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In this five-week study, two teacher educators and one preservice teacher brought console and virtual reality games into an elective middle school language arts course in order to explore aspects of literacy as a social practice. To the extent possible in a public school, researchers sought to construct the classroom as an affinity space, treat the games as literature worthy of thoughtful response, and position students as co-investigators. Small groups of students played games and reflected on their experiences in writing, class discussion, and a culminating interview. The evolving discourse was framed with questions designed to evoke student explanations of their thinking related to their play experiences. Thematic analysis of student writing, researcher field notes, artifacts from large group meetings, and final interviews revealed the importance of community to the gamers' progress in the game and to their well-being in the classroom.

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of online price dispersion in Europe, across a broad range of product categories and countries. Using the dominant European price comparison site we collected firm specific prices, weekly, from seven European countries (Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) for 31 unique products, falling into five distinct product categories (printers, PDAs, scanners, games consoles, computer games and music), over the nine-month period October 2001 to June 2002. The resulting data set comprises over 17,000 individual price observations.

Using a number of alternative measures of price dispersion we find significant differences in the degree of price dispersion observed in online markets, both between countries and across product categories. We consider alternative explanations for online price dispersion and analyze their significance in explaining the observed differences.

Inspired by the debates on participatory methods and drawing from research on “digital childhoods” in Portugal, this chapter aims to address the methodological innovations and challenges in collecting visual and digital data with children at their homes. As one of the stages of a research project on internet use, children were asked to take photos of their favorite objects at home and to collect screenshots of their most used webpages, followed by a conversation with the researcher. The use of photography allowed children greater expression and autonomy and gave researchers access to the children’s own perspectives on their home environment. It also provided unique information about the arrangement of digital objects at home and their different appropriations by girls and boys. Screenshots showed creative uses of the internet by children and gender differences. Ethical concerns were raised, due to the specific nature of working with children and with visual material (anonymization and dissemination). Entering the domestic setting provided a privileged access to children’s private sphere and to the in situ observation of their use of technology. However, the home is not a neutral place for a researcher and crossing the border into the private domain involves risks. These findings, illustrated by empirical examples from the research field, stress the importance of reflecting on and discussing the potentials, limitations, and ethical considerations of different methodologies, as well as their suitability to specific research objects, subjects, and contexts.