Re Thinking Leisure In A Digital Age

Digital worlds and cultures—social media, web 2.0, youtube, wearable technologies, health and fitness apps—dominate, if not order, our everyday lives. We are no longer ‘just’ consumers or readers of digital culture but active producers through facebook, twitter, Instagram, youtube and other emerging technologies. This book is predicated on the assumption that out understanding of our everyday lives should be informed by what is taking place in and through emerging technologies given these (virtual) environments provide a crucial context where traditional, categorical assumptions about the body, identity and leisure may be contested. Far from being ‘virtual’, the body is constituted within and through emerging technologies in material ways. Recent ‘moral panics’ over the role of digital cultures in teen suicide, digital drinking games, an endless array of homoerotic images of young bodies being linked with steroid use, disordered eating and body dissatisfaction, facebook games/fundraising campaigns (e.g. for breast cancer), movements devoted to exposing ‘everyday sexism’ / metoo, twitter abuse (of feminists, of athletes, of racist nature to name but a few), speak to the need for critical engagement with digital cultures. While some of the earlier techno-utopian visions offered the promise of digitality to give rise to participatory, user generator collaborations, within this book we provide critical engagement with digital technologies and what this means for our understandings of leisure cultures. The chapters originally published in a special issue in Leisure Studies.

The digital turn in leisure has opened up a vast array of new opportunities to play, learn, participate and be entertained – opportunities that have transformed what we recognise as leisure. This edited collection provides a significant contribution to our changing understanding of digital leisure cultures, reflecting on the socio-historical context within which the digital age emerged, while engaging with new debates about the evolving and controversial role of digital platforms in contemporary leisure cultures. This book also demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of studying digital leisure cultures. To make sense of how individuals and institutions use digital spaces it is necessary to draw on history, science and technology, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology and geography, as well as sport and leisure studies. This important and timely study discusses both the promise of the digital sphere as a realm of liberation, and the darker side of the internet associated with control, surveillance, exclusion and dehumanisation. Digital Leisure Cultures: Critical perspectives is fascinating reading for any student or scholar of sociology, sport and leisure studies, geography or media studies.

Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age addresses the complex and diverse experiences of learners in a world embedded with digital technologies. The text combines first-hand accounts from learners with extensive research and analysis, including a developmental model for effective e-learning, and a wide range of strategies that digitally-connected learners are using to fit learning into their lives. A companion to Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age (2007), this book focuses on how learners’ experiences of learning are changing and raises important challenges to the educational status quo. Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age: moves beyond stereotypes of the "net generation" to explore the diversity of e-learning experiences today analyses learners' experiences holistically, across the many technologies and learning opportunities they encounter reveals digital-age learners as creative actors and networkers in their own right, who make strategic choices about their use of digital applications and learning approaches. Today’s learners are active participants in their learning experiences and are shaping their own educational environments. Professors, learning practitioners, researchers, and policy-makers will find Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age invaluable for understanding the learning experience, and shaping their own responses.

Packed full with case studies from multi disciplines and with a helpful appendix of tools and resources, this book is an essential guide to effective design and implementation of sound e-learning activities.

What do we need to know about language and why do we need to know it? Providing the essential tools with which to analyse and talk about language, this book demonstrates the relevance of linguistics to our understanding of the world around us. This second edition includes: - Discussion of key areas of contemporary interest, such as neo-pronouns, translanguaging, and communication in the digital arena -Two brand new chapters exploring language and identity, and language and social media - A range of new and international examples - New and updated references and suggested readings - Tasks to aid learning at the end of each chapter - A glossary of key terms. Introducing a set of practical tools for language analysis and using numerous examples of authentic communicative activity, such as overheard conversations, social media posts, advertisements and public announcements, Why Do Linguistics? explores language and language use from a social, intercultural and multilingual perspective, showing how this kind of analysis works and what it can tell us about social interaction. Also accompanied by a new companion website featuring audio, video and other supportive resources for students and teachers, this book will help you to become an informed, active noticer of language.

Rethinking Problem-based Learning for the Digital Age provides grounded, evidence-based strategies for teaching faculty, academic developers and educational technologists who are changing their problem-based learning (PBL) modules and programmes from face-to-face to online. Given today’s rapid advancements in learning and curriculum development specific to online and blended modes, there is considerable potential to introduce new forms of PBL in higher education. This book applies fundamental and cutting-edge research, including original scholarship by the authors, to innovative PBL practices and realistic tasks that can be brought to life through digital environments, teamwork and resources. Whether re-contextualizing PBL practices for newly online/blended instruction or seeking fresh PBL approaches for existing digital education environments across disciplines, readers will be guided to construct active, highly motivating, learner-centred experiences using simulations, games, virtual reality, multimedia and other complex innovations.

Authored by more than 20 leading academics and providing in-depth coverage of a wide array of economic, social, technological and environmental realities in tourism planning and development, this volume is the latest in the field of tourism, theory and practice.

This is the first book to focus on the interrelated issues of social control and disorder in football. It shows how the ‘beautiful game’ illuminates our understanding of the mechanisms and techniques of social control and regulation in contemporary societies. It explores past, new, and continued responses from law enforcers, football associations, sport’s governing bodies, the media, and international organizations to issues of disorder and misbehaviour in football, and how this is highly contested by fans and fan groups. Featuring the work of an international team of leading researchers in football and sport-related studies, the book examines key contemporary trends and topics including fan activism, football-specific legislation, power, violence, fan rivalries, subcultures, the policing of crowds, social sorting, and surveillance. Featuring diverse international cases, including the Qatar World Cup, stadium protests in Portland, Oregon, spectator violence in Polish football, social media and Brazilian football, and sectarianism in Scottish football, the book also looks ahead to what the future holds for the world’s most popular sport. This is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, or the general reader with an interest in the sociology of sport, criminology, sport management, and sports law.