Screenplay

Children and Computing in the Home

Keri Facer, John Furlong, Ruth Furlong, Rosamund Sutherland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415298438
• eBook ISBN: 9781134427383
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

What are young people really doing on computers at home? Computers feature heavily in the lives of today's young people, and this book sets out to question commonplace assumptions about the use of technology by children at home. Bringing together research from the perspective of psychology, sociology, education and media studies, the authors ask whether we are really witnessing the rise of a new 'digital generation'. Drawing upon the results of their in-depth research project, the authors filter and assess their findings accessibly, offering fascinating reading on: * how computers are used in the home * how parents and children negotiate access to and use of the computer * what role the computer plays in the day to day lives of families. This book makes use of illuminating case studies, and highlights key issues of concern around issues of equality and access in a wider social context. This truly interdisciplinary perspective will be instrumental in reshaping the understanding of teachers, ICT advisors, policy makers and all involved in ICT for children.

Part I

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Introduction

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Chapter 1

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The Screen Play project

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In homes today across much of the developed world, young people are growing up with computers. In living rooms, bedrooms, hallways and landings, computers are an increasingly familiar sight in the public and private spaces of the home. This phenomenon raises important questions for educators, for policy makers, for parents and for children, and it is in response to these questions that this book has been written. In it, we explore the implications of young people growing up with, living with and learning with computers as a familiar part of their day-to-day lives.

The trigger for this book, and the research upon which it is based, was the argument in academic and public arenas that we are beginning to see a new generation of young people emerging whose social identities, styles of learning and interactions with the world have been radically altered by prolonged and frequent use of computers in the home. On an almost daily basis, we see newspaper articles and academic research suggesting that young people are ‘digital natives’ compared with the adults of today who can, at best, be considered ‘digital immigrants’, belatedly attempting to incorporate new technologies into their existing lives.¹ In the field of education, a rallying call has been made to researchers, policy makers and teachers to recognise that we are now seeing the emergence of ‘aliens in the classroom’, children whose interactions with digital media mean that they are now psychologically and socially different from the teachers teaching them every day.²

At the same time, outside the academic arena there are increasing calls to equip young people for a world of work in which computers and associated technologies are seen as likely to saturate even the most menial of occupations. Major government initiatives around the globe see millions poured into initiatives to ensure children learn to use computers in schools. At the same time, the home is increasingly seen as a site for learning with technologies as parents and children are bombarded with advertisements urging them to buy home computers. Alongside these injunctions to use computers, however, is a sense of unease about how our young people are growing up — there are concerns about ‘over-exposure’ to technologies, about disturbing content, and safety issues surrounding the Internet and computer games. Any study of children and computers today, then, needs to remain mindful of the complex position of children in our society; they are at the centre of a network of concerns, praise and rhetoric which offer a powerful association between young people and technology as natural bedfellows.³ This book is an attempt to move beyond some of these sweeping assumptions in order to understand, through detailed research, how families and young people are themselves shaping the role of computers in their daily lives.

The need for diverse perspectives

As we have indicated, the debate surrounding young people's use of computers takes many forms: there are articles in daily newspapers on children's safety, political initiatives concerning education and the economy as well as highly theoretical discussions on, for example, the changing nature of existence in a digital world. Often, these debates draw on different theoretical perspectives, if only implicitly. For example, some have a psychological focus, asking how young people's learning might change through interaction with these new tools; others are more sociological, looking at emerging patterns of social inequality in the access to and use of these tools. In the research that formed the basis for this book, we too drew on a range of different perspectives. Our research strategy was to ‘follow the child’, to explore how, from their own point of view, young people were living and learning with computers in the home. In so doing we had to recognise that young people's daily lives don't fit into neat sociological or psychological boxes labelled ‘impact on learning’ or ‘social consequences’; we could not simply say that the most important question was how children's learning might change, or how social factors determine which children get access to computers and which do not. Rather, in working with and watching children and their families over the 18 months of the study, we needed to call upon existing research from a range of theoretical perspectives to enable us to ask the right questions about what we were seeing.

One source of questions has been research in the field of media studies that has looked at how other technologies — television, video and radio — have, in the past, become ‘domesticated’. From this literature we came to recognise that we cannot assume that it is the technologies ‘themselves’ that determine how they are used in the home. Rather, the environment into which any technology is introduced is likely profoundly to affect the ways it is perceived and used by the people in that setting.⁴ To talk about ‘the computer’ in the home, then, may be misleading, as what ‘the computer’ actually comes to mean to a family is likely to be shaped by the existing values, practices and interests of the family itself. For example, earlier studies on the way in which television or radio fit into family life highlight how existing gender patterns of behaviour can be projected onto any technology; as a result new technologies are often used in ways which reinforce the family's (and society's) views of appropriate activities for boys and girls, men and women.⁵ Previous studies of the introduction of computer games into the home also highlight the ways in which different families' ‘moral economies’ — their views of the appropriate values and practices within the home — shape whether these games are encouraged, valued or rejected within the family.⁶

Research in cultural studies is also useful in that it alerts us to the fact that the computer is a ‘consumer good’; as such it is brought into the home for a wide range of reasons. Families will have different views about what it is that a computer is supposed to ‘do’ for the family. For example, as a consumer good it may be intended to demonstrate something about the family's wealth, about their values and aspirations for their children, about their relationship with the modern world that the computer often seems to represent. At a time when we see computers being sold to families on the basis that they will ‘give your children a head start’ (as though the technology ‘itself’ and alone is responsible for any and all educational benefit that may come from owning it), we need to remain sensitive to the fact that the ‘meanings’ of computers within families may be very diverse.

In understanding how young people interact with computers, we have also drawn on questions from the contemporary sociology of childhood which recognises that there are changing and increasingly complex ‘geographies of childhood’.⁷ Young people occupy the streets and spaces of their local communities, navigate routes to school, to friends' houses, and, with changing patterns of family life, often live in more than one family home. However, growing concern about children's safety in the outside world means that there are increasing attempts to constrain their unsupervised occupation of the streets and parks of our cities and towns and, instead, to create ‘digital playgrounds’ of safe spaces in their homes and schools.⁸ Within that world, however, they live in an increasingly global culture which enables them to become as familiar with a high school in Los Angeles or Melbourne as with Grange Hill, with Japanese Manga Art in computer games or with the all-powerful information resources of Microsoft Encarta. At the same time there is increasing concern that these technologies, in particular the Internet and computer games, are bringing the ‘outside’ into the home, reshaping the traditional boundaries and borders of childhood geography, bringing the threats of the ‘real’ world into the apparent security of the family space.⁹ Modern children therefore occupy a range of different sites, both physically and virtually, that cannot be constrained simply to the home or school and, as a result, identifying the ‘location’ of childhood today is ever more difficult.

Another source of questions has been contemporary socio-cultural psychology¹⁰ which alerts us to the complexities of how we as humans interact with cultural tools such as the computer. The computer that we see in homes today is capable of supporting a wide range of different practices — we can design and make things with it, we can write and animate, we can calculate and quantify, we can communicate, and we can look things up, combine information, images and sounds and send these halfway round the world to friends or colleagues. However, in trying to understand what we, and young people, learn from using a computer, we cannot separate the learning from the activity itself. When we write this book on the computer, for example, we cannot simply say that we ‘alone’ are writing it. Socio-cultural psychology highlights the fact that it is us ‘plus’ the computer that is involved in the writing; the technology affords different ways for us to write — it offers a range of possibilities that we come to see in the technology.¹¹ For example, as we as authors are based in different locations from each other, one of the key affordances of the technology for writing is that we are able to send drafts to each other via email, and comment on them digitally without having to meet face to face. This is evidently not the same thing as saying ‘the computer makes us write differently’, nor is it the same as saying that we write the same way we always used to, except that we now do it on computers. Rather, we would want to say that the way we write is now a product both of our needs and interests and their intersection with the possibilities offered to us by the new tools available.

But how does this relate to understanding children's learning with computers in the home? What this perspective has meant is that we have not assumed that there is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• ScreenPlay
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of pictures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The domestic context
• Part III Young people’s computer use in the home
• Part IV Digital cultures
• Part V Learning with the computer
• Part VI Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index