The aim of this article is to address how online tools and digital technologies can influence data collection opportunities. We are still at the early stages of piecing together a more holistic picture of the role of digital media in young people's everyday lives, especially regarding digital gaming among younger children. Digital technologies have enabled both new ways of gaming together and the possibility of capturing children's everyday knowledge-making dialogues in a non-institutionalized digital environment. In this case study, the online tool FRAPS^®, which enables players to record their play sessions while gaming was used to address data collection opportunities. By using this tool, the lifeworlds of children could be displayed through their knowledge-making dialogues, which also captured the resources the children use when they collaboratively played Minecraft. The analysis draws on peer learning and on Vygotsky's notions of object-regulation, other-regulation and self-regulation. The results show that language was a resource when the children collaboratively played, Minecraft^® online, as enabling other-regulation. Other resources of importance connected to language use were digital tools and artefacts, such as computers, headsets, Skype and smartphones, object-regulation. The children's previous knowledge and experiences from their ordinary lifeworld used in the game also became resources. The resources can also be built into the game and regarded as affordances. The children already know how many of these affordances are used, self-regulation, and external assistance did not seem necessary.

This case study explores how Swedish upper secondary students communicate in English as part of second language learning, in a blog shared with Thai students. Grounded in a sociocultural perspective on learning, the notions of Goffman's frame shifting and Bakhtin's concept of carnival are employed to analyse two specific students’ negotiations and co-construction of postings in relation to authorship and audience. The findings show that when encountering a task introduced as part of schooling but contextualized in social media, the two students struggle to come to grips with how to frame the task. Initially, they frame the activity in relation to what counts as conventional language-learning practices but shift framing as they discover that other classmates’ postings are framed more in line with social media contexts, distinguished by a carnivalesque spontaneous writing. Thus, for the two specific students who author the postings, the local audience consisting of their classmates plays the most significant role.

This study presents results from an intervention case study at upper secondary level, in which Blogger was introduced during English class. The overarching interest was to explore the students’ social performances and their interplay with students’ uses of language across multiple forms of literate activities in blogging. The study draws on a sociocultural perspective, taking a particular interest in language as a meditational tool for communication and interaction in the students’ own digital vernacular practices. Goffman’s dramaturgical approach including the concepts of performance and role distance in front and back regions together with Bakhtin’s notion of carnival were invoked as analytical tools for the analysis of video material as well as ethnographic scraping of online content in the blog. It was found that the students presented a witty, humorous image of themselves, while playing around with language as well as bringing in manipulated media for mockery and self-irony. Analytically speaking the students were living the carnival by utilizing a norm-breaking language—a language in the wild. Though this in-depth study presents a limited number of students’ blogging, the findings contribute to an increased understanding of the in situ creation of a blogger text providing a basis for discussing the uses of language in social media and what this implies for learning languages and for teaching practices.

This study investigates what characterises teachers’ pedagogical design of OER, and potential affordances and constraints in pedagogical design in an open education practice, when contributing to a Swedish repository Lektion.se. The teachers’ framing of the OER shared on the repository included the analyses of a delimited number of OER for learning Swedish. The analytical work with analysing what characterised the OER, was followed up with teacher interviews to explore teachers’ incentives for sharing. The OER selected for analysis were investigated linked to the features given in the repository, to identify what distinguished different categories of OER when framed by the teachers. The OER displayed a continuum of ways of framing an activity, though the majority was represented by low levels of description, which afforded less guidance. The teachers expressed a positive attitude towards sharing. The findings suggest that OER need to be defined and supported by web features to enable going beyond reuse.