Early Adopters: Playing New Literacies and Pretending New Technologies in Print-Centric Classrooms

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Date
2009-08
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Publisher
Sage
Abstract
In this article, semiotic analysis of children’s practices and designs with video game conventions considers how children use play and drawing as spatializing literacies that make room to import imagined technologies and user identities. Microanalysis of video data of classroom interactions collected during a three year ethnographic study of children’s literacy play in kindergarten and primary classrooms reveals how the leading edge of technology use in print-centric classrooms is pretended into being by 5- , 6-, and 7-year-old “early adopters” a marketing term for first wave consumers who avidly buy and explore newly-released technology products. Early adopters signals two simultaneous identities for young technology users: 1) as developing learners of new literacies and technologies and 2) as curious explorers who willingly play with new media. Children transformed paper and pencil resources into artifacts for enacting cell phone conversations and animating video games, using new technologies and the collaborative nature of new literacies to perform literate identities and to strengthen the cohesiveness of play groups.
Description
The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 9/2, 2009 by SAGE Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. ©
Keywords
design, multimodal analysis, new literacy studies
Citation
Wohlwend, K. E. (2009). Early adopters: Playing new literacies and pretending new technologies in print-centric classrooms. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 9(2), 119-143.
DOI
10.1177/1468798409105583
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Article