Digital Mediation of Children’s Learning and the Changing Ecology of Home-School-World Connectivity

Becoming a school student and progressing through the education system in these times is a project in which digital technologies are intertwined. The imposition of home-based online learning in response to the ongoing global pandemic situation has served to intensify and accelerate the digital mediation of education. The emergence of the ‘datified child’ and the intensification of digital parenting were causing concern even before the ongoing pandemic raised the stakes considerably.

Three key challenges will be addressed in this session. First, children’s access to online experiences, resources, and services - which may operate as forms of digital pedagogy - together with a proliferation of commercial providers in an unregulated marketplace, have ended the monopoly of official education systems on children’s education. How do scholars and policy makers approach the conceptual and practical challenges posed by this dynamic evolving ecology?

Second, conceptual models of parent involvement continue to reflect a past in which the ‘home’ and the ‘school’ and a key problem was the child’s ‘transition’ from home. What alternative model is needed to conceptualise and study school-home-world connectivity within digitally mediated dynamic networks in which both humans and technologies act as agents?

Finally, approaches to educational and social disadvantage have not come to grips with new forms of digital exclusion, associated with differences in children and families’ access, knowledge, use and networks. How are opportunities for digitally mediated connectivity distributed across different social, economic and cultural groups?