Online gamification is an innovative educational practice, yet little is known about how the socio-material imbrications entailed in this pedagogical approach influence educator professional identities. Adopting a social-material sensibility to examine lecturer professional identities, this qualitative study mobilises visual-elicitation interviews…

In this paper, I ask: 'Can digital games support the learning of scientific inquiry as a situated practice? If so, how?' To approach this question, I draw upon feminist, STS, and pragmatist scholarship to develop a framework that can be used to analyze how a learning environment has been designed to teach scientific inquiry, as well as how it can…

The potential for technologies to transform health and physical education (HPE) has received increasing international attention in both policy and academic contexts. However, what is absent from much of this work is a lack of appreciation of the spatial dimension that recognises the relationship between "how" young people use digitised…

There is growing interest in the incorporation of digital games as part of the suite of offerings in museum education in heritage environments. Digital games are seen as ways of recreating historic worlds, affording empathetic and affective engagement, and increasing interest in and understanding of historical periods or processes, working in…

This study investigates children's media literacy with a specific focus on socially situatedness of children's understanding of online gaming industries and related marketing. This article analyzes interviews with 8-9-year-olds and their parents in homes in the U.S.A. Rather than concentrating on developmental factors, the article uses a…

Digital games have the potential of being a transformative tool for applying constructionist principles to learning within formal and informal learning settings. Unfortunately, most recent attention has focused on instructionist games. Connected gaming provides a tantalizing alternative approach by calling for the development of games that are…

This article aims to contribute new knowledge about the media literacies children assemble as they play the digital game "Minecraft" which it describes as a children's digital making platform. The article argues media literacy's tendency to use socio-cultural and humanist accounts of media participation limit its ability to fully explain…

In this article, we use a model for games and literacy to explore how one FIFA gamer worked across contexts. Previously, this model has been used to address the role of computer and video games in the teaching of literacy in the subject of English. In the current article, we combine this model with a learning lives perspective, which builds on the…

While there are several positive outcomes from implementing game design in a formal learning context, there are also challenges that have to be considered in order to improve game-based learning. This is explored in the article, using the concepts of "activity frames" and "stancetaking", focusing on the social organization of…

This paper explores teachers' beliefs about the ways in which the use of digital games in schooling contexts impacted upon students who they believed to be in some way at risk of educational or social alienation or failure. Drawing upon the theoretical resources provided by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the paper explores opportunities…

There is considerable enthusiasm in many quarters for the incorporation of digital games into the classroom, and the capacity of games to engage and challenge players, present complex representations and experiences, foster collaborative learning, and promote deep learning. But while there is increasing research documenting the progress and…

Teachers who attempt pedagogical innovation with authentic digital games face significant challenges because such games instantiate open systems of learner activity, inviting enquiry learning rather than knowledge acquisition. However, school environments are normatively sanctioned cultural spaces where direct instruction and high-stakes tests are…

In the last few years, digital games have become increasingly popular with both "hardcore" and "casual" audiences. At the same time, it has been argued that games can be powerful learning environments, since they are seen to encourage active and critical learning through participation in affinity groups and semiotic domains but…

With children using digital media at ever younger ages, media-education becomes a pressing issue for parents. As there is hardly any research on how parents guide the online activities of toddlers and young children an internet-survey was held among 792 Dutch parents of children aged between 2 and 12 years. Factor analysis revealed that for the…

Despite significant research in the field of educational technology, there is still much we do not fully understand about students' experiences with technology. This article proposes that research in the field of educational technology would benefit from a sociological framing that pays attention to the understandings and lives of learners. Within…