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ESRC funded seminar series: Play, Creativity and Digital Cultures

This seminar series focuses on children's digital cultures, specifically examining the role of play and creativity in learning with new media technologies. Recent work on children's digital cultures has identified a range of literacies that are emerging through children's play with new media technologies. Such work has raised questions about the extent to which school practices have succeeded in bringing together traditional understandings of the role of play and creativity in learning and new approaches to learning occasioned by media technologies. In particular, there is a concern that technologies are valued mainly for their functionality in the classroom, even though these or related technologies may be largely used outside the classroom for play and pleasure including many aspects of creative production work. This seminar series brings together the work of a range of researchers in the UK and worldwide who are extending our understandings of children's interactions with new media both within and outside of school. Through the seminars, we seek to develop a theoretical perspective around play and learning in relation to digital cultures which will inform and empower a wide group of stakeholders including teachers, teacher trainers, post-graduate students, researchers and policy makers.

This seminar series follows on from Children's Literacy and Popular Culture.

You may also be interested in the Digital Beginnings project.

And this amazing book is available as an online text, free! - Knobel, M and Lankshear, C (eds) (2007) A New Literacies Sampler.

Click here for a list of Core Group Members and their Research Interests (last updated June 2006).

Seminar 1: How can theories of play inform analysis and practice when considering children's interaction with digital cultures - September 2nd and 3rd 2005 at Bishop Grosseteste College

Professor Margaret Mackey - P(l)ay Attention
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Julia Davies- Affinities and Beyond: Web communities and online collaborative play
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Jackie Marsh - Winnicott's ideas on transitional objects and play as a way of analysing very young children's digi-practices.
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Seminar 2: Play and digital cultures - 27 February 2006 at the London Knowledge Lab

Andrew Burn (Institute of Education, University of London) - 'Writing' Computer games: Towards a model of game literacy
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Andrew outlines a provisional model of 'game-literacy', a research objective of the ESRC/DTI funded project 'Making Games'. This uses examples of computer games made by children using the software developed during this project, and relates the forms of literacy discussed here to game-theory as well as earlier models of media literacy.

Valérie-Inés de La Ville (University of Poitiers, France) - Property management and branding in digital cultures: enriching the continuity of play through intertextual displacements
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Toys, video games, animated TV series or feature films are strongly linked as they contribute to create meaningful cultural worlds for children. Inés will explore the complex inter-textual elaboration involving narratives, plot construction, graphics and artistic choices that international audiences recognize. The launch of new cultural products worldwide requires producers to cast a wide promotional net over a mass audience and to consolidate brand identity through multiple licensing agreements. Inés will consider how these managerial displacements are adapted to enrich the continuity of play and to meet children's digital cultures in each country.

Caroline Pelletier (Institute of Education, University of London) - Learning the rules of play
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Caroline Pelletier examines the social functions which a group of students ascribed to play, and how they used play as a framework for making meaning. The findings are based on a research study which involved students analyzing a variety of board games, including the relationship between their rules and the kinds of pleasures these provided. The aim of the study was to generate a vocabulary for describing games and a design practice to create new ones. The analysis throws some light on debates in the literature on how play can be interpreted as a social practice.

Lydia Plowman (Institute of Education, University of Stirling) - Pedagogy in the playroom
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Drawing on research conducted as part of the ESRC TLRP-funded study Interplay: Play, learning and ICT in pre-school settings, Lydia discusses pedagogy relating to play with digital technologies and try to answer some questions that motivated the research. How explicitly do practitioners manage this play? To what extent do young children learn through play with digital technologies? How can practitioners support this play? To what extent do practitioners recognise children's experiences with digital technologies at home?

Seminar 3: Digital cultures, informal learning and school practice - Wednesday 5 July 2006 Bishop Grosseteste College, Lincoln

Catherine Beavis (Deakin University) - Games within games

Clare Dowdall (University of Plymouth) - Producing digital texts at home and school

Victoria Carrington (University of Plymouth) - The 'Trapped underground.jpg': Why did this image become iconic?

Seminar 4: Creativity in Practice-what do we mean? - Thursday 19th and Friday 20th October 2006, Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln

Shakuntala Banaji: 'Rhetorics of Creativity'
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Document for preliminary reading

Beth Cross: 'Children's strategies for buying into or borrowing the discourse economy in digital terrains: what consequences for agency, creativity and play'
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Kate Pahl: 'Re-inserting Creativity: Instances of Practice?'
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Seminar 5: Digital cultures, informal learning and school practices (2) - Friday March 16th 2007, Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln

Julian Sefton-Green: Is informal learning the new 'new literacies'?
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Read more of Julian's work on informal learning:
http://wac.co.uk/sharedspaces/research.php
http://www.unisa.edu.au/hawkeinstitute/publications/downloads/wp35.pdf

Helen Bromley: 'The Best of Plays'

Jackie Marsh: Informal learning in formal settings? The pedagogical possibilities of blogging as a classroom practice.

Final conference - At the Institute of Education, London, on Saturday June 9th 2007

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