What is it about?
This article has three aims: 1) to explore ways to visualize the rhythms of how people perform digital skills; 2) to examine how the process for describing these rhythms of skill involve mediality; an interweaving of tools, technologies, and media; 3) we develop a new method called "spotlines" as a way to qualitatively describe and compare the rhythms of performing skill.
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Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
Why is it important?
How we define, measure, and represent skill is a topic of considerable debate. Finding better ways to describe skill — ways that don't fall into tropes that present skill as a static, tangible resource that can be acquired and stored — is essential if we want to better understand how skill is developed and why it matters.
Perspectives
The research described in this paper was conducted just prior to COVID 19, but some of the methods used proved useful for dealing with situations where it isn’t possible to conduct participant observation in person.
Dr Frederik F Lesage
Simon Fraser University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Finding a rhythm: The mediality of researching digital skill as process, New Media & Society, August 2023, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/14614448231192966.
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