Episode 087 - Michael Dezuanni

Leading Lines producer, Cliff Anderson, talks with Michael Dezuanni, associate professor of communication at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, and associate director of the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland. His research focuses on digital media, literacies, and learning in a variety of contexts, and he’s the author and editor of numerous articles and books, including Serious Play: Literacy, Learning, and Digital Games, a book he co-edited with Catherine Beavis and Joanne O’Mara, published in 2017 by Routledge Press. Dezuanni talks about his newest book, Peer Pedagogies on Digital Platforms: Learning with Minecraft Let’s Play Videos, published in 2020 by MIT Press. He shares some of the findings from his studies of Let’s Play videos, including ways that children learn from peers and near-peers in this very particular learning context. He and Cliff also talk about implications for teaching digital media literacy in other contexts, and about the troubles with YouTube comment policies. Links • Michael Dezuanni’s faculty page, https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/people/michael-dezuanni/ • Peer Pedagogies on Digital Platforms: Learning with Minecraft Let’s Play Videos, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/peer-pedagogies-digital-platforms • @dezuanni on Twitter, https://twitter.com/dezuanni • Cliff Anderson’s YouTube channel, Computational Thinking at the Margins, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-nUTl7F0PLgpXOMFsQDstA