New Research Methodologies for Researching New Literacies

This paper presents work-in-progress on a longitudinal study (2003-2007) that aims at identifying and examining the educational features associated with valueadding to the literate capabilities of students with varying performance and process profiles. The study, funded by the Australian Research Council, adopts a situated perspective to investigate the patterns of performance that are evident across the high school years on school-relevant online tasks in a wide range of sites. Of special interest in the discussion are the methodological issues associated with recording, coding and analysing students’ activities online, drawing on screen tracking software. The software has been used to capture how students use digital technologies to research and synthesise information which is drawn on to create a multimodal text demonstrating how they convey new curricular knowledge.