Learning and the Digital Generations

This subject will introduce students to the complex and emerging relationships between learning and digital communications. Drawing on the idea of digital generations, it enables students to gain an understanding of the ways in which digital communication is integrated into the lives of new generations. The subject will enable students to understand the ways in which young people both access and produce knowledge, blurring the boundaries of knowledge production and consumption and local and global spaces. It will explore how digital communications open up new opportunities for learning in both formal (e.g. schools) and informal (e.g. leisure) settings, challenging traditional ideas about where and how young people learn. It will also enable students to understand more about the ways in which digital communication technologies can enable disadvantaged young people to draw on local and global ideas and resources and produce new cultural knowledge through the use of new (digital) literacies and forms of civic engagement. Finally the subject will draw on both local and global examples, including the role of digital communications in youth-led revolutionary movements. On completion of this subject students will have a deepened understanding of the potential uses of digital communications for producing new knowledge and expanding the possibilities for learning.