Over the last few years, a new multidisciplinary academic area has emerged around interest in digital media and learning. As with any such new area, the question arises as to how work in such an area can achieve enough commonality across different disciplines for contributors to engage in fruitful collaboration and the accumulation of shared knowledge? This paper is in two parts. The second part makes a specific proposal about one way in which such commonality can be achieved, namely in a new use of the concept of “worked examples”. The first part of the paper deals with what core themes constitute the emerging area of work on digital media and learning and how we, from different directions and disciplines, got here to this shared interest. I overview several earlier multidisciplinary areas that have come to contribute to, and serve as a background for, work on digital media and learning. These areas are: The New Literacy Studies (NLS); Situated Cognition Studies; New Literacies Studies; and New Media Literacy Studies.