Aims
The aims of this strand of the project were:
- to investigate young people's use and access to ICT outside school in order to work with
project teachers to develop awareness of this activity and how it might be utilised and
augmented;
- to investigate the implications of differential out of school use of computers for
homework strategies and additional provisions;
- to characterise the relationship between parental expertise and young people's
expertise;
- to investigate how young people make use of the school and local authority's web pages;
- to investigate students' differential access to and use of computers in out of school
settings as a consequence of social class, gender and race.
Preamble
It is increasingly recognised that young people are growing up in a media and
technology rich environment outside school, in which computers, computer games, mobile
phones and internet are taken for granted in their day to day lives. Research undertaken prior to the InterActive Education Project suggested that interactions with these environments outside school may
lead to different forms of social interaction, different approaches to learning, and
access to a range of information and educational resources previously inaccessible to
young people. This changing socio-technological environment provides a range of challenges
to formal education. How might schools manage differential out of school access to
technologies? How might traditional school curricula adapt to respond to this increasingly
different environment outside school? How might schools learn from the ways in which young
people are learning with technologies in the home?
Research Design
This aspect of the InterActive project drew specifically on a previous ESRC project Screen
Play: an exploratory study of children's techno-popular culture carried out by
Bristol and Cardiff University researchers between 1998-2000. The Screen Play Project provided a detailed
baseline mapping of children's out of school computer use. The 'Learners out of
school' research theme consisted of three stages:
- Detailed questionnaire surveys in 2001 and 2003 of children in all project schools to
map changes in access and use of technologies both in and out of school.
- Focus Group Interviews
- Home-based interviews exploring the family context for home technology
use and use of computers and internet in the home.
Central to this research theme was the recognition that technology is always
incorporated into already-existing social contexts - in this case, into children's already
existing social and educational worlds. Rather than assuming that the presence and design
of the technology dictates use, this research theme explicitly worked with the idea that
children's interests, social groups and family cultures play a major role in shaping
the uses they make of these technologies. Attention was accordingly paid to questions of
the relevance of digital technologies to children's lives, the uses they make of
technologies for specific purposes and the ways in which these are differently patterned
in the settings of home and school.
Only by engaging with children's digital cultures outside school, it is argued, will we
be able to ensure that experiences with digital technologies in school are able to build
on young people's already existing expertise and interest in digital technologies.
Further, a recognition of the social context in which different children use digital
technologies will allow a more complex picture to be developed of the ways in which
different groups are excluded from, reject or embrace technology use and enable a more nuanced
school-based approach to be developed.
Project Team
Keri Facer (Until 2001)
Naomi Kent
Ros Sutherland
Graduate School of Education
University of Bristol
35 Berkeley Square
Bristol BS8 1JA
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