I have also helped with this paper. While children’s relationship with media technologies has long been an area of significant news interest news coverage in this area is often perceived as focusing on negative elements, perhaps even constituting a ‘media panic’. The ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child is and always has been, sensitive to the perceived or assumed orientation of media to the value and impact of digital media during childhood. Many researchers perhaps feel as though Australian news media is more often than not negative about children’s use of digital technologies, yet it is difficult to point to evidence of such trends.

This paper thus attempts to assess prominent Australian news media’s portrayal of children and digital technologies. It does so by specifically by assessing articles from mainstream print newspapers

This working paper asks: what is the tone and subject of Australian media coverage of issues relating to children and digital technologies? To address this question, we first provide an explanation of the concept of ‘news values’ and its role in our analysis. We then outline our methods, which involved collecting and analysing articles published in 14 Australian newspapers between 2000 and 2022. This is followed by our findings which indicate an overall tendency toward negative reporting, with an increase in negativity over recent years.

A scoping review and call for forward momentum

I was very pleased to be able to contribute towards this new article published open access and which can be found here

The article argues : Digital technologies are a common part of everyday life for families with young children (aged 0–8). Despite public anxiety around this reality, much of the current guidance for families and practitioners is conflicting and lacks sufficient evidence. This article maps recent research to gauge the extent to which it is providing nuanced understandings of digital technology use that can positively contribute to this context. Through a large-scale, multi-disciplinary scoping review, this article provides a high- level view of dominant topics, research designs, and conceptual approaches. It finds that the field is largely rooted in methodological and conceptual approaches to childhood, family, difference, and technology that are insufficient for capturing the breadth and complexity of experiences in this area. Rather than arguing for a specific approach, we call for forward momentum in the form of greater ambition to look beyond current methods, concepts, and questions – especially those that are no longer fit for purpose. The review identifies several issues and gaps around which research agendas could be reframed. These include the need for more precise articulations of technologies, greater emphasis on dimensions of use other than time, abandoning dosage models of media effects, and greater attention to diverse digital childhoods.

I recently had the opportunity to chair a discussion around what might make a good childhood in the digital age with guest speakers Professor Sonia Livingstone (London School of Economics and Political Science) and Dr John Davis (Deakin University) in a public seminar hosted by the Digital Child in partnership with the Telstra Foundation.

The guest speakers spoke in response to a new short documentary-style film produced by the Deakin node of the Digital Child centre.

The video featured interviews with children, parents, grandparents, social workers, and representatives from organisations like the Raising Children Network, Alannah & Madeline Foundation, TalkiPlay, Life Without Barriers, and more, and the end result is a broad range of perspectives into what a good childhood means to different people.

In the seminar for which there is also a recording here, we explored what it might mean to talk about a good childhood

We deliberately framed it as the broader good – rather than just focus on our remit in the digital age – because it’s now impossible to separate childhood from the digital. Enquiring into what it means to talk about a good childhood goes to the heart of our passion, our interest and our commitment in the work of the Digital Child centre

I am very pleased to have contributed, even if only by way of a forward, to this new book, available here. Edited by Rebekah Willett and Xinyu Zhao, the book examines changes in families’ rules and routines connected with media during the pandemic and shifts in parents’ understanding of children’s media use.

Drawing on interviews with 130 parents at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book explores specific cultural contexts across seven countries: Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, South Korea, United Kingdom, and United States. Readers will gain an understanding of family media practices during the pandemic and how they were influenced by contextual factors such as the pandemic restrictions, family relationships and situations, socioeconomic statuses, cultural norms and values, and sociotechnical visions, among others. Further, encounter with theoretical framings will provide innovative ways to understand what it means for children, parents, and families to live in the digital age.

As part of my work at the Centre for the Digital Child I have been working with colleagues on the political economy of Edtech. Here is one preliminary article exploring some of these themes.

Ubiquitous datafication of children and families in educational and everyday settings is both a result of and catalyst for power asymmetries between digital platforms and their users. These platforms seek to know their users by extracting and analysing various streams of personal information, often discreetly. However, the users are rarely equipped to do the same to the platforms as information about these platforms is often obscured, convoluted, or simply unavailable. This article explores the possibilities of reversing such power imbalance via the design intervention of an Australia-focused educational technology (EdTech) database developed by the authors of this article. Employing a design intervention method, the database is a collection of publicly available information about EdTech companies and products that target young children and their parents or educators in Australia. This alternate commentary article presents and discusses the ongoing processes of developing the database to reflect on what it says about the power relations between EdTech providers and their users. It demonstrates how the database works as a pedagogical space where people learn how to critically unpack and think about contemporary EdTech platforms. The database is positioned as a point of convergence for different actors involved in children’s digital learning to collectively understand what needs to be done to enact and protect children’s digital rights in education.

I gave this talk recently at a seminar held at the University of Utrecht called Platforms and Pedagogies: Digital technologies and new perspectives for Youth & Education which concluded the Learning in digital Worlds project held jointly between Deakin and Utrecht. A PDF of my slides can be found here. I tried to offer way of not being subsumed by a “platform gaze” arguing that we need to think of platforms as a larger process owned jointly by a range of actors and institutions which constitute the under-the-surface work of a platform, and that future research needs explore the work of these various sectors and organisations as part of any agenda examining platforms in education.

I also visited colleagues at the University of Groningen offering a PhD masterclass on platform pedagogies and a talk reprising The Class asking whether it still asks the right questions in a post Covid platformed vision of society.

I am on the advisory board for the joint research centre at the LSE and 5Rights Foundation, Digital Futures for Children. This launches today (21 Nov 2023) with 4 key aims, to:

• Conduct critical and practical research: We conduct high-quality research on current and emerging areas relevant to children’s rights in the digital environment. This includes research on topics such as online safety, digital literacy, and the impact of emerging technologies on children and young people.
• Provide an evidence base for advocacy: We produce research outputs that contribute to a robust evidence base for advocacy on children’s rights in digital contexts. This will include longer-form research reviews, rapid response research briefs, and other materials that will provide key insights and recommendations to policymakers and other stakeholders.
• Facilitate dialogue between academics and policymakers: We facilitate a bridge between academic research and policymaking, facilitating dialogue and exchange of ideas between scholars and policymakers to ensure that children’s rights are central in decision-making processes relating to digital provision and policy.
• Amplify children’s voices: We ensure that children and young people have a meaningful voice in our research, and that their views and experiences are taken into account in the development of policy and practice. We will seek to capture the perspectives of diverse groups of children and young people, including those who are often marginalized or underrepresented.

I have been involved with project that imagined the digital products, services, and content that children experience online as ‘the Children’s Internet’. Our Manifesto, available here analysed the numerous things we can do to create a better Children’s Internet for the future.

As a society, we will benefit from an ongoing public conversation about how to create better children’s internet experiences. After all, a better Children’s Internet makes a better Internet for all, prompting us to consider what it really means to have fun, productive, safe, diverse and ethical internet experiences.

I had the pleasure of co-supervising two PhDs from a collaboration between Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. The aim of this project is to explore how learning is shaped through digital media, both in and beyond the classroom. Previous research has explored the potential of digital media for learning, but how digital media have changed the way we understand learning is rarely discussed. Examples of questions both projects investigated are: “How do young people learn in digital communities?”, “How does the structure of digital platforms shape learning processes?” and “How does the use of video games in the classroom changes perceptions of both learning and playing?”

Both candidates successfully recently defended their theses.

At Deakin, Chris Zomer’s thesis,  Laugh, Focus, and Perform! A Critical Ethnography of Gamified Engagement investigated the role of gamification in reshaping understandings and performances of student engagement in a private girls’ school in Melbourne’s inner east. Gamification’s proponents claim it creates engagement through game elements such as points, rewards, and a leaderboard. However, engagement is a problematic term and historical notions of student engagement are not necessarily congruent with perceptions of engagement in user-interface designs and games on which gamification is based. The aim of this research is to analyse how these ‘technoeconomic’ and ‘gameful’ discourses inform representations, performances, and perceptions of engagement.

At Utrecht, Zowi Vermeire thesis Youth’s desire to learn: The pedagogies of platformised learning communities investigated alternative forms of learning that youth create on social media platforms as these question accepted ideas about what constitutes “good” learning She undertook an ethnography of six learning communities on YouTube, Twitch and TikTok acquiring an understanding of how youth shape their own learning online and in doing so how they resist and appropriate pedagogical opportunities and limitations that formal education, social media platforms, and online learning optical communities offer them. The aim of the study is to explain how youth shape their learning online in order to offer inspiration to educators and policymakers to move beyond dystopian perspectives on youth and social media towards reimaginations of educational practices.

A blog from both candidates about their work can be found here.

This co-authored book has just been published. It is open access and is available here.

The book is an original study of the youth organizations in London, Toronto, and Vancouver that offer creative and arts learning mainly to youth from diverse and socially marginalized backgrounds. It describes a sector that is often not recognized as such, organizations that don’t like being institutionalized, forms of education that exist outside the mainstream, and types of aesthetic expression that often go unrecognized.

Rooted in the history of community arts movements Youthsites are now part of cities around the world.Technological change, shifts in educational and policy discourses and a decline in funding of formal public schooling have all impacted the growth of youth arts organizations.

Yet, there are to date no systematic studies of the history, structure, and development of this “sector”. We wanted to fill this gap and the book is the first study to develop an internationally comparative, evidence-based, analysis of the organizations, and people who are helping young people to become creators, citizens, or just themselves in times of austerity, crisis, and change.