ABSTRACT
Educational research focusing on new media and technology has been slow to investigate informal learning processes online outside of institutionalized and formal educational contexts. Informal learning spaces, particularly online communities and social networking spaces, which users create and occupy, have garnered a great deal of research attention of late but remain an area in need of further theorizing (Buckingham and Willett, 2006; Trotter, 2007). In the same way that we cannot underestimate the significance of informal learning environments, environments in which “virtual topographies reveal cultural topographies, enacted by the variety of practices of everyday life” (Nunes, 2006, p. 41), we cannot underestimate the significance of the informal learning generated within and emerging from these virtual domains. Pushing beyond informal learning discourses that focus on user competency, civic engagement, holistic valorization, and/or moral panic offer new and productively complicating analytical possibilities for educational research.
