Once upon a tablet: A school toy in the making

Abstract

The current paper introduces the definitions of playful literacy and multimodal hyper-intertextuality, key concepts when researching children’s use of digital tablets. The pilot investigation, which took place in spring 2014 in Denmark, is part of a larger cross-cultural comparative project exploring what emergent behaviors are present when preschool children use and play with tablets in their formal learning environments. In order to map the array of play and usage of such devices for this research, after the first round of observations, the tablet taxonomy was outlined and has been applied as a guide for the subsequent rounds of data collection. The proposed definitions are a valuable contribution to the field of multisensory interfaces, due to their pervasiveness on digital mobile platforms.