LEARNING TO BE DIGITAL PRODUCERS: WRITING A SCHOOL NEWSPAPER

In this paper we explore a multimedia workshop that took place in a primary school in which children developed digital literacies helped by their families. In this presentation we are going to analyse the different skills related to publishing on the Internet, in the journey from being receivers to becoming active producers of digital contents. We will see how the adults´ support becomes a key issue. Even when adults don’t feel confident with these technologies, they can provide support in other practices related to the reflection about the contents (Buckingham, 2003).
They participate in a digital literacy process using multiple technologies to publish a newspaper on the Internet. In the context of our work, we understand literacy as the ability to critically manage different tools such as new technologies or the media (Mercer, 2000). These new literacies are related to specific skills that help children to face new media in a clever way. Exploring the construction of knowledge in this setting, we can see how the use of the Internet means much more than managing the tool: it also means the commitment to become digital producers.
In this study we adopted an ethnographic perspective (Atkinson, Coffey, Delamont, Lofland & Lofland, 2001; Spindler & Hammond, 2006), which helped us to understand school as a cultural or institutional context in which the activity of individuals acquires meaning. In this context, we adopted a case study methodology that enabled us to analyse in more depth the activity of one of the families (Yin, 2003; Stake, 2006). From this approach, we analyse how children who participated in the workshop with their families progressively constructed a community of learners (Barton & Tusting, 2005) in which a dialogical interaction among children and adults developed (Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., 2005).
Thus, our question is: How could we develop in the school useful learning in different contexts? Could the school educate children as competent citizens facing the new challenges that are raised by the new technologies and mass media? Some children develop skills to manage these new contexts through their interaction in informal communities by learning in daily situations. Almost all the new literacies imply social abilities developed through the collaboration and participation in networks. These competences are based on the traditional literacy and practical skills -related to critical analysis and research- that are usually taught in the classrooms. This could be a reason that facilitates the school to introduce these abilities within the basic competences that usually develop, as a medium to integrate itself in an emergent participatory culture (Jenkins et al., 2006).
From this perspective, it seems necessary to create shared settings and to generate contributions, arisen from the applied research, that help teachers and families in the social activity of constructing knowledge and sharing it through mass media.