I gave a talk in Mikkeli, Finland called From ‘Othering’ to Incorporation: the dilemmas of crossing informal and formal learning boundaries’ at a conference called  A New School.

The talk will be published in a Finnish book later in the year. I suggest that the past twenty years have seen a paradoxical attitude to the learning experienced by young people as consequence of their engagement and participation in digital culture. On the one hand research has underwritten a notion of the strangeness or otherness of digital culture characterising fundamentally new and different literacies, ways of comprehending and manipulating even understanding knowledge. The key here is an argument about an alleged deep structural difference between the digital world and the day-to-day mundanity of schooling. At the same time this otherness has been at the forefront of anxieties about changing childhoods, alienated youth, the penetration of consumerism into make-up of the young and a decline in fundamental education standards. Both of these (contradictory) aspects have been part of a deep process of differentiation from an assumed norm. We are now witnessing a period where the everyday, typified by a construct of average public schooling is now fighting back and the current period is characterised by a series of interventions where the difference is being recuperated and standardised in ‘normal’ schooling.