Research Questions

, it is important to study students in action and understand their spoken and unspoken knowledge, actions displayed when they jointly relate to one another, and the digital artefacts they use. This was done through video observations, recordings, and interviews. This study also contributes empirical data to

research on students in action utilizing various digital tools. This study method is explorative and descriptive; this approach was chosen because I wanted to study what the students were actually doing with and around the digital tools in the given settings.

The main research questions are as follows:

RQ1: In terms of social practices, how do digital literacies play out in social studies?

RQ2: How do students relate to each other and to digital tools in different contexts in social studies?

In addition to these content-related research questions, there are two research questions related to methodology:

RQ3: What are the limitations and advantages of using action cameras to gain insight

The figures show the central aspects of this study and how it is understood. This is relevant in this figure and in all the following figures in this extended abstract.

Figure 1. From initial research questions to objectives in each article

Figure 1 illustrates how the three terms: digital literacies, social practice, and method, also seen in Figure 2, derive from the initial research questions concerning social practices, method, and digital literacies. The funnel illustrates how these components are forced together and present in all four articles in varying degrees. The cogwheels show this. All the elements are strongly connected, but the focus of each study varies. The numbers leading to the

cogwheels refer to the chronological numbering of the articles. The new arrangements of the components following the funnel and the cogwheels show the transition from the initial open approach to the research questions in each article.

In my efforts to answer the research questions, the different articles clarified the different aspects of the main questions. Therefore, the articles are presented here in chronological order, as follows:

Article 1: Bruk av teori for økt refleksivitet i praksis. Praksisarkitektur som rammeverk for å belyse forskerens plass i datagenereringen.

A self-reflective book chapter about the research process, Article 1 discussed how empirical data focusing on digital literacies can be generated and some problems the researcher might encounter.

This article clarifies the 4th of the main research questions.

Article 2: Students Choosing Digital Sources: Studying Students Information

DIGITAL

Lofthus: Digital literacies as social practices: students, technology, and research methods

This article is an empirical study from the classroom, addressing the following research question: How can mobile digital tools be used as learning

resources in social studies education? The focus was on answering three questions related to this issue: How do students negotiate the meaning of the use of various available sources on a tablet when

working on a school project? How does a tablet as an artifact and learning resource fit into a social learning situation? How does the work done on a tablet contain elements of formal and informal learning? This article examines the main research questions concerning content relations.

Article 3: Action Camera: First-Person Perspective or Hybrid in Motion?

Article 3 focuses on using action cameras to gather information This seemed to be a good way to gather video data from several groups without interference from the researcher. In retrospect, however, it was not as straightforward as initially thought. In this article, the focus was to

understand the multiple ways in which the camera, the person wearing it, co-present others, the researcher, and the making of the recording as a process figured into the data production.

This article discussed the limitations and advantages of using action cameras to study

method

Lofthus: Digital literacies as social practices: students, technology, and research methods

Article 4: Digital Literacies in Social Studies

Article 4 is based on an empirical study from the outdoor museum, and it illuminated the main research question by focusing on two related questions:

Which tools do the students use at different times, and what are the reasons for their choices? How are these choices a part of digital literacies and the digital?

This article examines the main research questions concerning content relations.

The four articles have different main focuses, but these different focuses are all a part of what establishes the overall social practices that occur, where students

each other and their digital tools and the researcher and the chosen research methods discern the context.

The articles are integrated by highlighting different practice architectures in distinct contexts, the relevant methodological issues, and how they become part of the practice architectures. The integration of the four articles is thoroughly discussed in Chapter 4 of the extended abstract.

Figure 2 illustrates how the articles focused on different aspects of the topic and how these elements made up a whole. Combining and bringing these aspects together added more value to this extended abstract than to the sum of the articles. It integrated the main

components of this study to show their interdependencies, which had to be separated and kept out of each article scope.

method

Figure 2. The articles in this research project addressed various aspects that together makes up a whole.

The figure shows how the articles addressed the aspects of the research project. In addition, the relationship between the focuses is shown in the figure, which indicates that digital literacies are the focus area that frames the whole. To explain and describe digital literacies in different contexts, I examined digital literacies as not static but rather changes according to and because of the components of the practice. This is shown in Articles 2 and 4, where the most important elements in the practices in focus are the students and the digital tools used. Theory on social practices is a narrower frame to understanding digital literacies, and how I understand and use the term will be discussed in Chapter 2.When I was working with the datasets and gaining a deeper understanding of what I consider important in social practice, it became clear that the chosen research methods and methodology are part of what delineates social practice, which is the main part of the digital literacies I was interested in investigating more closely. Throughout the project, data generation, analyzes, the

, and the methods chosen for generating data have become important

elements, not only as a means for gathering the data but also as a strong premise for the social practices that occur. The focus on both digital literacies and methods is bound by social practice, practice architecture, and affordances.

DIGITAL LITERACIES - Affordance

In the classroom

(2)

Excursion (4)

SOCIAL PRACTICE Practice architecture

Students (2 & 4) Digital tools (2 & 4)

METHOD

Researcher (1 & 3)

Action camera (1 & 3)