1st Edition

Play, Creativity and Digital Cultures

Edited By Rebekah Willett, Muriel Robinson, Jackie Marsh Copyright 2009
    254 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    254 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Recent work on children's digital cultures has identified a range of literacies emerging through children's engagement with new media technologies. This edited collection focuses on children's digital cultures, specifically examining the role of play and creativity in learning with these new technologies.

    The chapters in this book were contributed by an international range of respected researchers, who seek to extend our understandings of children's interactions with new media both within and outside of school. They address and provide evidence for continuing debates around the following questions: What notions of creativity are useful in our fields? How does an understanding of play inform analysis of children's engagement with digital cultures? How might school practice take account of out-of-school learning in relation to digital cultures? How can we understand children's engagements with digital technologies in commercialised spaces?

    Offering current research, theoretical debate and empirical studies, this intriguing text will challenge the thinking of scholars and teachers alike as it explores the evolving nature of play within the media landscape of the 21st-century.

    1. Introduction: Encountering Play and Creativity in Everyday Life  Rebekah Willett and Muriel Robinson  Section 1: Contexts of Digital Cultures  Introduction to Section One  2. Games within Games: Convergence and Critical Literacy  Catherine Beavis  3. Achieving a Global Reach on Children’s Cultural Markets: Managing the Stakes of Inter-Textuality in Digital Cultures  Valérie-Inés de la Ville and Laurent Durup  4. Consumption, Production and Online Identities: Amateur Spoofs on YouTube  Rebekah Willett  Section 2: Children and Digital Cultures  Introduction to Section Two  5. The Texts of Me and the Texts of Us: Improvisation and Polished Performance in Social Networking Sites  Clare Dowdall  6. Exciting Yet Safe: The Appeal of Thick Play and Big Worlds  Margaret Mackey  7. Online Connections, Collaborations, Chronicles and Crossings  Julia Davies  8. Mimesis and the Spatial Economy of Children’s Play across Digital Divides: What Consequences for Creativity and Agency?  Beth Cross  Section 3: Play, Creativity and Digital Learning  Introduction to Section Three  9. Creativity: Exploring the Rhetorics and the Realities  Shakuntala Banaji  10. What Education Has to Teach Us about Games and Game Play  Caroline Pelletier  11. Digital Cultures, Play, Creativity: Trapped Underground.jpg  Victoria Carrington  12. Productive Pedagogies: Play, Creativity and Digital Cultures in the Classroom  Jackie Marsh  13. Conclusion  Muriel Robinson and Rebekah Willett

    Biography

    Rebekah Willett is a lecturer at the Institute of Education, University of London, where she teaches on the MA in Culture, Language and Communication.

    Muriel Robinson is Principal and Professor of Digital Literacies at Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln.

    Jackie Marsh is Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield, UK, where she directs the EdD.