Learning the Virtual Life

Digital technologies have transformed cultural perceptions of learning and what it means to be literate, expanding the importance of experience alongside interpretation and reflection. Learning the Virtual Life offers ways to consider the local and global effects of digital media on educational environments, as well as the cultural transformations of how we now define learning and literacy.
While some have welcomed the educational challenges of digital culture and emphasized its possibilities for individual emancipation and social transformation in the new information age, others accuse digital culture of absorbing its recipients in an all-pervasive virtual world. Unlike most accounts of the educational and cultural consequences of digital culture, Learning the Virtual Life presents a neutral, advanced introduction to the key issues involved with the integration of digital culture and education. This edited collection presents international perspectives on a wide range of issues, and each chapter combines upper-level theory with "real-world" practice, making this essential reading for all those interested in digital media and education.

Peter Pericles Trifonas is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto.

1. Digital Literacy and the Spaces of Academic DiscoursePeta Mitchell2. New Epistemologies? Rethinking Ways of Knowing in a Digital CultureJennifer Jenson & Suzanne de Castell3. The 4-Cs of Youth Digital Media Practices: Consciousness, Communication, Community and Consumption.Michael Hoechsmann4. Technoliteracy at the Sustainability Crossroads: Posing Ecopedagogical Problems for Digital Literacy FrameworksRichard Kahn5. Learning environment and digital literacy: a mismatch or a possibility from Finnish teachers' and students' perspectiveLiisa Ilomäki, Peppi Taalas, & Minna Lakkala6. What haunts the Narcissus-Narcosis: Media Education and the Social Life of Digital TechnologiesStuart R. Poyntz7. Wikilearning as Radical EqualityJuha Suoranta & Tere Vadén8. Learner voice and lived culture in digital media production by younger learners: implications for pedagogy and future researchJohn Potter9. How Public Literacy Comes to Draw Upon Academic Literacy in Cybersapce: Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.John Willinsky?10. The Future of Learning and the Virtual Life of KnowledgeRobert Luke and Peter Pericles Trifonas11. Tomorrow we go bowling: Covert Intimacy and Homosocial Play in the Grand Theft Auto IV SeriesMarc Ouellette12. From Greek School to Greek's Cool:Using Weblogs in a Greek Heritage Language ProgramThemistoklis Aravossitas13. The Digital Game as a Learning SpacePeter Pericles Trifonas