Navigating discourses in place in the world of Webkinz

Abstract

Geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003) frames this analysis of play, multimodal collaboration, and peer mediation as players navigate barriers to online connectivity in a children's social network and gaming site. A geosemiotic perspective enables examination of children's web play as discourses in place: fluidly converging and diverging interactions among four factors: 1) social actors, 2) interaction order, 3) visual semiotics, and 4) place semiotics. The video data are excerpted from an ethnographic study of a computer club for primary school-aged children in an after-school program serving working and middle class families in a US Midwest university community. Discourses of schooling in the computer room and Webkinz complicated children's goal of coordinated game play and mutual participation in online games. Barriers to online connection produced ruptures that foregrounded childrens' collaborative management of time and space. This foregrounding makes typically backgrounded practices, modes, and discourses visible and available for deconstruction and critique.

Being together in classrooms at the interface of the physical and virtual: implications for collaboration in on/off-screen sites

“…Learning in this particular class -whether or not it involved digital technologies -might be seen as inflected by a teleoaffective regime which valued sharing, caring and collaboration. As in Wohlwend et al's (2011) analysis of children's play in Webkinz in an after-school club, the children in the present study could to some extent be seen as operating as a community of practice; they found ways of 'being together' around virtual environments through watching others' screens and learning how to navigate and manage on-screen actions as they attempted to explore a virtual environment together. However, there appeared to be other nuances to how they played and worked alongside each other that were not accounted for by these models of learning and community and which seemed to suggest other dimensions of 'being together'.…”

“…Similarly, Wohlwend et al (2011) document how group leaders muted the sound when children were playing Webkinz during a school-based after-school club. This had implications for what children were able to do: while the quiet room was perhaps more 'school-like', children were unable to access the spoken instructions they needed to navigate the site.…”

“…This had implications for what children were able to do: while the quiet room was perhaps more 'school-like', children were unable to access the spoken instructions they needed to navigate the site. These studies highlight how the 'nexus of discourses' (Scollon 2001;Wohlwend et al 2011) that inflect school-based experimentation with virtual worlds plays out in embodied relationships to physical surroundings, and through deferred embodiment (Marsh 2005) as avatars interact with each other and their on-screen environment.…”

“…This in turn raises questions about the availability of different modes. Other studies have highlighted how the affordances of classroom spaces have restricted or enhanced children's interactions using digital technologies (Wohlwend et al 2011;Thibaut et al 2014). This example adds to such analyses by exploring how children's practices in this class meshed with practices associated with other times and places and how these entanglements were significant to what they did with the affordances available to them.…”

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

“…What forms of research (e.g., user studies, design visions)? Future efforts along these lines might try some alternate methodologies (e.g., discourse analysis [25]). …”