Content area
Full text
Digital Media, Culture and Education: Theorising Third Space Literacies By John Potter and Julian McDougall Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 205 pp./$99.99 (hb), $79.99 (e-book)
Worried About the Wrong Things: Youth, Risk, and Opportunity in the Digital World By Jacqueline Ryan Vickery MIT Press, 2017 360 pp./$35.00 (sb), $24.00 (e-book)
Create to Learn: Introduction to Digital Literacy By Renee Hobbs Wiley-Blackwell, 2017 285 pp./$89.95 (hb), $34.95 (sb)
To read about critical digital literacy in the context of K-12 and undergraduate education in the United States and Great Britain in 2017 is to engage in an act that is profoundly disappointing, disheartening, and discouraging. This is not to say that current discussions lack compelling ideas, sophisticated solutions, or ethical considerations that deserve careful pondering. Nor is it to suggest that this realm of academic research and curriculum development has declined or dwindled. Quite the contrary. The discipline is home to rigorous, provocative, and dedicated work by scholars who have steadily produced both sound and radical ideas about how best to educate young people for a digital world, with varied and abundant research studies as support. Further, the last decade has seen the evolution of a global perspective, careful attention to both formal and informal learning, and an awareness of generational differences that boasts a greater acuity than ever. So why the weary sense of despair?
Perhaps David Buckingham put it best in his book Beyond Technology: Children's Learning In the Age of Digital Culture, which includes a chapter titled "Waiting for the Revolution." He was referring to the revolution in digital literacy and its acceptance within the curriculum for students of all ages. Sadly, that sentence was published in 2007. Here we are, in 2017, another decade on, and we're still "waiting for the revolution."
Luckily, the writers of three new books on digital literacy refuse to cede the future of young people and their right to an education that integrates media literacy to the onslaught of challenges preventing imaginative pedagogical reform in this area. Together, authors John Potter, Julian McDougall, Jacqueline Ryan Vickery, and Renee Hobbs offer a spectrum of perspectives, practices, and research that demonstrate the remarkable vitality and breadth of activity in the field.
In Digital Media, Culture and Education: Theorising Third Space Literacies, Potter...