Identity Community And Learning Lives In The Digital Age

This book analyzes research on education, identity and community, exploring the ways in which learning can be characterized across 'whole-life' experiences.

"Recent work on education, identity and community has expanded the intellectual boundaries of learning research. From home-based studies examining youth experiences with technology, to forms of entrepreneurial learning in informal settings, to communities of participation in the workplace, family, community, trade union and school, research has attempted to describe and theorize the meaning and nature of learning. Identity, Community, and Learning Lives in the Digital Age offers a systematic reflection on these studies, exploring how learning can be characterized across a range of 'whole-life' experiences. The volume brings together hitherto discrete and competing scholarly traditions: sociocultural analyses of learning, ethnographic literacy research, geo-spatial location studies, discourse analysis, comparative anthropological studies of education research and actor network theory. The contributions are united through a focus on the ways in which learning shapes lives in a digital age"--

Analyzes recent research on education, identity and community, exploring the ways in which learning can be characterized across 'whole-life' experiences.

It has become popular in recent years to talk about 'identity' as an aspect of engagement with technology - in virtual environments, in games, in social media and in our increasingly digital world. But what do we mean by identity and how do our theories and assumptions about identity affect the kinds of questions we ask about its relationship to technology and learning? Constructing the Self in a Digital World takes up this question explicitly, bringing together authors working from different models of identity but all examining the role of technology in the learning and lives of children and youth.

This book offers a case study of children and young people as they live, study and work within the contexts of their families, educational institutions and informal activities. The study explores how 'learning identities' are forged through complex interplays between young people and their communities.

Developments within the “knowledge society,” especially those resulting from technological innovation, have intensified an interest in the relationship between different contexts and multiple sites of learning across what is often termed as formal, non-formal and informal learning environments. The aim of this book is to trace learning and experience across multiple sites and contexts as a means to generate new knowledge about the borders and edges of different practices and the boundary crossings these entail in the learning lives of young people in times of dynamic societal, environmental, economic, and technological change. The empirical research discussed in this book has grown out of a Nordic network of researchers. The research initiatives in the Nordic countries tend to avoid the more spectacular debates over the future of the educational institutions that tend to dominate and obscure discussions on education in the knowledge society, and which look to models of informal learning, whether in the “learning communities” of workplaces and families or in the new socio-technical spaces of the Internet, as a source of alternative educational strategies. Rather, Nordic researchers more modestly ask whether it is possible to envisage new models of teaching and learning which take seriously both the responsibility to social justice and social wellbeing, which, at least rhetorically, underpinned a commitment to mass education of the 20th century, as well as to the radical challenges to traditional educational models offered by the new socio-technical spaces and practices of the 21st century.

This book explores the importance of the adoption of digital technologies by contemporary education systems. Partly a synthesis of findings from projects carried out in Norway by the author over the past 15 years, the data have been extended to raise key questions about the effectiveness of current education strategies for the Facebook and YouTube generation.

Youth Online chronicles the stories of young people from several countries - the US, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, and Holland - and their interactions in online communities over a seven-year period. It examines how young people construct their identities in various social contexts: social, fantasy, role-playing; and for various social purposes: leadership, learning, power, rebellion and romance. It explores the ways youth are deploying both visual and literary cues to develop a full sense of presence online and to effectively communicate with their peers. Using methods of textual, visual, and socio-psychological analysis, this book illuminates the ways in which young people are making sense of their own identities and their place within broader communities.