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This thesis investigates adolescents' on line literacy practices on a college-affiliated bulletin board system, BBS, in Taiwan. Aligned with New Literacy Studies, this research project understands BBS texts as a social practice and explores choices of language, writing systems, orthography and language creativity. These linguistic features constitute college students' digital literacy practices and how the students manage to perform their identity in this online community of practice. Viewing BBS texts as a social practice entails the holistic appreciation of the interplay of the purposes, contexts and resources involved in human sense-making that are appropriately approached through qualitative methods, including through taking an emic perspective. Three qualitative methods are combined: textual analysis, an online questionnaire and a semi-structured group interview. Through the analysis of texts, I show how the diverse multimodal affordances of the BBS texts are innovatively exploited by college students. I investigate lexical, grammatical, pragmatic and graphological features of BBS texts, demonstrating innovation in the writing systems, spelling, code-switching and symbols when students compose BBS texts. An online questionnaire and a group interview reveal college students' perceptions and motives that influence their BBS text-making practices. The findings reported in this thesis demonstrate these screen-based texts are multi modal and dynamic, with a combination of image, onomatopoeic sounds and various modes of representation and communication employed. BBS is shown to have enabled an extended set of orthographic choices, reshaping the nature of traditional writing systems. Students make use of these affordances to foreground their friendship, rapport and cultural bond with peers, constituting an affinity space to share common knowledge and conventions on BBS. These college students use representational resources in multilingual, multiscriptual and multimodal text-making practices and play with writing systems, scripts and symbols. This study reveals that BBS in Taiwan provides a fruitful source of materials in exploring the complexity and creativity of adolescents' digital literacy practices, although further developmental work is still needed for future research.

The quality of the student learning experience in an online learning course has raised many debates in educational studies. Evidence found in current literature indicates that individualised learning and interactive learning do contribute to the student learning experience in online learning courses. However, there is little evidence of any major studies that have tried to explore the impact of both individualised learning and interactive learning on the students' experience.

The influence of technology on education is significant and growing. In particular, most students in higher education now work in a learning environment that supports electronic access to course materials and perhaps controls aspects of the learning process. Within such an environment, students have greater choice as to when, where and how they study; unfortunately, however, these advantages are often offset by a reduction in student engagement. This is partly due to the quality of the learning content but equally important is the suitability of the learning environment in which that material is studied. This thesis focuses on that environment, considering, in particular, how student engagement might be improved using techniques common in digital games. In general, games succeed by entertaining players in a way that builds on their natural curiosity and competitiveness, thereby encouraging them to continue to play. Similar encouragement seems desirable in education. The thesis examines the hypothesis that student performance in e-learning can be improved by using engagement techniques from digital games. Essentially, this means enhancing technology-oriented learning environments with engaging features that occur in game design. The thesis considers the general requirements of such environments and identifies relevant engagement techniques. From this understanding, a game-oriented learning framework (GOLF) is proposed. The essence of the framework is that a game setting can promote desirable behaviour in terms of completing basic learning tasks and tackling additional challenges, with engagement further encouraged through regular feedback on performance, measured against others in the same class. It was anticipated at the outset that the design of the framework would require significant experimental evaluation and refinement so it has been produced through action research and evolutionary prototyping. A series of case studies in academia has been used in this development process. Results show that the framework can enhance, student engagement leading to improved performance. Also, as might be expected, however, there are significant soft factors involved that can have a significant impact on the benefit of the game approach and indeed determine whether or not it succeeds at all. These factors are discussed, together with suggestions for future work.

Over the last ten years the application of m-learning has increased within educational settings worldwide. Through everyday exposure to mobile technologies young people are rapidly becoming 'digital natives' (Prensky, 2001}, making this technology something schools cannot afford to ignore (Becta, 2009a; Sharples, 2007). However, the current position within schools does not support the notion that teachers are keeping pace with technological advances (Bauer and Kenton, 2005; Ofsted, 2009) and most schools are not grounded in young peoples' everyday technological experiences (Bauer and Kenton, 2005). It is essential that the effects of m-learning are investigated further because m-learning offers teachers the opportunity to work outside the constraints of the classroom environment providing pupils with personalised, up-to-date learning on demand; however vigilance is key as participation in m-learning does not automatically transform pupils into 'learning natives' (Passey, 2009). The goal of this small-scale action research inquiry was to expose GCSE Geography pupils to two location-aware (mediascape) mobile technology activities and then, through the lens of Activity Theory, the advantages and limitations associated with using mobile technology have been presented and discussed in terms of affective and cognitive findings. After weighing up the advantages and limitations; this action research inquiry has discovered that sufficient evidence exists to assert that m-learning can enhance pupils' learning experience. If embraced and embedded into the curriculum m-learning can become more than an idealistic dream moving beyond the 'early adopters' (Rogers, 2003) into mainstream education. It could become a revolutionary teaching and learning tool benefiting both teachers and pupils; helping to raise standards, improving performance and enhancing the learning process. In an effort to increase the acceptance of mobile technology as a worthy teaching tool the potential future use of m-learning within GCSE Geography has also been reviewed and recommendations for interested groups/individuals presented.

This thesis addresses two key research questions surrounding games-based learning (GBL). In Part One, three attitude studies are reported. Using confirmatory factor analysis, Study 1 disconfirmed the factor structure of an existing scale (Bonanno & Kommers, 2008). Studies 2 and 3 developed new scales for measuring pupils' ('Pupil attitudes to GBL' scale i.e., PA2GBL) and teachers' attitudes towards GBL . ('Teacher attitudes to GBL' scale, i.e., TA2GBL) in general. Exploratory factor analysis across both studies revealed three similar sub-scales measuring: learning benefits of GBL, perceived self-efficacy, and boastfulness! confidence (pupils) and confidence with IT use (teachers). Factors affecting attitudes were examined. The key finding was the importance of gaming experience on GBL attitudes. Both GBL and spare time gaming experience were important factors for the pupils, but for teachers, GBL experience was more important. In all instances, those with more experience were more positive. In Part Two, three pairs of pupils were observed over three time points interacting with a game designed specifically for the Northern Ireland curriculum, focussed on the topic of Citizenship. A coding framework was created to code their behaviour and dialogue. Different patterns of how the pairs moved through the games were identified as 'systematic', 'tentative yet improving', and 'off-track with guided improvement'. The results demonstrated how greater experience with the games increased higher order dialogue and collaboration, but procedural dialogue did not always decrease. All pairs experienced some confusion with the game; therefore, the importance of teacher support is recognised. The implications from the thesis point to: (1) the importance of gaming! GBL experience for improving attitudes towards GBL and for encouraging collaboration and higher order thinking whilst using GBL; and (2) the importance of pedagogic considerations, namely, the vital scaffolding/guiding role of the teacher in a GBL classroom to ensure educational benefits are realised.

The role of the tutor in online leaming can be complex due to the wide range of media and pedagogies that can potentially be used. As a result there is a need for effective training materials that recognize this and the Sino-UK e-Educator training project, funded in the UK by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Ministry of Education (MoE) in China, aimed to meet this need. A Participatory Design approach was adopted within the project and this meant involvement of writers and designers with different backgrounds in the collaborative design of the module and the training materials.

The aim at the start of this thesis was to examine the use of broadband technologies in education, particularly focusing on the GEMISIS 2000 Schools Project. I use it now to open up discussion about the implementation and subsequent use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in education. The GEMISIS 2000 project began as a partnership initiative between Salford City Council, The University of Salford and Cable and Wireless (formerly Nynex).

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