Situated practices of information use and representation: an ethnographic study of a web design project for boys

This article explores the production practices employed by children building personal webpages in a semi-structured afterschool program: the Fifth Dimension (5D). Following a critical Multiliteracies (CritMLs) approach to learning design, this ethnographic study introduced web-building practices to the children of the 5D and followed their production of personal webpages over a 9 month period. By structuring the intervention this way, it was possible to simultaneously observe the development of both the webpage as artifact as well as the child-participant. Along these lines, the study describes the unique and particular social contexts from which personal webpages emerge and develop over time. Through ethnographic observations, child interviews and surveys, and the personal webpages themselves, project findings suggest that the children engaged in practices of bricolage made possible via web-based informal information seeking practices. This reliance on web-based information seeking as a method for collecting representations to populate personal webpages made visible important relationships between children's production practices, meaning-making, and the electronic articulation of situated identity/membership and the sharing of expertise and interests.