Learning by doing in the digital media age : the contention of learning in adolescents' literacy practices

Technology is now more than what is commonly known as information technology (IT) or information and communication technology (ICT) (Buckingham 2008). The changing characteristics of technology in contemporary times are described as being digital, interactive, hypertextual, virtual, networked and simulated (Lister et al. 2009), otherwise known as digital media. Digital media are electronic media that operate on numerical representations or digital codes (Manovich 2001). As the digital codes make media programmable, digital media allow convergence of various media for producing and distributing multimodal productions and reassembling these texts to accentuate its interactivity and aesthetic power (Everett 2003; Lankshear and Knobel 2007; O'Reily 2005). What is distinctly new about digital media is not just the shift in physical properties from the analogue to the digital form but, more importantly, what changes this shift brings to social practices.