E3S Web of Conferences 273, 12018 (2021) https://doi.org/10.

1051/e3sconf/202127312018
INTERAGROMASH 2021

Digital educational media in foreign language

teaching and learning
Svetlana Kodrle1, and Anna Savchenko1*
1
Kuban State University, 350040, Stavropolskaya str., 149, Krasnodar, Russia

Abstract. The article considers the ways of exploiting digital educational

media in foreign language teaching at Kuban State University. The authors
propose a comprehensive definition of digital educational media, which is
an umbrella term for Internet-based media, computer-based media and
mobile media used for educational purposes. The digital educational media
exploited in foreign language teaching are classified into narrative,
interactive, adaptive, communicative and productive according to the
function they fulfil and the learning experience they support. The article
outlines effective ways of incorporating podcasting, multimedia
presentations, digital storytelling and other Internet-based media in foreign
language teaching. The authors demonstrate that the ways modern media
are applied in teaching English are determined by the teacher and depend
on the learning objectives. The findings indicate that modern media can be
effectively exploited for curricular purposes and assist in developing both
foreign language skills and general learning skills. The research done
shows that integration of media education and foreign language teaching
proves to be the most promising innovative educational technology
employed in modern universities today.

1 Introduction
Intensive introduction of new digital technologies and further development of existing
information technologies, including media technologies in all spheres of our life caused
rapid fundamental changes in education. The National Doctrine of Education of the Russian
Federation till 2025 focuses on the introduction of electronic educational tools, modern
information, telecommunication and media technologies into the education system, to foster
the integration of Russia into developing global information community and to improve the
quality, accessibility, efficiency and competitiveness of domestic education.
Studies have shown [1, 2] that the rapidly changing socio-cultural situation is another
factor, contributing to introducing significant changes in education. The current social
situation due to the coronavirus pandemic has posed a serious challenge to the higher
education institutions making them organize distance education based on digital
technologies.

*
Corresponding author: [email protected]

© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
E3S Web of Conferences 273, 12018 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202127312018
INTERAGROMASH 2021

To meet the expectations and needs of the information society the contemporary higher
education system is experiencing digital transformation. According to Russian
researchers [3, 4], the digital transformation of higher education is the integration of digital
technologies into education practices of all levels, implying the development of innovative
teaching methods exploiting a variety of media technologies: mobile, smart technologies,
interactive information technologies and other related Internet-based educational media
resources.
The impact of modern media technologies on education has been the subject of many
research papers. In his study A. Verbitsky [5], analyzes the challenges the higher education
system faces due to implementing digital learning in the era of cybersocialization of
society. He highlights that the only way for digitalization of learning to be productive is to
be supported by the psycho-pedagogical theory of contextual education.
In line with the theory of contextual education D. Laurillard [6], proposed her
“Conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies”. She worked out
a functional classification of media and analyzed their contribution to pedagogical
processes within the suggested framework. Previous studies have focused on applying
Laurillard’s classification of educational media to analyze the components of an online
teaching process [7], and to evaluate learning effectiveness of museum Web sites [8]. In
this paper we suggest that Laurillard’s classification of media may be similarly adopted to
analyze the educational efficacy of digital media exploited in foreign language teaching.
The aim of the research is to define and analyze digital educational media applied in
foreign language teaching and learning and to study the scope of their application at Kuban
State University.

2 Methods
In our research we applied the following methods: the analysis and synthesis of scientific
concepts, content analysis, descriptive method, structural and functional analysis of the
results, quantitative and qualitative research.
The following steps have been taken to achieve the aim of our research.
Firstly, we defined and classified digital educational media on the base of different
criteria. We gave definitions to terms “digital media” and “modern media” in the
educational context; differentiated terms “educational media” and “media education”. We
considered the functional classification of educational media suggested by D. Laurillard
and summarized its main points.
Secondly, we described the application of digital educational media in foreign language
teaching at Kuban State University. We refined D. Laurillard’s classification of educational
media to analyse the effectiveness of digital media in foreign language teaching within her
framework.
Finally, to study the students’ assessment of digital media contribution to the
development of language skills and general skills, we conducted empirical research
applying observation, survey, quantitative research.

3 Results

3.1 Definition and classification of digital educational media

Modern information society cannot exist without steady progress of digital technologies,
which involves the increasing influence of media and further introduction of media
educational technologies at universities.

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In the educational context today the term media is used and understood as:
– “a channel or system of communication, information;
– an object on which information may be stored [9]”.
To clarify the definition of educational media, it is essential to analyse the existing
classifications of media based on various criteria.
Applying the historical criterion, media can be divided into: grand-media (a drum,
whistle), handwritten media, printed media, electronic media (telegraph, radio, cinema),
digital media (web-sites, Internet, messengers), integrated media (those, which combine all
kinds of media and create a convergent media environment).
‘Digital media’ is an umbrella term for Internet-based media, computer-based media
and mobile media. The term ‘digital technology’ refers to a diverse area of media
technologies including Internet-based technologies, computer-based technologies and
mobile technologies.
With reference to the evolution of their development media can be classified into
traditional and modern. All kinds of media that appeared in the traditional analogue culture
belong to traditional media. Modern media are those, which evolved in the period of
digitalization, cybersocialization of our society. In terms of their evolution, digital media
are referred to as modern media. For this reason, the terms ‘digital media’ and ‘modern
media’ can be used synonymously in the discourse of our paper.
According to their content, media are subdivided into: scientific, social, political,
cultural, educational, etc. In pedagogical theory and practice, educational media technology
is defined as a technology using media for educational purposes.
The term “educational media” should be distinguished from the term “media
education”. While educational media are understood as a tool assisting in gaining
knowledge and obtaining skills in the scope of a particular curriculum course, media
education is an educational process implying ‘learning with the media and from the media’,
aimed at developing media and information literacy; acquiring critical thinking and
communication skills [10], facilitating creativity, promoting interpretation and analysis of
media texts; fostering self-expression using media technology.
To extend the definition of educational media we suggest using the analytical
classification of educational media presented by D. Laurillard [6]. According to the
learning experience they provide and the function they fulfil, D. Laurillard identifies five
types of educational media: narrative, interactive, communicative, adaptive, and productive.
In the proposed functional classification of educational media, each type of media is
described, characterized and related to a certain kind of students’ learning experience:
narrative media support attending, apprehending; interactive media support investigating,
exploring; adaptive media support experimenting, practicing skills; communicative media
support discussing, debating; productive media support articulating, modelling, expressing
ideas.
Laurillard’s classification of educational media is summarized and presented in Table 1.

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Table 1. Laurillard’s classification of educational media.

Examples of media, Learning
Type of media Characteristics
media technologies experience
Attending,
Print, graphics, picture,
Linear presentational apprehending a
image, audiocassette,
Narrative media media, non-interactive, lesson as a largely
CD, DVD
non-computer based passive recipient
Television, radio, films
of information
Investigating,
Hypertext, hypermedia, exploring some
Computer-based
multimedia, Web relevant resource
presentational media
Interactive media resources which contain when the way of
which allow users to
texts, graphics, video, interaction with
interact, navigate and
audio or any media is
select the content
combination of these determined by a
student
Computer-based media
that can change their state
in response to the user’s
actions. “An adaptive Tutorial programmes,
media is one that uses the tutorial simulations,
Adaptive media Experimenting,
modelling capacity of simulations, virtual
practicing skills
computer program to environments, virtual
accept the input from the worlds
user, transform the state of
the model, and display the
resulting output” [6].
Digital, Internet based
media Computer mediated
Computer / mobile phone conferencing, digital
Communicative
based media enabling document discussion Discussing,
media
discourse / discussion / environment, video debating
interaction through texts, conferencing,
graphics, video, audio or audioconferencing
any combination of them
Media enabling students
Micro worlds, product, Articulating,
Productive media to media to become an
modelling, animation, modelling,
author / to create
word processor expressing ideas
something

To sum up, the analysis of previous studies devoted to the definition and classifications
of media in the educational context allowed us to propose a comprehensive definition of
digital educational media. Our findings show that digital educational media is an umbrella
term for Internet-based media, computer-based media and mobile media used for
educational purposes. According to their function, digital educational media are classified
as narrative, interactive, communicative, adaptive or productive.

3.2 Modern media exploited in foreign language teaching and learning at

Kuban State University

As we have stated above, the use of modern media, information and digital technologies
has become an integral part of teaching foreign languages and developing reading, writing,
listening and speaking skills as well as enlarging the vocabulary, improving pronunciation,
motivating students and preparing them to use English for cross-cultural communication.

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Further, we will describe the ways teachers take advantage of the learning potential media
technologies afford in teaching English as a foreign language.
Prior research shows that 40% of our communication time is spent listening to others,
35% is spent talking to others, 16% is spent reading and 9% is spent writing. About 57,7 %
of learning time is spent listening. In the process of language learning, listening remains the
main source of knowledge and an important tool of language practice in class. It also has a
positive impact on students’ memory, which plays a crucial role in language acquisition.
Thus, listening comprehension plays a vital role in developing language competence. As
foreign language acquisition occurs in the Russian-speaking environment, it is vitally
important to have access to the authentic teaching resources designed by native speakers.
Modern media such as the World Wide Web offer a great variety of resources that can be
exploited to develop listening skills at different levels of language mastery. It allows to
apply individual approach to language teaching and to design multi-level tasks for in-class
and out-of-class activities. We widely use a number of audio and video resources, such as
Businessenglishsite.com, engvid.com, etc. The former provides free audio and video lessons
aimed at improving students’ listening skills and pronunciation, learning new vocabulary
and becoming fluent in the language of business. The latter is a bank of free video lessons
lasting for about 30 minutes. The topics of the video lessons for advanced or intermediate
learners range from culture tips to ZOOM meeting tips, while the lessons for beginners are
mostly devoted to matters relevant to the initial stage of language learning such as most
frequently used verbs, prepositions of time, etc. Both resources allow us to apply individual
approach to teaching as they provide the tools to customize teaching materials for learners
of different levels. The sites mentioned here are just two examples of the numerous Internet
resources that are easily adapted to students learning needs.
We assume that one of the most helpful teaching tools based on modern media is
podcasts. As a rule, podcasts are devoted to a certain topic and are updated on a regular
basis. These audio files can be listened to on a PC or they can be downloaded on a
smartphone. Podcasting has evolved greatly since its emergence in 2004 and now these
files can be both listened to and watched online. This technology offers great opportunities
for foreign language learners, mobile learning being one of them. Further, we will outline
how it can be used as an educational medium.
BusinessEnglishPod.com provides free weekly lessons and audio courses for
intermediate and advanced learners of English. As the name of the site implies, the
materials posted are related to business communication. Each Business English podcast
lesson focuses on a particular workplace English skill or situation (meetings, presentations,
telephoning, negotiating, socializing, travel, conversation, video conferencing, adapting to
change, etc.) and language function (clarifying, disagreeing, questioning, expressing
opinions, persuasion etc.). The list of topics is numerous and the teacher can easily choose
those their students will most benefit from. As each lesson lasts for about 40 minutes, we
consider it reasonable to use this resource for students’ independent work that is checked by
means of class or group discussions and/or vocabulary revision or test. It is worth
mentioning that dialogues and conversations recorded in these lessons can serve templates
for role-playing activities.
Scholars claim that significant learning occurs outside formal educational, training or
work settings [12]. It makes mobile learning, i.e. learning accomplished with the use of
mobile devices and informal learning, i.e. “learning that takes place elsewhere voluntarily
and primarily for pleasure” [12] central to meeting the learning needs of the younger
generation. For this reason, any authentic feature and documentary films (Learning English
Video Project on Englishclub.com, BBC), series (“Friends”), songs, smartphone
applications (Duolingo, British Council) are an invaluable source of new knowledge about
the language in general and a helping hand in developing listening skills in particular.

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It is obvious that learners learn through conversation with the external world, with
themselves, and with other learners and teachers. Therefore, for successful foreign language
learning it is essential to create favourable conditions for communication in the classroom.
Creating such a stimulating environment became an urgent task that required taking
immediate action in March 2020 when higher educational institutions had to work distantly
due to the outbreak of COVID 19 pandemic. Kuban State University chose Microsoft
Teams platform to conduct practical classes and read lectures. As a result, traditional face-
to-face teaching and learning activities had to be converted to the mode of video
conferencing. One of the most common complaints voiced by the foreign language teaching
community with regard to e-learning is the lack of regular, face-to-face teacher-student and
peer interaction [13]. This problem was partly solved by creating separate channels for
pairs or groups of students to facilitate simultaneous pair or group work aimed at discussing
or debating some issues. This approach was applied when a group discussion was a separate
task (e.g. following some text/article or a role playing exercise) and when it was one of the
stages of a big project. In some cases, students were asked to record their conversations for
further feedback and peer/teacher assessment.
The benefits of applying the principle of peer learning to foreign language teaching
have been discussed by K. Voloshina and A. Bolshak [14]. One of the ways to implement
this idea using modern digital media is to invite graduates to the virtual classroom to share
their experience with undergraduate students. We follow this approach at the Department of
Foreign Languages for Professional Communication at Kuban State University. In fact, this
3,5–year training programme is an additional course students can do simultaneously with
their first degree. At the end of the course the students have to translate an authentic English
text into Russian, analyse the lexical, grammatical and stylistic aspects of the translation
and present the work done. The text has to be scientific and relevant to the students’ major
subject at university. At the beginning of the academic year, we invited our former students
to join our online lesson to show multimedia presentations of their projects to graduate
students who were going to do the same kind of assignment at the end of the term.
Similarly, when translation practice was ending, graduate students presented their projects
to junior students who were going to do a similar task next year. In both cases, the
presentations were followed by questions and answers sessions, which stimulated online
discussion of the points related to the subject of the paper and the translation, as well as
some technical issues such as finding the right text, approaches to the task assigned, etc.
Thus, students of three different years of study participated in this activity. This experience
was beneficial for all the parties involved, it promoted collaborative and cooperative on-line
learning and made the participants speak English for a practical purpose.
Multimedia presentations have long been used in teaching foreign languages, both by
teachers and students. There are enough tools to create slides (PowerPoint, Bookdown,
Office Mix, Prezi, Sway), images or graphs that can be effectively exploited to the mutual
benefit of the teaching staff and students. A more sophisticated way to present information
or produce a hypertext in a foreign language is digital storytelling, which combines the art
of storytelling with the use of various digital devices, services, programmes, graphics, texts,
video, audio, etc. There are different types of storytelling (socio-cultural, business,
academic, personal, family) and a great number of websites that post digital stories devoted
to a wide range of topics. The variety of choices contributes greatly to the didactic potential
of this multimedia in foreign language teaching. Apart from using digital storytelling as a
source of relevant information presented in an engaging way, in our practical classes digital
storytelling is assigned as individual or group project facilitating interaction, cognitive,
communication, research and foreign language competence. Thus, the focus is shifted from
reproducing the information to competency-based education and creativity. Digital stories
can be created in mobile applications and on websites (“UtellStory”, “Renderforest”,

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spark.adobe), using different programmes («Pivot», «Adobe animation», «Autodesk

Maya») or mobile applications («Explain Everything», «Prisma 3D», «FlipaClip»).
When it comes to developing reading skills, new media also offer numerous
opportunities. Visiting websites of the leading English/American newspapers or
professional journals, reading and rendering articles has become a routine activity of our
students. In teaching English for specific or academic purposes, social media (Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube) can also be exploited as a resource for sharing and finding articles,
studies, new trends and best practices. The reliability of such sources is explained by the
fact that the members of professional or scientific communities read and review the
information posted on social media. As “digital natives”, i.e. those in the 18-34 age range,
access one or two social media platforms several times a day [15], social media prove to be
an effective teaching tool.
We adopted D. Laurillard’s taxonomy (Table 1) to study a wide range of digital media
exploited in foreign language teaching at our university. To expand the scope of the
analysis, we also researched how media of different types contribute to meeting language
learning objectives and general learning objectives. Our findings are summarized in
Table 2.
Table 2. The influence of the types of media on the meeting language learning objectives and general
learning objectives.
Type of media/
Media, methods and Language learning
learning General learning objectives
technologies objectives
experience
Promoting open-mindedness and
Narrative Texts / articles, graphics, Developing listening /
a positive attitude to other
media/ images, presentations, CD, reading comprehension
cultures and better understanding
attending, DVD, television, radio, skills; vocabulary
of students’ own cultural
apprehending feature / documentary development
identity; activating visual
films
memory and imagination;
Multimedia presentations,
search engines, on-line
Reading / listening/
Interactive translators, on-line Exploring, finding, classifying,
speaking;
media/ dictionaries, multiple selecting relevant information;
familiarizing with
investigating, choice tests, Web understanding,
different functional
exploring resources, newspaper evaluating, analyzing media
styles; vocabulary
websites, on-line journals, texts; developing computer skills
development
digital stories, social
media, mobile applications
Listening/ speaking/ Enhancing communication skills;
writing; explaining information; using
On-line conferencing,
Communicative overcoming the information in new situations;
discussion forum, email,
media/ language barrier; expressing and interpreting
mobile applications,
discussing, vocabulary ideas; drawing connections
messengers, social media /
debating development; between ideas, justifying a stand
social networks,
conversing; discussing; or decision; interacting;
educational platforms
debating; functional brainstorming; critical thinking;
language developing media skills
Reading/ listening/
Productive speaking/ writing; Creativity, speaking in public,
media/ giving a speech; ability to work independently
Computer/mobile based
synthesis of discussing; making a and in a team;
applications for
some new presentation; writing setting goals, planning, self-
multimedia presentations
product reports, articles, efficacy, reflection; creating a
and digital storytelling
messages, essays, media product, media literacy,
formal/ informal letters; digital literacy, editing
digital storytelling

Virtually all types of modern educational media incorporated in foreign language

teaching enhance communicative competence (linguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic), add to

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cultural awareness, foster communication and support particular kinds of thinking (critical,
logical, creative, visual, and intuitive). Therefore, these general learning objectives were
not included in Table 2.
The study reveals that the same medium can belong to different types of media
depending on the function it fulfils. Accordingly, the same medium can facilitate different
learning experience depending on the way it is used. Thus a multimedia presentation shown
in the classroom to present some new information is a “narrative” medium as it is just a
means to “re-purpose material originally developed for narrative media” [8]. However,
when the same presentation is accessed via the Internet, it becomes an “interactive”
medium. Finally, if creating a multimedia presentation is supposed to be the final stage of a
student’s project, it is a “productive” medium. The same refers to digital stories. When used
as a way to narrate, digital storytelling proves to be “exploratory” and “interactive” as the
students can select which parts they wish to read or to skip, whether they will watch the
video once or twice, etc. and “productive” when assigned as a creative task/project.
Another example is social media such as Twitter or Facebook exploited to gain new
knowledge from written texts or video lectures posted by members of a professional virtual
community. In this case, they are “interactive” media. On the other hand, when students
express their own ideas in the form of articles or blogs in a foreign language on social
networking sites, they use these media as “communicative” and “productive”.
Understandably, the function modern media perform and the way they are applied in
teaching English are determined by the teacher and depend on the learning objectives. We
agree with Stephen Brown who states that for the new medium to reach its pedagogical
potential, it is often necessary to reconstruct the learning objectives [7].We argue that,
when it comes to teaching foreign languages, the focus should be on authenticity (reading
and listening to authentic materials), research (exploring relevant sources of information on
the internet), communication (exchanging opinions and sharing experience via social media
or educational platforms), interaction (participating in class or group projects), innovation
(looking for new ways of teaching/learning), collaboration (on-line peer and cross-module
learning), creativity (producing one’s own unique product in a foreign language).

3.3 Students’ evaluation of contribution of digital media to language and

general skills development
In order to study the students’ evaluation of digital media effectiveness in language and
general skills development, we carried out a survey with the 242 Bachelor students of
Kuban State University participating in it. The study involved first year students (58%) and
second year students (42%) of Humanities (47%) and Natural Sciences (53%). In our
research we employed observation, survey, quantitative research.
We used a questionnaire that contained two multiple-choice questions. The respondents
had to assess the effectiveness of modern media in terms of achieving language-learning
objectives and general learning objectives as very effective, effective, fairly effective,
slightly effective, ineffective. The analysis of the results obtained shows that the vast
majority of the respondents consider modern media to be very effective (53%) or effective
(41%) for developing foreign language skills, while 6% consider modern media fairly
effective for developing foreign language skills. The results are graphically presented in
Fig.1.

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very effective 53%

effective 41%
fairly effetive 6%

Fig.1.Graph on students’ assessment of the effectiveness of modern media for achieving foreign
language learning objectives.
When asked how effective modern media exploited in foreign language teaching-
learning are for achieving general learning objectives, 36% of the participants assessed
them as very effective, 41% assessed them as effective, 19% considered modern media
fairly effective, 2% considered modern media slightly effective and 2% ineffective. The
results are graphically presented in Fig.2.

very effective 36%

effective 41%
fairly effective 19%
slightly effective 2%
ineffective 2%

Fig. 2. Graph on students’ assessment of the effectiveness of modern media for achieving general
learning objectives.
The data obtained in the survey confirm that students generally perceive modern media
as an effective tool for foreign language acquisition. Most respondents also believe that
modern media foster general skills development. However, a small percentage of the
participants reported modern media exploited in foreign language teaching and learning to
be ineffective for achieving general learning objectives. It might indicate that when
involved in media-related activity in and out of class, the students’ focus is primarily on the
language-related tasks.

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4 Discussion
At the beginning of this paper we proposed that D. Laurillard’s classification of educational
media could be adopted to analyze the efficacy of digital educational media in foreign
language teaching. The research results have proven this proposition.
Applying the adopted classification, we studied the framework of modern educational
media exploited in foreign language teaching at Kuban State University. We analysed the
educational efficacy of the digital media and classified them into four types, according to
their function and contribution to the students’ learning experience, as narrative, interactive,
communicative and productive.
The suggested analytical classification demonstrates the direct relation between the type
of media used and the certain learning mode: narrative media facilitate learning through
acquisition, interactive media promote learning by discovery, adaptive media provide
‘guided discovery’, communicative media foster learning through discussion, productive
media encourage learning through designing a new product.
To expand the scope of the analysis we refined D. Laurillard’s classification bringing
two more aspects into its framework, namely the contribution of digital educational media
exploited in foreign language teaching to achieving language learning objectives and
general learning objectives.
The approach adopted in this paper is of theoretical and practical significance. We
managed to give an analytical classification of all types of media integrated in foreign
language teaching and to relate each of them not only to the certain learning experience of
the students, but also to a particular set of language learning objectives and general learning
objectives. We consider our research of practical significance as it can be used by foreign
language teachers when planning their courses, setting teaching objectives, designing
media-based tasks for in-class activities and independent work of students.
The study of educational media applied in foreign language teaching indicates that
narrative, interactive, communicative, productive types of media are effectively
incorporated into foreign language teaching at Kuban State University, providing students
with diversified learning experience. However, adaptive media are not exploited in foreign
language teaching due to the lack of appropriate educational media in our educational
environment. Therefore, to exploit the teaching potential of adaptive media, it is vitally
important for universities to find technical solutions enabling to design simulations and
virtual environments for foreign language courses.
In our research we proposed a comprehensive definition of digital educational media
and analyzed terms “educational media” and “media education” in the context of foreign
language teaching. Our findings show that when incorporated in foreign language teaching,
media are not only an efficient educational tool, developing 4 basic language skills
(reading, writing, listening and speaking), but also a basis for effective media education,
which constitutes a significant part of general learning objectives associated with digital
media application.
This conclusion has been confirmed by the survey, conducted to study the students’
assessment of digital media effectiveness for the development of language skills and
general skills. The results of the survey clearly demonstrate that most students highly assess
the educational potential of modern digital media in enhancing both kinds of skills.
To sum up, integration of media education and foreign language learning proves to be
the most promising innovative educational technology employed in modern universities
today. Developing and reinforcing each other, media education and foreign language
learning form a powerful way to create richer learning experiences for students.

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Chapter 12
Learning by Doing in the Digital Media Age

Lynde Tan and Beaumie Kim

Keywords Digital media • Learning by doing • Social theory of literacy

• Ethnographic perspective • School literacy practices • Out-of-school literacy
practices

Introduction

Technology is now more than what is commonly known as information technology

(IT) or information and communication technology (ICT) (Buckingham 2008).
The changing characteristics of technology in contemporary times are described
as being digital, interactive, hypertextual, virtual, networked and simulated (Lister
et al. 2009), otherwise known as digital media. Digital media are electronic media
that operate on numerical representations or digital codes (Manovich 2001). As
the digital codes make media programmable, digital media allow convergence
of various media for producing and distributing multimodal productions and
reassembling these texts to accentuate its interactivity and aesthetic power (Everett
2003; Lankshear and Knobel 2007; O’Reily 2005). What is distinctly new about
digital media is not just the shift in physical properties from the analogue to
the digital form but, more importantly, what changes this shift brings to social
practices.
Digital media have enabled adolescents these days to become both consumers
and producers of their own media texts (Lankshear and Knobel 2010; Reid et al.

L. Tan ()
School of Education, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797,
Penrith NSW 2751, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
B. Kim
Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2015 181

T.-B. Lin et al. (eds.), New Media and Learning in the 21st Century,
Education Innovation Series, DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-326-2_12
182 L. Tan and B. Kim

2002). Lankshear and Knobel (2010) argue that the role of a text consumer and
producer is no longer clearly defined in adolescents’ multimodal literacies. They
argue for a new role which they call the producer (Bruns, as cited in Lankshear and
Knobel 2010, p. 10) to refer to a person who actively uses the resources available in
their literacy practices to (re)create new resources that are in turn made available to
others in their network.
Ito et al. (2008) emphasise that in this digital age, young people are acquiring
social and technological skills necessary for participation in contemporary society
while participating in friendship-driven and interest-driven online participation.
They further argue that contrary to the perceptions held by educators, parents
and policymakers, young people’s online participation has given them access to
different forms of learning. There is an increasing body of literature that describes
adolescents’ new culture of learning, such as learning by doing while creating texts
using digital media (e.g. Lankshear and Knobel 2010). For instance, the young
people in Lankshear and Knobel’s (2003) study learnt about Microsoft’s 3D Movie
Maker and FrontPage, and how to use these applications, while using them to create
web pages. Lankshear and Knobel (2003) argue that learning by doing or ‘learning
as you go’ is the norm when young people experiment with digital media (p. 188).
However, Luke (2002) notes a general agreement that a dichotomy between
school and out-of-school literacy practices exists. He further argues that the
dichotomy is perpetuated by policymakers who ‘lack the necessary designs, exper-
tise, and generational orientations’ (Luke 2002, p. 190) to realise new literacies,
which are more evident in youth’s everyday lives, in school. In line with Luke’s
(2002) argument, King and O’Brien (2002) argue that teachers play a part in
translating policy that privileges print into classroom practices that devalue youth’s
expertise with language and literacy associated with technology use outside the
school. Teachers, thus, establish a dichotomy between school and out-of-school
literacy practices, when they use technology as ‘old wine in new bottles’ (Lankshear
and Knobel 2006, p. 55).
A baseline research was conducted in 51 primary and secondary schools as
well as junior colleges in Singapore to study the relationships amongst teachers’
beliefs about knowledge and learning and their pedagogical practices. The study
highlighted a gap between policies and implementation of technology for teaching
and learning (Jacobson et al. 2010). Although teachers believed in the potential of
technology in inculcating higher-order thinking skills in more authentic learning
(such as analysing data collected from real-world contexts), technology was pre-
dominantly used to reinforce content-based or didactic instruction which teachers
deemed more appropriate for preparing their students for the national examinations
(Jacobson et al. 2007, 2010). Similarly, teachers’ preference for didactic instruction
was also reported by Lim (2006) in his study of technology integration in Singapore
schools. In short, it can be inferred that technology used in Singapore schools has
not incorporated adolescents’ use of technology outside the school.
We acknowledge the need to understand the contexts in which adolescents’ social
practices of learning are better brought into play through their voices. This chapter
therefore examines different contexts in which the emergence of their learning
12 Learning by Doing in the Digital Media Age 183

culture happens and what the practices look like. This chapter contributes to the
ongoing dialogue on a new culture of learning afforded by digital media in Singa-
pore contexts. It specifically expounds on the term, learning by doing, and makes
use of illustrative examples from two adolescent research studies to unpack the term.

The Social Practice View of Literacy and Learning

The social practice view of literacy and learning is the orienting theory that
underpins the arguments we put forward in this chapter. By social practices, it
refers to the ‘recurring patterns of behaviour that are culturally recognizable’ and
‘they involve people making meaning and communicating their meanings, by using
language and other semiotic means’ (Papen 2005, p. 30). Hence, by literacy as social
practice, I refer to the six tenets of the social theory of literacy espoused by Barton
and Hamilton, namely:
• Literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these can be inferred from
events which are mediated by written texts.
• There are different literacies associated with different domains of life.
• Literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and power relationships,
and some literacies are more dominant, visible and influential than others.
• Literacy practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goals and
cultural practices.
• Literacy is historically situated.
• Literacy practices change and new ones are frequently acquired through pro-
cesses of informal learning and sensemaking (2000, p. 8).
From this perspective, literacy as social practice is used interchangeably to refer
to the social view of literacy.
Gee’s work is widely cited for applying the practice view of literacy to learning.
In his books (Gee 2003, 2004), he has made a unifying argument that children
learn best through ‘cultural processes’ where there are modelling of behaviours
by masters and support, feedback and information are given just in time only
when needed (Gee 2004, p. 12). He contends that this learning is situated and
less alienating for children. He furthers his argument by contending that children
are more likely to acquire the skills that are important in new times by playing
computer games in their everyday lives than through traditional schooling. He
claims that computer games embed principles of learning that are more anchored
in contemporary learning theories. Acquiring these skills through game play is in
fact producing mushfaking, a term Gee (2008) borrows from prison culture to refer
to ‘[making] do with something less when the real thing is not available’ (p. 180).
Gee (2008) argues that mushfaking can be a possible starting point in applying the
practice view of literacy to classroom teaching and learning.
Building on Gee’s perspective on the practice view of literacy and learning,
Ito et al. (2008) further contend that literacy and learning are inseparable in
social practices regardless of the sites of their occurrences. In Ito et al.’s (2008)
184 L. Tan and B. Kim

ethnographic work of young people in America, they suggest that young people have
been using online spaces to extend friendships and interests. While participating
in such online practices, the young people are also participating in self-directed
and peer-based learning. Their study suggests that social contexts and learning are
inseparable which thus shows how social and educational affordances of digital
media can be related.
Brown (2005) strongly suggests that in the digital age, the culture of learning
characterised by tinkering, experimenting and sharing in a community creates a
new learning environment in education. Drawing on examples such as blogging,
online chatting, participation in wiki and video-based game playing, the unifying
argument points to the work of Lave and Wenger (1991) who argue that learning
is best viewed as a social process that is situated in one’s participation in social
practices. Participation in social practices presupposes learning by doing something
that is significant to the social and cultural contexts that one finds himself or herself
in. This is the starting point for the discussion in this chapter.
We aim to identify the key tenets of learning by doing suggested by the work of
Gee (2003), Ito et al.’s (2008), Brown (2005) and others who are proponents of Lave
and Wenger’s (1991) work on situated learning. These are the tenets that are taken
up and expounded in the following sections of this chapter. It is important to note
that we do adopt the narrower view of learning by doing which connotes hands-on
experience or drills and practice.

Foregrounding Student Voices: Cases from Two Schools

We draw on cases from two different schools in Singapore to illustrate the ways
in which learning by doing happens. Although both studies described in this
chapter are based on different curriculum designs, they share similar approaches
and dispositions. First of all, both studies foreground student voices in learning
approaches and involve teachers to design curriculum. Second, there is a strong
interest in listening to student voices in order to understand adolescents’ media use
through ethnographic perspective.
Barton and Hamilton’s (1998) four aspects of an ethnographic perspective
represent how we seek to understand the adolescents’ engagement with digital
media:
• It focuses on real-world settings.
• Its approach is holistic, aiming at whole phenomena.
• It draws on multiple methods of collecting data.
• It is interpretive and aims to represent the participants’ perspective(s) (p. 57).
The primary merit in adopting an ethnographic approach lies in its ability to
provide meaning in context, a cultural description of how communicative practices
are instantiated and how artefacts are created (Barton and Hamilton 2000; Green
and Dixon 2008; Heath et al. 2008; Kress and Street 2006). In the following parts of
12 Learning by Doing in the Digital Media Age 185

the chapter, we illustrate how learning by doing happened in the two schools using
various types of digital media through selected data (i.e. observations, interviews,
artefacts, videos and online postings). We selected key incidents from the data we
collected for in-depth analysis and discussion in this chapter. By key incidents,
we refer to Emerson’s (2007) notion that they are the events from my participant
observations that ‘suggest and direct analysis in ways that ultimately help to open
up significant, often complex lines of conceptual development’ (p. 457). Given the
characteristics of an ethnographic perspective, it is more appropriate to achieve
communicative validity that stresses ‘the soundness of the argument put forward’
(Carspecken, as cited in Knobel 1999, p. 15) by drawing on a range of data and
providing thick descriptions of our two cases.

Multiliteracies Curriculum in Lakeshore High School

Lakeshore High School’s (LHS, pseudonym) English Department was redesigning

their language arts curriculum, informed by the New London Group’s (Cope and
Kalantzis 2000) pedagogy of multiliteracies when the first author started working
with them. The department was keen to explore how this pedagogy could support
their plan to incorporate the linguistic and paralinguistic modes of communication
in their Year 2 language arts programme (for the 14-year-olds) (Tan and Guo
2009). The revised language arts curriculum for the Year 2 students included the
reading, viewing and production of multimodal and multimedia texts. Hence, the
revised curriculum in that year had made provisions for the students to participate
in text production, such as developing brochures, PowerPoint and Flash multimedia
presentations and 3D films.
The students discussed in this chapter were involved in creating Flash multimedia
presentations and MediaStage productions as part of their multiliteracies curricu-
lum. Flash allowed the students to create animation, integrate video into web pages,
make games and develop Internet applications. To use Flash for these purposes,
the students had to learn the programming language within the software called
ActionScript. The production task of creating a Flash multimedia presentation was a
combination of their language arts and computer literacy group project. The students
were tasked to create a multimedia presentation to promote their new language
arts curriculum targeted at potential overseas students who might be interested in
learning English and studying in their school.
The Year 2 students had been reading Shakespeare’s Macbeth in their language
arts classes. At the end of the unit, the teacher wanted the students to use MediaStage
to produce a short clip of 30 s to 1 min to cast parts from Macbeth Act 1 Scene 7
with the aim to portray any of the themes they had learnt from the literary study.
MediaStage was an appropriate software for the literary study as the students were
able to create 3D productions such as short films, television news, pop music video
using the range of backdrops, props, sounds, images, recording facilities, text-to-
speech technology, lighting and camera work made readily available within the
animated learning environment.
186 L. Tan and B. Kim

All the adolescents who participated in this multiliteracies curriculum were

Chinese, and they were about 14 years of age. They learnt how to use Macromedia
Flash 8.0 (predecessor of Adobe Flash) not from their language arts lessons but in
their computer literacy lessons for about 8 weeks. For MediaStage, however, only
a 3-hour crash course was conducted by the local vendor that sold the software
to the school. Due to the constraints of space and time, the language arts teacher
asked for one or two student representatives from each project group to attend the
training session. Eight participants, Jay, Wendy, Sally, Xin, Yenny, Tiffany, Melissa
and Amanda, appear in this chapter, as we illustrate how they learnt by doing in
small groups for all their production tasks around this multiliteracies curriculum.

Learning Geography in Good Shepherd Secondary School

Good Shepherd Secondary School (GSSS, pseudonym) had a group of Geogra-

phy teachers who got together for professional learning circle with our project
researchers every week to redesign and reflect on their Secondary one Geography
lessons. The curriculum was designed based on our six design principles of game-
integrated curriculum (Kim 2010):
• Engage them in group activities (developing epistemic communities), starting
with open-ended questions (setting up the meaningfulness of the topic).
• Engage them in activities that provide relevant experience (using game or other
tools).
• Require them to produce group or individual artefacts (encouraging their owner-
ship of the process and product).
• Develop a sharing mechanism of the class (encouraging making their ideas public
and further conversations).
• Engage them in consolidation and linking activities (understanding the connec-
tions and gaining confirmation about their ideas).
These principles were implemented by incorporating a game and other tools for
Geography learning and creating spaces for sharing learners’ ideas and artefacts in
and out of the classroom.
The cases presented in this chapter emerged within the context of the changed
curriculum. Secondary one Geography at GSSS in 2011 started with disaster-
related topics (volcanoes, earthquakes, plate tectonics, landforms) differently from
the typical sequence of the curriculum. This was done deliberately to set up a
better context of meaningful and collective learning of Geography (i.e. common
experience outside of school due to the proximity to Indonesian volcanoes and the
sporadic minor tremors in Singapore affected by their activities). Two of the digital
media that students used and we will discuss here are Edmodo and a game called
Voyage to the Age of Dinosaurs (VAD). The latter was developed by involving the
students and their teachers throughout different phases of the game development
(Kim et al. 2013). VAD used in this curriculum was the project’s third game
12 Learning by Doing in the Digital Media Age 187

prototype that was focused on topics of navigation, maps and rock types with
fossil search, excavation and assembly activities. Edmodo (www.edmodo.com) is a
social learning site that resembles social media features, such as those of Facebook
(www.facebook.com), but caters for the educational use of teachers and students by
providing a safer platform for them to connect and collaborate.
GSSS is an all-boys school, and the students described in this chapter were in
their first year of the secondary school. In GSSS’s Geography classroom, VAD was
used to teach the identified curriculum topics. It was also used outside of curriculum
time in order to facilitate the longer play time. The teacher used Edmodo as an
extended space for discussions; she did not use Edmodo to curricular topics solely
but to let students continue exploring their areas of interest related to Geography
or earth sciences. In Edmodo, there were around 13 frequent visitors and another
10 occasional ones who posted and responded throughout the semester. The rest of
them were quiet or were responding only to the class matters such as exam time,
homework and other assignments.

The Ways in Which Learning by Doing Happens

In this section, we put forward our arguments on how learning by doing can be
understood by the way it can happen in adolescent literacy practices. Our viewpoints
about learning by doing repudiate the Cartesian assumption that learning is the trans-
mission of decontextualised and discrete knowledge from one individual to another
(Brown and Adler 2008). By focusing on adolescent literacy practices, we advocate
that learning by doing happens by situating learning in social practices, through
learning in participatory culture and by tinkering with tools in everyday practices.

It Happens by Situating Learning in Social Practices

We argue that learning by doing means participating in the social practices similar
to those of experts (Burn 2009). Learning by doing in the context of our studies
was similar to learning to be practitioners of some sorts through ‘enculturation
into a practice’ (Brown 2005, p. 3). Citing studio-based learning environments as
an example, Brown (2005) explains how students learn to be architects, physicists
and engineers by making public their work in progress and engaging in critiques
with experts and peers. In such social learning environment, the students were
enculturated into a practice by thinking like an expert and participating in processes
and practices that experts in their field would involve themselves in. In other words,
the students took on various roles needed for experts’ practices that are comparable
to those in professional communities.
In Burn’s (2009) study on how a secondary school worked with four primary
school children to create animations of Little Red Riding Hood, he describes
188 L. Tan and B. Kim

the shared responsibilities in the collaborative production and argues that such
shared responsibilities are shared authorship where students ‘may adopt different
roles in the production process, and practices of the industry may be simulated’
(Buckingham, Grahame & Sefton-Green, as cited in Burn 2009, p. 135). Such
enculturation into the media production practices was tacitly acquired as one
participated in the shared authorship of a collaborative digital media production
that closely matched with the social practices of a media producer.
In LSH’s multiliteracies curriculum, the division of labour as shared authorship
was also observed during the participant observations. For instance, on the first
day of creating the Flash presentation in Xin’s group, Xin, Wendy and Jay were
the scriptwriters when they discussed what to represent in the Flash presentation.
Xin doubled up as a scribe whenever she typed out the group’s ideas on the
possible narrative using Microsoft Word. Sally was the producer who used Flash to
actualise their work and final ideas. In Xin’s group, Xin had to be the storyboarder
to draw out their Flash presentations on the hard copy storyboard.1 Wendy was
also the proofreader to ensure that the written texts in the Flash presentation were
grammatically correct. At different stages of creating their Flash presentation, the
group was a team of producers or directors when they discussed how visual and
music could be used to mediate their target audience’ perceptions of their school
learning environment and programmes.
Similarly, various roles and practices that may look similar to geoscience
practitioners were emerging in Edmodo with the students in GSSS. As the Edmodo
space is less regulated by the teacher, students started asking new questions
and suggesting opinions that are outside of curriculum, monitoring credibility of
information sources, moderating discussions, asking clarifying questions and so
forth. For example, a student named Greg realised that a question raised in class
was never resolved, so he suggested revisiting it in Edmodo (see Excerpt 12.1).

Excerpt 12.1: Extended Geoscience Talk (Global Warming and Volcanic

Eruptions) on Edmodo
I was flipping through my thinking journal and found out that we had forgotten
to discuss the thinking question: Does global warming affect the number of
eruptions. Well, most information I researched on states that volcanoes affect
global warming, but this still does not answer the thinking question : : : Does
anyone found the answer yet? Or does this question remain unsolved?

Five people participated in this discussion over 3 days trying to understand the
relationships between global warming and the number of eruptions. The group
eventually concluded that global warming would not affect the number of eruptions,
but they acknowledged that there might be a need for more relevant research in this
area in the future. Figure 12.1 shows a screen capture of another Edmodo discussion
about ‘earthquake proof buildings’.
12 Learning by Doing in the Digital Media Age 189

Fig. 12.1 Students’ discussion on Edmodo

The roles more similar to geoscience community of practitioners emerged when

Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami happened on March 2011. Students
started monitoring and sharing news online and continued to do so as the natural
disasters developed. Their activities online started on 13 March and continued until
15 April. Dan, for example, shared about Indonesia’s event followed by Japan’s
earthquake (see Excerpt 12.2).

Excerpt 12.2: Extended Geoscience Talk (Volcanic Eruption and Earth-

quake) on Edmodo
One of Indonesia’s most active volcano has erupted, sending lava and searing
gas clouds tumbling down its slopes. Volcanology official Agus Budianto said
on Friday that authorities were still trying to evacuate residents living along
the slopes of Mount Karangetang : : : . The eruption happened hours after a
massive earthquake in Japan that triggered a Pacific-wide tsunami.

After Dan shared this news on 13 March, four students discussed about this
event by sharing more details and other connected events and exploring relationships
amongst them until 20 March. They discussed the causes, the magnitudes, the plates’
faults and the changes that happened. Through their discussions, they verified and
elaborated information and knowledge shared with each other and challenged their
190 L. Tan and B. Kim

own previous assumptions about the world. Their activities resembled the group of
scientists who would have been studying these events at that time.
Nevertheless, further analysis demonstrated that the impetus for learning by
doing, in school and out of school, was different. In out-of-school literacy practices,
learning by doing was self-directed. It was also ‘passion-based learning’ (Lankshear
and Knobel 2010, p. 20), as the learning was driven by their self-generated interest,
purely for fun, curiosity and personal concerns. In LHS, Tiffany and Amanda are
good examples of how they learnt by doing as they explored ‘specialized and niche
interests’ in ways that gained acknowledgement from their network peers (Ito et al.
2008, p. 1). While learning to use digital media to create blog skins and fan fiction,
Tiffany and Amanda were learning to be a blog skin creator and a fan fiction writer,
respectively, in the online community that they participated in. In the case of GSSS,
it was also apparent that Greg and Dan’s postings and the responses to them also
show that they were exploring and trying to understand about the earth’s events
out of their own interest and concerns. In contrast, coping with the demands of
completing and submitting their schoolwork to meet a deadline appeared to be the
impetus for learning by doing in school even though it was their inherent way of
learning, in their literacy practices, in and out of school.

It Happens Through Learning in Participatory Culture

Earlier, we argue that learning by doing happens by situating learning in social

practices. Building on this point, we explain how learning by doing happens
in young people’s participatory culture in their everyday practices. Participatory
culture has been widely cited in adolescent literacies, such as by Dowdall (2009),
Jenkins (2007) and Sefton-Green (2004), amongst many others. Jenkins explains
that participatory culture includes:
• Affiliations: Memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centred
around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards,
metagaming, game clans or MySpace.
• Expressions: Producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning
and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mashups.
• Collaborative problem solving: Working together in teams, formal and informal,
to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia,
alternative reality gaming, spoiling).
• Circulations: Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging)
(2007, p. 3).
Gee (2003) suggests that learning in the participatory culture is learning by doing.
In the first study of (LHS) the participants’ out-of-school literacy practices, this was
evident when the bloggers claimed that they learnt about blogs from their peers who
blogged. These peers taught them what a blog was and how to blog. For instance,
based on my individual interview with Melissa, she reported that she learnt how
to create blogs from her classmate, named Beatrice, in Class 2 F when she was
12 Learning by Doing in the Digital Media Age 191

13 years old. She had seen Beatrice blogging at school (but outside school time) and
was interested to learn how to blog. Beatrice guided her in her search for a free blog
creation tool called blogger and sat down beside her to show her how to go about
creating a blog, step by step. After Beatrice had introduced her to blogskin.com, she
learnt how to change her blog skin on her own.
It is interesting to know that Melissa then taught Yenny how to create blogs.
Yenny read her friends’ blogs when she was 13 years old, but she approached
Melissa to guide her through the steps needed to create her first blog, from choosing
a template from blogger.com to adding a tag board, creating links to other people’s
blogs and publishing her first blog post. After Melissa did an example for her, she
later picked it up on her own.
As in Greenhow and Robelia’s (2009) study, both these girls started using their
blogs not only to keep themselves updated on each other’s lives but as sites of
learning about schoolwork. For instance, Melissa once wrote on Yenny’s blog post
to ask her for help in using Flash. Although explicit instruction was given on how
to use Flash, the girls needed just-in-time help in learning how to use Flash to
create their productions. Instead of waiting for the next lesson on Flash where
Melissa could have approached the teacher for technical advice, she would rather
use blogs like a helpline to get her peer’s technical advice to resolve her problem
when learning to use Flash to create a presentation.
Through Edmodo interactions in GSSS, participatory culture could be seen from
their affiliations and collaborative problem solving. On 31 January in discussing
volcano in the classroom, some students were wondering about the difference
between lava and lahar. ‘How is lahar formed?’ A student asked and the teacher
wrote on the board, but it was not discussed in class. The students searched and
discussed about lahar online for the next 10 days (1 January–9 February). Jason
started the post on 31 January (see Excerpt 12.3).

Excerpt 12.3: Extended Geoscience Talk (Lahar) on Edmodo

I found out what Lahar is. It is the mixture of all the pyroclastic materials
mixed with half-solid and half-liquid lava. Meaning that the lava looks like
mud because it is solidified and it is half liquid, thus it flows down like a
mudslide.

After Jason posted, two other students shared what they found about how
lahar forms, and the discussions continued until 9 February amongst 17 students,
elaborating on the process, contents and effects of lahar. The discussion continued
to talk about relevant cases (i.e. Mt. Vesuvius and Pompeii), to compare lahar
with volcanic ash and to discuss geologists’ efforts to predict lahar’s paths and
disaster prevention measures. They were practising collaborative problem solving
to understand various aspects of a natural disaster.
This example demonstrates classroom practices being extended through the
digital media. Their membership for Edmodo was requested by the teacher, but the
participation in the discussion was voluntary and often emergent around their own
192 L. Tan and B. Kim

interest (but within geography content related). Edmodo can be seen as a ‘boundary
object’ (Bowker and Star 1999, p. 16), which has similar characteristics of Facebook
and provides an informal space to discuss issues of their own interest. At the same
time, it would limit their issues closer to their school Geography-related topics and
also can be a space that can be tightly focused on supplementing classroom practices
(e.g. sharing notes, making announcements, conducting quizzes).

It Happens by Tinkering with Tools

Extending on our last two arguments about learning by doing, this part of the chapter
explains how learning by doing happens by tinkering with tools in adolescents’
participatory culture in their school and everyday practices. Learning by doing, in
the sense of learning how to ‘first and foremost engage with the software’ (Sefton-
Green 2005, p. 100), was our research participants’ way of learning how to use
digital media. These practices were learnt by what Ito et al. (2008) describe as
‘tinkering and exploration’ with the new digital media.
In LSH’s multiliteracies curriculum, learning by doing was exemplified as the
adolescents in the study showed that they would rather experiment with the digital
media than engage in storyboarding before the actual production began (Tan 2013).
Storyboarding was an imposed school literacy practice, and it was expected to
precede the actual digital media production in school. The data in this study,
however, suggest that the participating adolescents were more preoccupied with the
experimentation with digital media so that they knew what could be afforded by
the digital media. These adolescents show that it was possible to complete a digital
media production without first completing a storyboard.
The interview data with the adolescents also confirm that learning by doing was
their way of learning how to use new digital media for text production. Yenny’s
viewpoint is a good illustrative example (see Excerpt 12.4).

Excerpt 12.4: Yenny’s Viewpoint on MediaStage Production

We didn’t follow our plan because we find it too tedious and also we didn’t get
a feel of how using MediaStage is like before the planning. While doing the
actual movie, we found out more and better approach to doing our task. If we
had a chance to explore the functions in MediaStage more before planning,
maybe we could come up with ideas and a more ideal and realistic plan and
thus follow our plan.

There was evidence that learning by doing was integral to the participating
adolescents’ out-of-school literacy practices. This was first noted when none had
to refer to any form of training manuals or help sites to learn how to use a range
of digital media to engage in out-of-school literacy practices, such as creating their
12 Learning by Doing in the Digital Media Age 193

own emails, instant messages on MSN, blogs and blog skins, fan fiction and personal
profile pages on social networking sites such as Friendsters.
For instance, Tiffany started blogging when she was 13 years old. She first learnt
how to use html language in her computer literacy class when she was in Year
1 in 2006. Although she had learnt how to use html language from the explicit
instruction received at school, my interview data suggest that she relied more
on self-exploration when using it to create blog skins in 2007. In my individual
interview with Tiffany, she explained to me how she first started using html
language, Photoshop and Adobe ImageReady to create her blog skins from scratch
(see Excerpt 12.5).

Excerpt 12.5: Tiffany’s Viewpoint on Experimenting with Digital Media

I wasn’t really familiar with html at that time. You must you must like, you
must I mean you must know that programme well in order to create better,
better products. Then you must explore (on your own) : : : Er they are not
very easy to use. You try, if possible, you try to see some works of others,
then you try to follow and you must try it out frequently like almost every
day. Then from there, after you know how to use the tools. Yah, then you can
try making your own [sic].

In GSSS geography classroom, tinkering with tools happened in a different

way when they were playing the VAD game. As the third prototype, some of the
programmers’ interface of the game could be accessed. Although it was not apparent
in the players’ interface, some students found out the menus or the shortcut keys
and started teaching other students (see Fig. 12.2a). Some students figured out how
to move their view out of the playing avatar and see the terrain from above (see
Fig. 12.2b). This, in some ways, changed the rules of the game play because they
were playing ‘navigation’ quest. Students were supposed to find multiple X marked
locations within time limits in order to acquire fossil digging tools, based on the
navigation clues with compass bearings or general directions. They were checking
out the landscape and comparing the views from above with the first-person view,
which would accelerate their finding and moving to the X marked locations. In a
certain level, they were challenging game restrictions and modifying the game out
of their interest, which Ito et al. (2008) saw as the behaviour of ‘geeking out’.

Conclusion

When designing learning opportunities for adolescents in the digital age, it is

worthwhile to consider Street’s (2005a) and Barton et al. (2007) strong suggestion
that literacy curricula and assessments should be designed around adolescents’
literacy practices by taking account of their entrenched ways of participating in
194 L. Tan and B. Kim

Fig. 12.2 Tinkering with VAD: (a) changing options and (b) viewing from above

social and cultural practices. The adolescents in both studies have introduced their
out-of-school literacy practices into their school literacy practices when using digital
media. This finding is similar to those of the studies conducted by Bulfin and North
(2007) and Ito and colleagues (2008). We tend to follow Ito et al.’s (2008) argument
that ‘[r]ather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and
careers’, policymakers in Singapore might want to ‘think of it as a process guiding
young people’s participation in public life more generally’ (p. 3).
In this chapter, we have highlighted learning by doing as one emergent culture
of learning that has been increasingly observable in adolescents’ literacy practices.
By focusing on the practice view of learning by doing, we believe that pedagogical
12 Learning by Doing in the Digital Media Age 195

connections can be more accessible when practitioners understand ‘the kinds of

things young people are doing and being outside school’ (Lankshear and Knobel
2003, p. 206) and then consider ways of integrating ‘their experiences of learning
outside school with what [practitioners] can and should teach about discrete
media’ (Sefton-Green 2005, p. 109) and digital media production. The ethnographic
accounts of how learning by doing is enacted in adolescents’ school and out-of-
school literacy practices provide a good starting point for practitioners and educators
who are keen to redesign learning opportunities that are more viable in the digital
media age.

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