas en el nivel escolar. Este proyecto persiguió los siguientes objetivos: reflexionar crítica y pedagógicamente el rol de formación que deben asumir los estudiantes del área de Lengua Castellana en los nuevos escenarios educativos a raíz de la situación de pandemia generada por la COVID-19; contrastar los lineamientos y políticas educativas nacionales respectoa la condición de pandemia y su efecto real en el aula de clase, y proponer una perspectiva curricular para la enseñanza de la lengua a partir de “los textos digitales” como alternativa de aprendizaje. La metodología se basó en el método cualitativo con un diseño evaluativo; las técnicas e instrumentos fueron la observación participante, el diario de campo, el cuestionario, la prueba diagnóstica, entrevistas y la prueba final, según la modalidad que orientaba cada docente en formación. Los resultados muestran la brecha que existe entre entornos presenciales y entornos virtuales, lo que permitió proponer nuevas alternativas didácticas como los formatos y naturalezas textuales y su utilidad en los nuevos escenarios educativos.
•Digital personalized books are a little explored reading medium.•Digital personalized books are likely to engage mothers and children in a dialogue.•Children engage in self-focused talk using ...first-person pronouns.•Mothers talk about their children and other story characters.•Parents need to draw children out to get them to talk about other book characteristics.
Numerous studies have documented the benefits of parent-child shared reading of print books, but few studies have examined parent-child reading behaviours with digital personalized books. This lab-based study examined the child language outcomes following shared reading of a personalized digital book by twenty-six British mothers and their 3- to 4-year-old children. The digital book included pages that were individualized to each participating child, with each child’s name, photograph, favourite toy and food, as well as generic pages with no personalized content. The findings indicate the significance of personalization features in parent-child shared reading on screen and indicate the importance of parents’ role in expanding beyond children’s focus on self during shared reading.
In the last three decades, the development of digital technology, and not least the Internet, has affected how we communicate, make meaning, and learn, both on an individual and on societal levels. ...Changes in communication patterns also coincide with increased globalization, changes in production and economic conditions. What drives what is difficult to ascertain, but all factors impact the educational system and contribute to the changing conditions for teaching and learning. Teaching nowadays involves the use and incorporation of digital technologies where learning increasingly becomes a matter of student-active participation, collaboration and sharing. Moreover, students need to be able to interpret information from a diversity of sources and media, formulate questions for this content and solve problems (Binkley et al., 2012; EU, 2017; Godhe et al., 2020).This special issue aims to showcase digital approaches to communication with the help of case studies that illuminate how text, information and multimodality in the digital age shape and influence education.
This article reports on an investigation of pre-service teachers' views on creating digital storybooks for use in early childhood classrooms, and how this activity helped them develop technological, ...pedagogical and content knowledge for teaching literacy. Cohorts of Master of Teaching PSTs (n = 67) participated in the study over five years. This article also presents a rationale for the creation of digital storybooks as a resource for teaching early literacy. Data for this mixed-methods study came from an online survey, focus group discussions, and PSTs' reflective comments and analysis of their digital storybooks and rationales. This article focuses primarily on the survey data. The majority of PSTs reported that the process of creating digital storybooks and using them during professional practice was useful in helping them develop their technological, pedagogical and content knowledge for teaching literacy in the early years, as well as their knowledge about students.
This article presents a social semiotic framework for the multimodal analysis of website interactivity. Distinguishing it from interaction, it defines interactivity as the affordance of a text of ...being acted (up)on, thus including hypertextuality. The author introduces the notion of ‘interactive sites/signs’ as the loci of interactivity in digital texts; these have a two-fold nature and a two-dimensional functioning. In their two-fold nature, they are both places enabling actions producing effects and forms endowed with meanings. Notwithstanding the non-direct correspondence between forms, actions and effects (which makes any specific association between the three significant within a webpage design), and in spite of their many possible forms (encompassing still and dynamic images, shapes and writing), a small range of actions can activate them (click/click+type/hover), producing a restricted set of textual effects (access/provide/transfer text). In their two-dimensional functioning, interactive sites/signs function both syntagmatically, on the page where they are displayed, in their relation with other co-occurring elements, and paradigmatically, opening to optional text realizations, hence in their relation with these. The framework adapts Halliday’s three metafunctions to the analysis of the two-fold nature and two-dimensional functioning of interactive sites/signs. It provides a fine-grained account of the interactive meaning potentials of digital texts, distinguishing between a text’s aesthetics of interactivity – as visually communicated before it is activated, performed and experienced – and its functionality, in the configuration of interactive possibilities offered by a page. Designed to complement the extant practices of text analysis of webpages, the framework can be used comparatively, as exemplified in its application to the analysis of two blog pages, and can provide a more refined assessment of the interactive meaning potential of a webpage than traditional methodologies such as content analysis.
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