TweetWe’re hosting the following public lecture at the Centre for Film and Media Studies next week: The Remaking of Citizens: Media, Civic Participation and Learning. David Buckingham Loughborough University, UK In most Western democracies, young people are seen to be disaffected from civic and political life. Yet while television has been accused of contributing to [...]

TweetProfessor David Buckingham will be a visiting Andrew W. Mellon Scholar at the CFMS for the most of August. David is a leading researcher on children’s and young people’s interactions with electronic media, and on media literacy education. Media education, digital literacies and young people August 3 9-4pm Venue: TB Davie Seminar Room, Postgraduate Centre, [...]

TweetMarion Walton, University of Cape Town Jonathan Donner, Microsoft Research Spatial injustices and mobile communication: Patterns of internet access in urban South Africa Marion Walton, University of Cape Town Jonathan Donner, Microsoft Research Abstract We describe results from interviews, prompts, and observational exercises with resource-constrained teenage visitors to cybercafés and public libraries in Cape Town. [...]

Tweet  Here’s the abstract of a paper Nicci Pallitt and I just had accepted by the journal Language & Education: ‘Grand Theft South Africa’: Games, literacy and inequality in consumer childhoods By Marion Walton and Nicola Pallitt Discussions of ‘game literacy’ focus on the informal learning and literacies associated with games but seldom address  the [...]

TweetPaper presented at Multimodality in Education colloquium held at Mont Fleur, Stellenbosch on 10 August, 2011 by Marion Walton and Silke Hassreiter, Centre for Film and Media Studies. University of Cape Town The affordances of mobile phones as devices for creating, publishing and distributing images means that they are often seen as a threat to [...]

This panel reports ethnographic approaches to play practices and digital gameplay in different sites in Cape Town, in the context of the regulation of the games industry in South Africa. Contributors explore the significance of games as commodities in the local context, identify digital literacies shaped by local socio-technical practices and differential levels of access, and theorize how commercial games produced in the North are being interpreted, reconfigured and appropriated in these South African contexts.

TweetThis article of mine was a contribution to the Educational Technology Debate (InfoDev and Unesco) and also appeared in the Association for Learning Technology Online Newsletter. Are Google and other websites rewiring our brains? Do the potentially distracting non-linear structures of new media pose a threat to ‘deep’ thought, contemplation and even empathy? This is [...]

Many urban teens in South Africa are mobile-centric internet users,
whose first and primary way of accessing the internet is via GPRS-
enabled cellphones. The m4Lit project used mobile social networks to
experiment with mobile publishing for teens. The pilot phase of the
project attracted substantial interest – over 28 000 teen subscribers
signed up to read an ‘m-novel’ on their mobile phones. The
project was less successful in encouraging teens’ writing of fiction,
largely owing to constraints of authorship on mobile platforms. The m4Lit
research project documented mobile literacies among teens living in
low-income townships in Cape Town, including the role of indigenous
literacies (isiXhosa) in the project, teens’ interest in the m-
novel, their use of mobile social network MXit (15 million registered
users in South Africa) and the mobile web.

TweetI’m presenting a paper today with Jonathan Donner about the role of mobile Internet in the SA 2009 elections, at the International Conference on Mobile Communication and Social Policy, at the Center for Mobile Communication Studies, Rutgers University. The conference has been a wonderful way to meet social scientists and humanities scholars studying mobile communication [...]

TweetI’m at the IAMCR conference in Mexico City. There are quite a few papers focusing on mobile media use on the programme, and I’m trying to attend them where possible. If I have time and battery power I’ll post a few reports here in the next few days. Aiko Mukaida from NTT DOCOMO’s Mobile Society [...]