This week, I have been reading...   Researching prior learning: How toddlers study movies by Carey Bazalgette (2018) Negotiated, contested and political: the disruptive third spaces of youth media production by Parry, Howard and Penfold (2020) Video games design and aesthetic by James Gee (2016) A summary in ten words: Disrupting the traditional teacher-learner power balance makes for interesting results. Word of the week: Bazalgette (now I realise how you pronounce it). Caffeinated sips to words-read ratio: 3:1   The theme of this set of reading is children’s engagement with digital media outside of the classroom. Bazalgette challenges the assumptions about how toddlers watch and understand films through informal viewing; Parry and others consider the creation of text-based video games by young people outside of a formal educational setting. One key idea that links these articles relates to the positionality of the learner in relation to traditional ‘authority’ in...

  This month I began a PhD at the University of Sheffield. At last! I have wanted to start a PhD for a long time and have waited for the right opportunity to arrive. Working alongside the exciting team at the School of Education in the area of digital literacy was too good an opportunity to miss.  The focus is children’s identities as authors through digital technology. In teaching children about creative writing, I have had ample opportunity to reflect on how they might experience authoring texts in school, at home and at play. Digital texts - such as videogames and films - are hugely important components in how children experience storytelling and yet these experiences are largely neglected by schools. As a keep computer game player myself, I am curious about the way playing sandbox (e.g., Minecraft) and openworld games and creating naratives within them might mirror storytelling in print. And, of course, I am interested in what schools might learn from it. As my fieldwork w...