ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses new media as technologies, contexts, and practices relevant to learning among children and adolescents. The chapter begins by presenting statistics about youths’ use of new media in the U.S., U.K., and China. With a focus on informal (out of school) learning, the chapter then presents three frameworks for understanding how youth learn with and through new media – New Media Literacies (Jenkins et al., 2006), Genres of Participation (Ito et al., 2019), and Connected Learning (Ito et al., 2020). Finally, the chapter explores two frequent sites for informal learning: gaming and social media, identifying the strengths and challenges of these practices. Taken together, the contents of this chapter argue for new media as productive sites for informal learning and point to the need to address inequities in youths’ access to new media.
