The move to a networked media environment presents a range of challenges for journalistic roles, norms and daily practices. This article employs actor network theory to investigate how different actors negotiate and ultimately shape the manner in which the internet and related digital technologies are embedded in the newsroom. Findings suggest that professional culture – articulated in skills, ideas and practices – acts as a network that weakens the potential impact of technology towards innovation and audience-oriented models of journalism. The results point to the conclusion that the internet and related tools are seen as empowering journalists to do their (traditional) jobs better instead of moving on to the next stage built around a stronger commitment to capitalize on the growing sociotechnical potential.

The present paper focuses on digital storytelling in education, emphasizing the teachers’ needs for familiarization with the new technological conditions. A transmedia integration approach is deployed to make productive, blended learning values while utilizing the availability of tools and reusable media assets in a component-based software engineering kind of framework. The topic is inspired by social studies and humanities, which seem to be marginalized, usually failing to make effective technological facilities, benefits, and contemporary findings. It is, therefore, necessary to modernize the approach to literary things and integrate digital means into the educational process, even in cases where a sole educator on humanities and social studies lacks multidisciplinary support in multimedia authoring and software engineering. This modernization can be made possible by introducing user-friendly tools into the process, representing not just a fashion of the time but mostly a renewal trend, aiming at revitalizing the course to attract and engage learners. Undoubtedly, today’s pupils have grown up with technological means, becoming familiar with their use so their implication causes undiminished interest in most daily activities, including schooling. In this high-tech generation, it is absurd to address the transmission of knowledge and values in outdated ways. Apart from adapting to the timely students’ needs, lesson plans on transmedia storytelling practices can also satisfy tutors, triggering their inspiration and co-creation potentials. Overall, the project aims to attract the trainees’ interest with the help of digital tools, which will be embodied in the educational processes by teachers without technical know-how, while continuously adapting to the audience’s needs. Research hypothesis and questions are formed as part of the deployed human-centered interactive design, aiming at modeling best practices for teaching classical topics, such as the “Odyssey”.

During the last years, there has been a growing multidisciplinary interest in alternative educational approaches, such as serious games, aiming at enhancing thinking skills and media literacy. Likewise, the objective of this study is to present the design and the development of an educational web application for learning the necessary steps towards the detection of bogus content, according to the fact-checking procedures. The game presents news articles, which have to be characterized as fake or real by the players. During the effort to reach the correct decision, the players can use tools and practices for identifying relevant information regarding the clues, which frame a news story (title, date, creator, source, containing images). After presenting the progress of interface design and development, this paper reports the results of a randomized online field study (n = 111), which provides some preliminary evidence. Specifically, it is validated that the game can raise awareness, teach about authentication tools, and highlight the importance of patterns that include evidence regarding the authenticity of articles. Additionally, thorough discussion was conducted within a media class (n = 35) to receive useful feedback/evaluation about the offered utilities and their usability. The findings suggest that educational games may be a promising vehicle to inoculate the public against misinformation.