Portals to Understanding Learners’ Social Interactions Online

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session synthesizes four innovative studies examining interrelated dimensions of social interaction and literacies of children and adults in online spaces. The theorists on this panel see that the emergence of hybrid digital forms of online participation, such as virtual worlds, blogs, and games, calls for new understandings of human interactions and the social production of virtual and corporeal spaces. The findings elaborate learners’ social engagement with digital media and related frames of meaning making, from pre-school to elementary and adult learning. They examine the entanglement of interactions between children’s online and offline worlds, pre-schoolers talk during shared digital composition, and adult learners’ emotional responses to online learning formats. Demonstrating how to integrate game-based learning meaningfully into the literacy curriculum, the final study investigates how teachers applied an original model of games-as-text-and-action to transform education.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chair

• Kathy Ann Mills, Australian Catholic University

Papers

• Actualizing the Virtual in Classroom Settings - Cathy Burnett, Sheffield Hallam University; Guy Merchant, Sheffield Hallam University

• Digital Communication in a Preschool Classroom: Collaborative Social Interactions of Children and Teachers Writing E-Mail - Susan J. Danby, Queensland University of Technology; Christina R. Davidson, Charles Sturt University; Karen Thorpe, Queensland University of Technology

• E-Motion Diaries: Blogging Emotional Responses to Online Learning in Higher Education - Kathy Ann Mills, Australian Catholic University; Stephen M. Ritchie, Queensland University of Technology

• Conceptualizing Literacy in Planning for Games-Based Learning - Catherine Beavis, Griffith University

Discussant

• William Cope, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign