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In an effort to further understand the nature of the productive consumption of media fans in an era of digital connectivity, this article expands on Lévy's (1997) concept of the knowledge community as it applies to fans of the digital-game series Fallout. Lévy proposed that the age of digital-connectivity would usher in knowledge communities where participation was voluntary, aggregate, and democratic. I argue that Baym's (2000) interpretive and informative practices, which serve as the lynchpins of fan discourse, may be understood as the lynchpins of the knowledge community as well. Further, here interpretive and informative practices are not only used to build community and negotiate values, but also to define status and position within the contested Fallout knowledge community. By testing the knowledge community against such an environment, and integrating it into previous research on the role of fan labor in an era where producers are increasingly interested in that labor, this article proposes an understanding of the concept that may well add nuance and context beyond the theory's utopian roots.

But, just as academics have, for years, sought to critically interrogate texts as part of the classroom, working with students to deconstruct and decode articles, poems, plays, novels, non-fiction books, films, games, and more, we would argue that technology also has become a text, one which plays a central role in our lives and that of our students. What is the relationship between a critically engaged activism, pedagogy, and technology? What does radical teaching with technology look like? How do we, as radical teachers, ensure that we and our students are shaping the content and meaning of technology rather than just being shaped by it? Teaching today, from K-12 through graduate school, is ubiquitously tied to digital technology, and the call to make it more so grows. Institutional resources are increasingly directed toward classroom digital initiatives. The "digital divide" discourse, abandoned for a while

In recent decades there have been various calls for a pedagogical revolution in universities to address a new technology-savvy generation of students. These developments have been met with concern about the postmodern relativizing of educational achievement and accusations of the 'dumbing down' of course content. Moving beyond such culture war divisions between orthodox and progressive worldviews, this article outlines how reference to popular culture and utilization of its styles can result in student re-engagement with traditional learning materials and formats. Drawing on focus group interviews with students from an introductory sociology class that incorporated a specifically designed DVD, we outline the individual and societal benefits of a de-differentiated pedagogy that combines traditional rationalist education with more playful forms of learning that directly link with students' life-worlds.

In recent years public libraries have experimented with user-generated or community-contributed content through the interactive tools of Web 2.0. For some commentators this not just establishes a new relationship between libraries and their publics, but signals the end of information hegemony and an 'expert paradigm'. Such claims need to be treated with caution. This article argues that public library experiments with user-generated content can be more usefully analysed in the context of wider institutional mandates around literacy, civic engagement and access. This article critically examines some recent library developments in this field, with a particular focus on Australian libraries.

With the increasing use of video recording in social research methodological questions about multimodal transcription are more timely than ever before. How do researchers transcribe gesture, for instance, or gaze, and how can they show to readers of their transcripts how such modes operate in social interaction alongside speech? Should researchers bother transcribing these modes of communication at all? How do they define a 'good' transcript? In this paper we begin to develop a social semiotic framework to account for transcripts as artefacts, treating them as empirical material through which transcription as a social, meaning making practice can be reconstructed. We look at some multimodal transcripts produced in conversation analysis, discourse analysis, social semiotics and micro-ethnography, drawing attention to the meaning-making principles applied by the transcribers. We argue that there are significant representational differences between multimodal transcripts, reflecting differences in the professional practices and the rhetorical and analytical purposes of their makers.

This article interrogates the notion of Web 2.0, understanding it through three related conceptual lenses: (1) as a set of social relations, (2) as a mode of production, and (3) as a set of values. These conceptual framings help in understanding the discursive, technological, and social forces that are at play in Web 2.0 architectures. Based on research during a two-year period, the second part of this article applies these lenses to the case of the Human Rights Portal, a Web portal designed to leverage the participatory knowledge production ethos of Web 2.0 for human rights organizations. This section discusses the design process and the ways in which the discourse of Web 2.0 as parsed through the three lenses described informed this process.

This article discusses the origins of video-based approaches to social research and their continuation up to the present moment. It begins by considering early studies employing silent cinema film and audio recording, followed by the unification of audio and visual recording in sound cinema film. Special emphasis is placed on the perspectives and methods initiated by the 'Natural History of an Interview' research group; the first systematic study of verbal and nonverbal behavior together, as these occur in immediate social interaction in face-to-face encounters. The discussion then continues autobiographically as I recount my own early research experience of the development of video-based research approaches. This is followed by an overview of current work to show the wide range of contemporary research that uses video. The article concludes with a few speculations concerning likely futures for video-based approaches in social research.

Changes related to globalization have resulted in the growing separation of individuals in late modern societies from traditional bases of social solidarity such as parties, churches, and other mass organizations. One sign of this growing individualization is the organization of individual action in terms of meanings assigned to lifestyle elements resulting in the personalization of issues such as climate change, labour standards, and the quality of food supplies. Such developments bring individuals' own narratives to the fore in the mobilization process, often requiring organizations to be more flexible in their definitions of issues. This personalization of political action presents organizations with a set of fundamental challenges involving potential trade-offs between flexibility and effectiveness. This paper analyses how different protest networks used digital media to engage individuals in mobilizations targeting the 2009 G20 London Summit during the global financial crisis. The authors examine how these different communication processes affected the political capacity of the respective organizations and networked coalitions. In particular, the authors explore whether the coalition offering looser affiliation options for individuals displays any notable loss of public engagement, policy focus (including mass media impact), or solidarity network coherence. This paper also examines whether the coalition offering more rigid collective action framing and fewer personalized social media affordances displays any evident gain in the same dimensions of mobilization capacity. In this case, the evidence suggests that the more personalized collective action process maintains high levels of engagement, agenda focus, and network strength.

This article examines a teacher educator's implementation of a pedagogy of multiliteracies in an adolescent literacy course. The purpose was to foster pre-service teachers' knowledge and dispositions to enact multiliteracies pedagogy. This article synthesizes the theories of multiliteracies pedagogy and Third Space to explore the opportunities and challenges presented by key learning experiences for pre-service teachers' development of knowledge about and dispositions towards multiliteracies pedagogy. This article argues that emphasizing the Situated Practice and Critical Framing components of multiliteracies pedagogy can promote pre-service teachers' productive negotiations of the conflicts they experience in developing dispositions towards multiliteracies pedagogy.

A regular tourist destination since the early 1990s, Rocinha - the paradigmatic touristic favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - has seen the number of foreigners visitors grow considerably after the successful international release of City of God in 2003. In dialogue with the new mobilities paradigm and based on a socio-ethnographic investigation which examines how poverty-stricken and segregated areas are turned into tourist attractions, the article sheds lights on the ways tourists who have watched Fernando Meirelles's film re-interpret their notion of "the favela" after taking part in organized tours. The aim is to examine how far these reinterpretations, despite based on first-hand encounters, are related back to idealized notions that feed upon the cinematic favela of City of God while giving further legitimacy to it.

This article describes problem-based learning as a powerful pedagogical approach and an aligned teaching and learning system to explicitly and directly teach critical thinking skills in a broad range of disciplines. Problem-based learning is argued to be a powerful pedagogical approach as it explicitly and actively engages students in a learning and teaching system, characterised by reiterative and reflective cycles of learning domain-specific knowledge and doing the thinking themselves. At the same time, students are guided and coached by the problem-based learning teacher, who models critical thinking skills in the acquisition of the domain-specific knowledge. This article will explore what critical thinking actually means. What are critical thinking skills? How best to teach such skills? What is the potential role of problem-based learning in teaching critical thinking skills? Finally, the article reflects on how critical thinking can be developed through problem-based learning as a pedagogical approach in an aligned learning and teaching context.

This article emerges from a long-term project investigating the BBC initiative 'Blast' - an on- and offline creative resource for teenagers. Designed to 'inspire and equip' young people to be creative, the research interrogates the assumptions behind such a resource, particularly in terms of the so-called 'digital native', and tests such assumptions against the populations actually using and engaging with it. It finds that the conception of a 'digital native' - a technologically enthusiastic, if not technologically literate - teenage population, which is operationalized through the workshop structure of BBC Blast, rarely filters down to the teenagers themselves. Teenage delegates to the Blast workshops rarely validate interest based on technological facilities, enthusiasm or competency. Instead, it is peer groups and social alignments which shape declarations and, more importantly, enactments of interest. This suggests that while the concept of the 'digital native' may be pertinent for generational comparisons of technological use, or is a useful concept for the operationalization of creative media workshops, it is simply not recognized by teenagers to whom it refers, nor does it adequately define use. Further, technological competency and enthusiasm sits uneasily with social and cultural peer group norms, where certain (and very specific) technological competency is socially permitted. This means that the concept of the 'digital native' is problematic, if not entirely inadequate. Focusing on the BBC Blast workshops therefore raises some critical questions around teenage motivations to become technologically literate, and the pleasures teenagers articulate in such engagements per se.

This essay examines the role of technology and social media in the performance of decentered heteronormative bodily and pedagogical power. Today's teaching spaces occupy traditional, physical outlets but also imaginary, online gathering places such as blogs, Twitter, and Facebook that have become extensions of our pedagogical bodies. I argue that feminism and queer theory-united by Foucault's upheaval of norms-provide critical sites to engage this discussion. Where feminism has become accessible inside and outside the classroom, resistance to queer theory persists. I share some of my own experiences with bodily ambiguity via teaching and living with social media that I hope can bridge the accessibility gap to move toward an emancipatory theory of pedagogical bodies in the digital age.

In numerous entries on his website Le Tiers livre (tierslivre.net), the French writer François Bon insists on the momentous nature of the transformations taking place in the contemporary literary world ("Si la littérature"; "Ceci n'est pas"; "Qu'est-ce qu'un livre numérique"). Bon argues that the advent of the Internet is equal in significance to the print revolution brought by Gutenberg. According to this view, the Web is not just one more medium among others, but in fact operates a number of crucial displacements in our modes of writing and reading and ultimately alters literary and social practices: "Internet est 'transparent', il traverse la totalité des pratiques mais en tant que lié � cette pratique elle-même, et non pas sa médiatisation" ("Vers un Internet"). It would be a mistake to see these claims as an expression of faith in progress, on the part of an author whose works (from Sortie d'usine in 1982 to Daewoo in 2004) have documented the damage to human communities wrought by technological and economic change.

This study focuses on the social formation of game virtual property through analyzing two of its major stakeholders in China: online gamers and game corporations. Based on analysis of the opinions, stakes, and demands of the Chinese gamers, I argue that they are developing an incipient 'gamer rights' awareness composed of gamers' entitlements to virtual property ownership as well as to virtual property rights protection by the state and game publishers. Based on analysis of the stakes and strategic actions of Chinese game publishers, I show that these corporations promulgate a self-serving version of gamer rights protection campaigns and pass the social responsibility of virtual property governance to the state. This study's findings provide empirical evidence to support theoretical and legal recognition of virtual property, government involvement in virtual-world governance, and the 'right to play' critique.

"Meet Benjamin, an aspiring Game Designer. If he works hard to accumulate the required skills in the game design industry, his career path will move steadily and predictably from Beta Tester to Hacker and finally to Game Designer. If he is not satisfied with that achievement, Benjamin can keep working and move up to Venture Capitalist, opening his own company, or ultimately to Information Overlord, entirely monopolizing the regional media. No glass ceiling will bar his ascent; no workload increases will tax his resolve; no layoffs will frustrate the steady pace of his advance. Regardless of age, race, class, or gender, with a little hard work and ingenuity, Benjamin can achieve any career he wants. If this career vector seems too good to be true, it is because it is not true. Benjamin is a simulated character-a sim-inhabiting the virtual space of the popular video game The Sims. McKenzie Wark, author of the book Gamer Theory, created Benjamin as an example of how games are not so much simulations of reality, but ideal models that embody hegemonic ideology (20-22). In this case, Benjamin's easy prosperity reveals how the algorithm governing economic life in The Sims is based on an "American Dream" in which an ideal combination of meritocracy, full employment, equal opportunity, and upward mobility is perceived to be the norm. Wark purposely contrasts his virtual Benjamin, who lives in this free-market ideal of capitalism, to the real Benjamin, a game designer struggling to survive in today's harsh economic landscape. After losing his job at a small game-design firm that went belly-up, the real Benjamin moved to a larger firm-Electronic Arts, owners of The Sims. In an online forum, Benjamin's wife exposed how"

"Throughout the history of film, plots have required that a character be rendered unconscious for a finite period with no explanation of the process and with no other consequence, to which end, the medium invented the "magic-single-punch." All one character has to do is say: "I hate to do this but . . ." then throw a swift punch to jaw, and the recipient agrees to pass out for however long the plot requires. More significant than this compliant character is the equally compliant viewer, who accepts this miracle of anesthesia, that works to perfect effect even on a character who, in other scenes, might have a chair broken over his head or receive several karate chops to the trachea with barely a blink or stagger. Although I believe that car chases were the reason God invented "fast-forward," even more bewildering than the apparent popularity of this screen event is the fact that audiences have failed, over the last two decades, to wonder why not one of the cars involved has a working airbag. Such thoughts, of course, disrupt the pleasure that has been paid for with money, time, and attention, in the same way, for example, that disputing the comparably absurd tenets of Reaganomics disrupts the myth of satisfaction purchased with (low) taxes, lip-service patriotism, and self-serving citizenship.1 In 1984-in the middle of Reagan's reign over morning in America-federal law required that all cars have passive restraints by 1989. Since Reagan's second term, in other words, in defiance of legality and common sense, the premises of Reaganomics and of movie car chases have remained unchallenged. Fueled on the one hand by pleasure industries, and on the other, by think tanks and talk radio, the speeding of the economy and of the movie-chase car, along parallel courses toward disastrous crashes could be glossed by saying that, as usual, American mass media had disabled the wrong airbags. Although we do not n

"There is growing interest in the use of virtual gaming worlds in education, supported by the increased use of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) and massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) for collaborative learning. However, this paper argues that collaborative gaming worlds have been in use much longer and are much wider in scope; it considers the range of collaborative gaming worlds that exist and discusses their potential for learning, with particular reference to higher education. The paper discusses virtual gaming worlds from a theoretical pedagogic perspective, exploring the educational benefits of gaming environments. Then practical considerations associated with the use of virtual gaming worlds in formal settings in higher education are considered. Finally, the paper considers development options that are open to educators, and discusses the potential of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) for learning in higher education. In all, this paper hopes to provide a balanced overview of the range of virtual gaming worlds that exist, to examine some of the practical considerations associated with their use, and to consider their benefits and challenges in learning and teaching in the higher education context."

Today's entering college students have the advantage of a lifetime of computer use. Education scholars and professionals claim that such exposure makes these students the most prepared ever to enter college. It cannot be argued that the advent of the Web, and Web 2.0 has placed at students' fingertips great works of literature, art, and science. It also cannot be argued that despite all this opportunity, students enter college writing with less precision than at any time in the last century. The two facts are reconcilable because (1) students map the world of technology differently than we do; and (2) they live in a digital culture different from our own. Until we understand that our perception of computers and technology is vastly different from our students, we cannot understand why they do what they do, and they will never understand what we want of them. This article argues that unless we change our pedagogy of technology, students and faculty will continue to be frustrated at poor performance, plagiarism, and misunderstandings about what each expects of the other.

This article considers the emergence of large-scale "commons-based peer production" projects such as Wikipedia.org from an institutional development perspective. The argument it makes is threefold. First, that that the lowered transaction costs and information abundance found online transform a subset of public goods problems, essentially replacing free ridership with mass coordination as the central challenge. Second, that the boundaries of this subset are defined by a "power law topology" that leads to the emergence of online hub spaces and serves to resolve search problems endemic to the anti-geographic online landscape. These boundary conditions limit the overall impact of commons-based peer production for the political space. Third, that all such hubs move through a common five-stage institutional development process, directly related to standard models of the diffusion of innovation. Identification of the institutional development process behind Wikipedia leads in turn to the stipulation of seven hypotheses: the "Field of Dreams" Fallacy, the "Interest Horizons" thesis, "Political Strategy is Not Like Computer Code," the "Location-based Wave" thesis, "Power Law Fragility Under Moore's Law," the "Punctuated Equilibrium" thesis, and "Code-Forking the Public Sphere." Each thesis holds direct implications for the potential and limitations of "open source" applications in the political arena