Studio 3 - Young citizens: Literacy and participation in new media ecologies
In recent decades, the development of digital technology and expansion of the Internet have resulted in significant changes in the media ecologies people use in their daily lives. Important consequences of these developments concern the socialization of new generations, where the values, skills and identities of young people are shaped through their participation in activities where technologies such as virtual environments and social media play an significant role.
The focus of LETStudio 3 is to unpack the consequences of the transformations that are currently underway and visible in many learning settings both inside and outside schools. The intention is to illuminate alternative settings and ways of learning where digital technology plays a significant role.
Studying virtual technologies and social media raises a number of analytic and methodological questions involving ways to understand these technologies and how to study them. These questions include:
- How can we study the virtual environment and what is going on there without losing what is happening locally? The social is happening digitally, but is also a situated, local activity.
- To what extent must one learn a medium or platform before one can use it to communicate? What obstacles must be overcome to become literate with a new medium or platform?
- What are the consequences of appropriating a leisure medium as an educational medium?
- Different tools are operated with different rules in different environments. How do digital environments function differently in different institutional and cultural contexts?
- What are the traces of a having used a digital tool in the subsequent conversations of users?
These research questions have been investigated in a number of research projects in Studio 3. Our research covers the use of social media such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, as well as educational platforms such as Einztein [http://einztein.com] and Carbon Footprint Calculator [http://footprint.stanford.edu/calculate.html].