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Computer use is a widespread leisure activity for adolescents. Leisure contexts, such as Internet cafés, constitute specific social environments for computer use and may hold significant educational potential. This article reports a phenomenological study of adolescents' experiences of educational computer use at Internet cafés in Turkey. The purposes of the study were to understand and describe the phenomenon in depth and arrive at the essence of adolescents' experiences with the phenomenon. Data were collected through series of indepth phenomenological interviews with six adolescents and analyzed using phenomenal analysis. The results include potential benefits of Internet cafés as specific social leisure contexts of educational computer use for adolescent development. Implications for designing and studying computer-based informal learning environments are presented.
KEYWORDS: phenomenology, computer use, informal learning, context, adolescence, Internet café, Turkey
Educational research has placed increasing emphasis on the place and context of educational experiences (Gruenewald, 2003a, 2003b; Vadeboncoeur, 2006), building on the insight that learning experiences and outcomes are shaped by the contexts in which they are embedded (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Resnick, 1987). Likewise, experiences of using computers are embedded in the social and cultural context in which computer use takes place (e.g., Mumtaz, 2001; Sutherland, Facer, Furlong, & Furlong, 2000; Zhao & Frank, 2003). Indeed, any human behavior, including computer use, is so embedded in and constrained by its social and cultural contexts that to construe such behavior as independent would be misleading (Granovetter, 1985). Adolescents use computers and the Internet in different contexts, including schools, libraries, homes, and public access points such as Internet cafés (Becker, 2000; DeBeIl & Chapman, 2003). Although the social and cultural contexts of computer use are critical to understanding adolescents' experiences with using computers, little research has investigated those experiences with respect to their contexts. Furthermore, despite the fact that computer use is a widespread leisure activity for adolescents (Roberts, Henriksen, & Foehr, 2004; Subrahmanyam, Kraut, Greenfield, & Gross, 2000) and despite the importance of leisure time and activities during adolescence (Eccles & Barber, 1999; Verma & Larson, 2003), little research has focused on computer use in leisure contexts as informal learning environments.
Formal, nonformal, and informal learning environments are three broad contexts (Maarschalk, 1988; Reed & Loughran, 1984; Smith, 1988) that afford different types...