Shifting and multiple spaces in classrooms : an argument for investigating learners’ boundary-making around digital networked texts

This paper argues that a spatial perspective makes a valuable contribution to understanding the challenges and opportunities associated with integrating digital networked texts in educational contexts. It considers what we can learn by looking at how spaces are constructed within and around such texts in classrooms. In particular, it highlights how a focus on boundaries and boundary-making during classroom literacy events can help us to understand how online activity is connected to and embedded within activity mediated in other ways. This highlights how actions and interactions around texts bound different kinds of spaces and how shifts in spaces may be significant to interactions with texts. Commentaries on two classroom incidents are used to illustrate six propositions which help to describe the fluidity and complexity of spaces produced by learners’ actions and interactions around online networked texts. This leads to an argument that, in conceptualising classroom space, we need to both recognise new literacies as ‘placed resources’ (Prinsloo, 2005) but also see space as continually and multiply rebounded by what happens. This I suggest is important in recognising new pedagogical possibilities and considering the implications of these for classroom practice.

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