ABSTRACT
The chapters in this collection paint a vivid picture of the diversity of practices that constitute what we have rather loosely termed virtual literacies. A uniting feature of this body of work is its concern for how the communicative affordances of digital technologies are woven into the lived experience of children and young people. They feature in their daily lives across a variety of domains—in domestic settings, in educational institutions, in both public and private spaces. The contributors to this book have documented the emergence of new meaning-making practices, and new kinds of social interaction, both ‘in the wild’ (Beavis, this volume)—in the self-sponsored, voluntary, and self-sustaining communities that coalesce around online games, virtual worlds, and social networking sites—and in the innovatory work of educators, who are exploring the possibilities of harnessing the learning potential of these new technologies. Further, one of the book's strongest themes is to offer constructive ways in which connections can be made between home and school—the domain boundaries that Kendall and McDougall (in this volume), drawing on the work of Bernstein, characterize as potentially ‘heavily insulated’ and then crossable in transgressive acts. As Marsh (this volume) argues, online and offline spaces are mutually constitutive in children's lives, and as we suggest later, some of the most exciting developments involve ways of describing the fluid movement between these domains.
