Students choosing digital sources: Studying students' information literacy in group work with tablets

Abstract

The focus of this article is on digital literacy and students’ use of digital sources. We are examining how students choose digital video sources when doing group work with tablets in a social studies project. The analysis centers on how students collaboratively negotiate and reason around their choice of video sources during an assignment about environmental issues. The data corpus consists of videos of group work. A sociocultural perspective on learning is employed for analyzing student participation. We explore how the tablets influence the group interaction and how the group members negotiate the process of choosing the video sources found online. The findings show that students do not discuss digital sources only in terms of the formal criteria for digital literacy, but in relation to their perception of how the video sources are presented. It is important to shed light on this aspect of students’ use of tablets in school, because being aware of this facet could materialize in greater digital skills which in turn might expand digital literacy.