Children today live in different cultural settings. The pre-school culture is one of them and the media culture outside the pre-school another. These cultures are in different ways characterised by opposite and often even conflicting traditions. This article shows how educators and children handle this dilemma by using interaction as a tool to bring changes into the discourse in an educational setting while making stories in the pre-school by means of the multimedia functions of the computer. The interactional processes from three observations are described. In the discussion a comparison with another study with a constructivist point of departure is made. The comparison between the two studies showed contrasting results. The use of a socio-cultural perspective in the presented project make the context and the community visible, while the other study with its underlying assumptions of individually constructed knowledge make context and community invisible.

Gestures are a significant part of communication and carry particular weight when using artefacts such as computers. This study investigates how gestures and utterances are used as resources in the interaction between children and preschool teachers when creating stories with the computer. The data consists of observations of 17 preschool teachers and 34 children who are engaged in making stories. The interaction between the child, the preschool teacher, and the computer has been documented on videotape and analysed by Interaction Analysis. The results show the preschool teachers’ decisive significance as an interplay partner for the child’s appropriation of a linguistic capacity outside of a here-and-now situation.

In this article two computer-produced multimedia stories created by children in their after-school centre are analysed, building on the assumption that children draw that which is important for them. The aim is to make visible the significance of narrative structure, reaccentuation, intertextuality, multivoicedness and various levels of interpretation. The author discusses how the stories spring from the children’s everyday social practice and mirror their contemporary media culture. In conclusion, the author advances the need for the appropriation of a socially shared symbolic system within the chosen genre through participation in social practices