From DMLcentral
Exploration: Digital Media and Social Inequality
By Whitney Burke
Christo Sims is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information and a graduate researcher for the Connected Learning Research Network’s Leveling Up project. The project team is investigating the learning dynamics of interest-driven online groups that support academically relevant knowledge-seeking and expertise development. Sims, whose research interests include youth culture, digital media practices, and social inequalities, developed an on-the-ground research methodology while working on the Digital Youth Project. A three-year ethnographic research project, Digital Youth brought together a cohort of researchers who jointly worked to understand how digital media and technology are meaningful to youth in their daily lives. Sims was also one of a dozen graduate students and postdoctoral scholars who participated in the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub’s Research Associates Summer Institute. In the video below, he discusses his developing interest in studying the reproduction of social inequalities and detecting how/if digital media plays a part in that process. Here are just a few highlights from the video, but the full interview (below) dives deep into Sims’ ethnographic approach to digital media and learning research....