Many scholars across the world have studied the knowledge, skills and dispositions needed to use digital media. Yet as digital texts have proliferated and evolved, there has been much conjecture over what it means to be ‘digitally literate’. As literacy researchers from Australia, Sweden and Argentina we are concerned with the drive to standardise definitions of ‘digital literacy’ despite notable differences in the cultural politics of education in each country. This paper analyses how the term digital literacy has been conceptualised and applied by scholars in these three language contexts. To do this, we analyse the most cited publications on digital literacy in the English-speaking; Scandinavian; and Spanish-speaking contexts. In the analysis the variety of definitions across and within each context, the key tensions and challenges that emerge and the implications for digital literacy education are explored. Our findings reveal that similar tensions and challenges exist in all three contexts, however, the path to resolution varies given contextual differences. The article concludes with suggestions for educational research that acknowledges and advocates the need for local conceptualisations of digital literacies in increasingly globalised educational systems.

With digital technology it has become possible and relatively easy to create texts, which contain different kinds of expression, such as images and sound. This challenges the concept of literacy and what it means to create texts in education. By exploring tensions and contradictions in and between different components in the activity system of creating texts in classrooms this article attempts to illuminate conditions for transforming this activity. Activities are here conceptualized as activity systems where components at local and systemic levels influence and constitute each other. Tensions and contradictions at both levels, reflect general issues related to the concept of literacy, as they concern what kind of expressions are considered valuable and primary when creating and assessing texts in educational settings.

This paper explores how digital competence is conceptualized in recent revisions in the curriculum for Swedish compulsory school. Four themes are identified based on a thematic content analysis of the revisions in the subject descriptions: use of digital tools and media, programming, critical awareness and responsibility. The distribution of the thematic revisions differs among the subjects, but the most dominating theme, permeating all the subjects, concerns the tool-oriented use of digital tools and media. This strong dominance of operational perspective tends to narrow the conceptualization compared to international definitions and frameworks of digital competence.

<p>This study explores how newly arrived young students created meaning, communicated, and expressed themselves using digital technology in the subject of Swedish as a second language (SSL).  The qualitative case study presented in this article focuses on how the orchestration of teaching contributed to opportunities for digital meaning-making in the SSL subject in four classrooms at three schools in a city in Sweden. The notion of language as being fluid, which involves a critical approach to languages as separable entities, considers linguistic and embodied meaning-making, including digital technology, in social processes. This approach recognizes the roles of technology and digital meaning-making in young students’ second language acquisition. Moreover, technological innovations facilitate immediate and accessible communication.  In today’s language studies, ethnicity only is not considered an adequate focus of analysis. Furthermore, the meaning-making practices of newly arrived primary school-aged students remain under-investigated. In the present study, data collected in classroom observations and teacher interviews revealed three themes regarding the students’ utilization of digital technology to develop their multilingual skills. One insight was that the newly arrived students used digital technology strategically when they engaged in meaning-making activities with peers and teachers. When the students took the initiative in computer-assisted language learning, they displayed agency in meaning-making by being their own architects. The findings of this research provided insights into how the orchestration of teaching in Swedish as a second language to newly arrived students affects their opportunities to use multilingualism in meaning-making while employing digital technology.</p>

The purpose of this article is to explore how aspects of students' critical digital literacy can be developed through the analysis of digital multimodal texts in a secondary school classroom. The analysis of students' group discussions, when deconstructing a video clip, shows that opportunities to develop a critical awareness of prominent perspectives in a digital multimodal text increase when students become aware of the construction of the text. However, more instructional attention needs to be given to the role modes play across diverse elements in a digital multimodal text.