INVESTIGATING EMERGENT POST-DIGITAL LITERACY PRACTICES: DO SOCIO-TECHNOLOGICAL PLATFORMS MEAN THE END OF STUDENTS' CONSCIOUSNESS AS LITERATE BEINGS?

Description

After being overwhelmed by Appadurai's 'media and technoscapes', contemporary societies across the globe have been faced with what I dare to term an emergent ‘post-digital-scape'. This 'scape' implies that the digital has become a ubiquitous fact, heavily rooted in contemporary (Meta) life. Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Google, and their respective algorithms increasingly hold a form of archival power over our daily interests and doings.

In the same fashion, socio-technological platforms also determine who will survive with their businesses (Uber disrupts the taxi and the tuk tuk business); they influence religious and ritual practices (Zoom and Microsoft Teams are used for funeral services and Death tech apps allow for prolonged mourning rituality), they dominate leisure activities (steering our choices of movies, music, television series) and, last but not least, they make quarter for novel digital literacies environments that transcend formal institutionalised education through the gamification of learning, and the learnification of gaming. Platforms thus change not only how students talk, write, and read, but also how they learn to reason.

Against the above, and within the frame of the Digital International Mother Tongue Education Network (Dig.I.M.E.N.), I present an exploratory ethnographic investigation of a digital game meant to teach secondary school students how to reason about canonical (Dutch) literature. Based on my classroom ethnographic inquiry, I advance some considerations about what is gained and what is lost by these students. I conclude by reflecting on the current position of L1 canonical literature teaching and the implications of game-based learning platforms for students’ ownership of how to reason about literature.

Period	2025
Held at	University of Kelanya, Department of English, Sri Lanka
Degree of Recognition	International