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Digital devices such as iPads are prevalent in children's play from an early age. How this shapes young children's play is an area of considerable debate without any clear consensus on how different forms of play are brought into the iPad interaction. In this study, we examined 98 play activities of children in two preschool settings, featuring 2 and 4–5-year-olds, their play with iPads and non-digital artefacts. Three analytical approaches were used: an index built on a digital play framework [Bird, Jo, and Susan Edwards. 2015. "Children Learning to Use Technologies Through Play: A Digital Play Framework." British Journal of Educational Technology 46 (6): 1149–1160. doi:10.1111/bjet.12191 ], a quantitative description of the index, and a qualitative interaction analysis of children's play. Results show how play with iPads is characterised as less ludic than play with other artefacts, and diverges from the age-typical norms of play. We discuss what these results might mean for children's play in contemporary early childhood settings and for children's learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that methodological uncertainty, such as that experienced by the social research community through the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022) is, and has always been, a vital part of the research landscape. Whilst recognising the many damaging effects of the uncertainties of the pandemic on research and researchers, we home in on the potential of the challenges raised by uncertainty as a force for methodological innovation. We introduce three InTouch project research studies conducted during Lockdown and reflect on the methodological challenges raised by the change and uncertainty of the pandemic. We describe our use, adaptation and reorientation of creative, sensory, and speculative methods to overcome these challenges. We reflect on how we mobilised the uncertain methodological terrain of digital touch and social research in the pandemic as a resource for methodological innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a speculative lens to explore the social and sensory trajectories of Interactive Skin, a class of skin-worn epidermal devices that augment the human body in ways that are significant for affective techno-touch. The paper presents and discusses the use of a speculative narrative on Interactive Skin futures produced through an exploratory research-collaboration with a Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) lab, combining data from speculative methods (cultural probe returns and a future-orientated workshop) with an ethnographic sensitivity to writing. The speculative narrative is in the form of a found archive of fictional fragments that are research provocations in their own right. We discuss their potentials, including the ability to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between social and HCI researchers and to agitate the socio-technological space of interactive skin futures, as well as their limitations. The paper concludes that a socially orientated speculative approach can provide useful insights on the interconnection between the senses, society, and technology in the context of emergent affective techno-touch technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the remediating effect of bio-sensing technology on touch practices in the context of parent-infant interaction. We examine how the entry of a biosensing technology into the social, sensory and technological ecology of family homes interacts with the ways in which parents and babies know each other and communicate through touch. The paper centres on an exploratory case study of the Owlet Smart Sock (OSS), a bio-sensing baby monitoring device. We bring the social critical and experiential lenses of multimodality and sensory ethnography to studying the OSS as a socio-technological probe across a range of research encounters, including focus groups, home visits and video re-enactments with parents. In doing so, we provide an account of the ways in which the technology affects how babies and parents' bodies are (re)imagined, assessed, controlled, interrelated, experienced, and cared for and move beyond generic social debate around the quantified-objectified baby and fears of touch deprivation in contemporary digital culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a qualitative analysis of family interaction around digital interactive tabletop exhibits. Parents play a teaching role in museum visits, using strategies from encouragement, to giving directions about using exhibits, to offering explanations that connect an exhibit to children's previous experiences. Touchscreens and touch tables offer different ways of engaging families in museums, raising questions around how these interactive tabletops support family collaboration, specifically their role in fostering scaffolding forms of activity. A multimodal analysis using video data of family interactions around three tabletop exhibits examines the role of digital exhibit design in fostering family collaboration and adult scaffolding behavior. Findings show that particular design elements in exhibit set up, expert video/audio and touch interaction influenced family formation around the exhibit, adult scaffolding and family engagement with the exhibit activity. The article draws on these findings to inform the design of interactive tabletop exhibits for family collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how family museum visitors crafted learning through interaction with one another and the touch objects of an exhibition. Through a case study of seven families' interaction, we show how families used touch to bring their interests and resources into dialogue with museum expectations and resources. Using a multimodal approach to analyze observational data, we generate a fine-grained account of differently configured family touch practices and ways of experiencing and knowing objects through their material, sensory tactile and affective qualities. We conclude by highlighting how our findings can inform the design of touch exhibits to support family learning, with attention to engagement, narrative creation, and embodied learning, and point to the paper's methodological contribution to the analysis of visitor situated real-time interaction and learning in museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine methodological innovation in the social sciences through a focus on researching the body in digital environments. There are two strands to our argument as to why this is a useful site to explore methodological innovation in the social sciences. First, researching the body in digital environments places new methodological demands on social science. Second, as an area of interest at the intersection of the social sciences and the arts, it provides a focus for exploring how social science innovation can be informed by engagement with the arts, in this instance how the arts work with the body in digital environments and take up social science ideas in novel ways. We argue that social science engagement with the arts and the relatively unmapped terrain of the body in digital environments has the potential to open up spaces for innovative social science questions and methods: spaces, questions and methods that have potential for more general social science methodological innovation. We draw on the findings of the Methodological Innovation in Digital Arts and Social Sciences (MIDAS) project a multi-site ethnography of the research ecologies of the social sciences and the arts related to the body in digital environments. We propose a continuum of methodological innovation that attends to how methods are moved across research contexts and disciplines, in this instance the social sciences and the digital arts. We illustrate and discuss the innovative potential ofexpandingandre-situatingmethods across the social sciences and the arts, thetransferof methods and concepts across disciplinary borders and the interdisciplinarygenerationof new methods. We discuss the catalysts and challenges for social science methodological innovation in relation to the digital and the arts, with attention to how the social sciences might engage with the arts towards innovative research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how to research the opportunities for emotional engagement that mobile technologies provide for the design and enactment of learning environments. In the context of mobile technologies that foster location-based linking, we make the case for the centrality of in situ real-time observational research on how emotional engagement unfolds and for the inclusion of bodily aspects of interaction. We propose that multimodal methods offer tools for observing emotion as a central facet of person–environment interaction and provide an example of these methods put into practice for a study of emotional engagement in mobile history learning. A multimodal analysis of video data from 16 pairs of 9- to 10-year-olds learning about the World War II history of their local Common is used to illustrate how students’ emotional engagement was supported by their use of mobile devices through multimodal layering and linking of stimuli, the creation of digital artifacts, and changes in pace. These findings are significant for understanding the role of digital augmentation in fostering emotional engagement in history learning, informing how digital augmentation can be designed to effectively foster emotional engagement for learning, and providing insight into the benefits of multimodality as an analytical approach for examining emotion through bodily interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a multimodal approach to analysing embodied interaction and discourses of scientific investigation using an interactive tangible tabletop. It argues that embodied forms of interaction are central to science inquiry. More specifically, the paper examines the role of hand actions in the development of descriptions and explanations of scientific phenomena in tangible digital learning environments. It reports an observational study of primary school students aged 10–11 years conducting scientific investigations via an interactive tangible tabletop. Through the systematic tracking and analysis of hand action in line with phases of scientific inquiry the paper maps, critiques and extends previous research, notably Roth’s concept of a ‘developmental trajectory’, to develop a ‘taxonomy’ of hand actions for scientific inquiry in tangible digital learning environments. The paper concludes by presenting an alternative model through which to understand the semiotic role of the hands in scientific inquiry, one in which different hand actions do not follow a simple developmental sequence, but instead fulfil different functions across the inquiry process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the use and potentials of Learning Platform (LP) technologies for organising learning in English primary and secondary schools. It reports on the findings of qualitative research on the benefits of LPs based on data from case studies in 12 ‘early adopting’ English primary and secondary schools. The paper reports findings on the potential of LPs to enhance student access to a broad range of learning resources, to increase opportunities for independent and personalised learning, to support opportunities for collaborative learning and to improve student processes of reflecting on and assessing their learning. The paper concludes by drawing out some of the pedagogic implications from these findings and with a brief summary of the emerging conditions associated with the effective use of LPs to support and organise learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the video-based social research of social researchers, an ethnomethodological study of work practices in optometry, and multimodal transcription.

Textuality is often thought of in linguistic terms; for instance, the talk and writing that circulate in the classroom. In this paper I take a multimodal perspective on textuality and context. I draw on illustrative examples from school Science and English to examine how image, colour, gesture, gaze, posture and movement - as well as writing and speech - are mobilized and orchestrated by teachers and students, and how this shapes learning contexts. Throughout the paper I discuss the issues raised by a multimodal perspective for the conceptualization of text and learning context, and how this approach can contribute to learning and pedagogy more generally. I suggest that attending to the full ensemble of communicative modes involved in learning contexts enables a richer view of the complex ways in which curriculum knowledge (and policy) is mediated and articulated through classroom practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers making texts for use in the classroom is nothing new, it is an established aspect of pedagogic practice. The introduction of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) into UK secondary schools has, however, impacted on this practice in a number of ways. Changes in the site of design and display - from the printed page or worksheet and the blackboard to the electronic site of the screen, together with easy access to multimodal resources, including colour, image, sound and movement - bring new potentials for teacher text design for IWBs. The texts designed and used with IWBs can be viewed as a meeting point for the agenda of educational policy, the interests of the commercial sector, teachers' pedagogic concerns and the facilities of technology. Pace, interactivity and multimodality are converged on by policy and research literature as key benefits of IWBs for pedagogy. In this article, we discuss teachers' design of IWB texts with a focus on these three resources. Drawing on three illustrative examples of IWB use in secondary schools maths, we examine how these resources are articulated and mediated in the classroom through teachers' text design. We highlight the role of teachers in digital text design and the potential of text design as a pedagogic tool for change (and non-change). We conclude that pedagogic text design for IWBs would benefit from a more nuanced approach to these (and other) resources that foregrounds pedagogy and backgrounds technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As words fly onto the computer screen, revolve, and dissolve, image, sound, and movement enter school classrooms in “new” and significant ways, ways that reconfigure the relationship of image and word. In this paper I discuss these “new” modal configurations and explore how they impact on students’ text production and reading in English schools. I look at the changing role of writing on screen, in particular how the visual character of writing and the increasingly dominant role of image unsettle and decentre the predominance of word. Through illustrative examples of ICT applications and students’ interaction with these in school English and science (and games in a home context), I explore how they seem to promote image over writing. More generally, I discuss what all of this means for literacy and how readers of school age interpret multimodal texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pathways and ToonTalk are computer programming systems for children (age 4 years old and over) to build computer games with. This paper explores how the range of representational modes made available in these two systems shape the potentials for learning with them. The analysis centres on the impact of modes (including still image, gesture, posture, speech, music, writing, and new configurations of the elements of these) on the emergence of the mathematical entities|super||opnbop|1|clobop| rule, condition and action. We show that the choice of representational modes in the design of each program is central to the potentials for user engagement. Modes (e.g. image and writing) provide the maker of an application and the user of it with different features for making meaning, in this case, for engaging with aspects of programming and building games. We conclude that a multimodal approach can offer new insights into the learning potentials of computer programming applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All teaching and learning in the school classroom involves a range of modes including speech, writing, gesture, gaze, body-posture, movement, and so on-in other words teaching and learning are multimodal. This is as true of school English, where common-sense would have it that teaching and learning are fully realised in language, as it is of school Science where the role of action is firmly established in the curriculum. While all teaching and learning is multimodal, the use of computers in the classroom serves to emphasise the multimodal character of pedagogy. Computer applications introduce new kinds of texts into the classroom and these demand different practices of students. In turn this suggests the need to re-think conceptions of literacy, learning and assessment-to move beyond the narrow definition of literacy apparent in recent government policy to a broader definition that realises the connections between literacy and social practices in a multimodal digital era. The questions raised by the move from a language-based curriculum to a multimodal curriculum are explored in this paper through an illustrative example of computer mediated learning in the school English classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on ideas and data from the ESRC funded research 'Rhetorics of the science classroom: a multimodal approach'. It suggests that learning is realised through the interaction between visual, actional and linguistic communication (i.e. learning is multimodal) and involves the transformation of information across different communicative systems ('modes'), e.g. from speech to image. It demonstrates that learning is a process of selection, adaptation and transformation motivated by the interests of pupils and the context of learning. Specifically, it analyses the different ways four Year 7 science pupils transformed their teacher's descriptions of cells in their production of texts on onion cells (and the choices they engaged with in producing them), focusing in particular on their use of analogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As conceptions of communication shift from a single focus on language to the full repertoire of communicational resources (e.g. image, action, sound), this paper challenges the assumption that learning and teaching are primarily linguistic accomplishments. Through an example of school-based teaching, we show that classroom texts are realised through the interaction of different 'modes' of communication (organised, regular, socially specific means of representation). That is, they are multimodal: Action and image are not mere illustrations to language, rather each realises specific representational work. Further we suggest that learning is a multimodal process, and goes beyond language. We conclude that multimodality presents a new challenge to current teacher education and the evaluation of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes the application of the visual social semiotics schema developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) to sexual health leaflets and posters for young people (age 13 to 19 years) in order to explore how male heterosexuality is managed at a visual level. It illustrates the use of the method, and its advantages and drawbacks in comparison with other methods, and highlights the importance of visual representations as a source of sociological data. This analysis shows how social semiotics can be applied to reveal the discourses in images, and how sexual health materials reinforce dominant ideologies of masculinity. The implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the potential effectiveness of sexual health materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]