My contributions to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education on this topic has been published here.

I suggest that digital technologies pose a threat to the post-Deweyian visions of how schools educate for democracy and civic participation at a number of levels. The datafication of interpersonal interactions (as the private individual self is surveilled and commodified by supra-national global technology companies) has enormous consequences for what we want young people to learn and how they ought to behave as citizens in the reconfigured power relations between the individual, the state, and the market. Indeed, questions surrounding what it means to be a citizen and what comprises the new polis in a digitalized global economy have created a distinct new challenge for the purposes of education.

The digital reconfigures the nature of agency, understood as being an intrinsic right of the liberal individual person. In addition there are political dangers for democracy, for these technologies can be mobilized and exploited as the neoliberal state fragments and loses regulatory authority (exemplified by the Cambridge Analytica and “fake news” fiasco). At the same time, the accepted paradigms of the civic, juridical, and identitarian self that traditionally comprised the democratic “citizen” are being rewritten as changing privacy practices reconfigure these models of identity.

What vision of educating for democracy is necessary in the early 21st century? One answer has been to focus on “critical pedagogy,” but that model of educating for full participation in democracy needs to be reworked for the digital age—especially in terms of how schools themselves need to develop an institutional and communal form of digital-social life.

I am one of the co-authors of the final report of  The Connected Learning Research Network: Reflections on a Decade of Engaged Scholarship. We report on a decade’s work of MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research Network.

The new report describes the connected learning approach and research in the context of broader social, economic, and technological changes. Here, we have the benefit of drawing from a number of research studies conducted over the life of the network, learning from partners putting connected learning into practice, as well as dialogue and debate in the network meetings that took place four times a year for nearly ten years. Readers can find substantial updates to the connected learning model and design principles, a new synthesis of research evidence relevant to connected learning, and an overview of the studies conducted by the network.  

In a blog, the lead author of the report, Mimi Ito summarises the connected learning approach as follows:

• We focus on how to support the interests and development of diverse learners rather than center our work on organizational goals, considering how learning and pursuits span settings such as home, school, community, and online. The focus is not on reforming a particular institution, such as schools or libraries, but on situating these institutions within a broader set of supports for youth pursuits.
• We conceptualize learning and development as a process of network building, in which building social capital, contributing to collective goals, and belonging to communities is essential. This view is in contrast to approaches to learning that center on individual knowledge and skill acquisition and see education as a linear pipeline and progression.
• Designing for connected learning takes an ecological and systemic approach, which emphasizes partnerships across sites of learning. It is not about implementing a particular technology or technique. 
• Rather than see research standing apart, we believe in community-engaged scholarship. The stakeholders we study and seek to benefit have essential knowledge and perspectives that must be at the table in research and design that aims for equity and positive learning outcomes.

This co-authored article examines the social utility of the concept,‘data literacy’. Recent developments in the processes of datafication challenge long-held assumptions about privacy and the role of both state and commerce in individual lives. Typically, these have been addressed through:regulatory legal constraints underwritten by the nation state but are difficult to enforce at a global level; tactical resistance through forms of self-regulation and technical innovations, and; educational interventions, typically as ‘literacy’, which brings understanding of the new forms of digital control. The article considers the benefit of theorising digital data as a‘text’ and reviews current educational models of data literacy, categorised here as formal, personal and folk pedagogies of data. The article concludes that while the analogy between print and data has many inconsistencies, the term has rhetorical benefits. However, to become a meaningful strategy ‘data literacy’ requires both a more complete theorisation and complex practical development

The article can be found here.

I am presenting on this topic at a conference on Media Information Literacy in Seoul, funded by the Ministry of Education and jointly organized by the Korean National Commission for UNESCO (KNCU), the Korea Press Foundation (KPF), the Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS), the National Information Society Agency (NIA), the Korean Community Media Foundation (KCMF), and the National Association of Community Mediacenters of Korea (NACM).

The talk argues that in a context of digital transformations in social relationships and arrangements and the ways that they now mediate what we know about the world, and how that knowledge constitutes and legitimates forms of authority, forms of power and contemporary politics, we need a changed version of media or digital literacy. My argument first of all is that while forms of media literacy or digital literacy have taken their time in becoming an acceptable part of both the school curriculum and, just as importantly what it means to be a responsible citizen, there is now a greater urgency in adapting these kinds of media and digital literacy frameworks for the current situation. Secondly, I talk about the differences between everyday, common sense ‘interpersonal’ digital literacies – that is the kinds of understandings people make up as they learn to live with these technologies – and the more formal critical literacies that we usually encounter in the school or university curriculum. I challenge how people can travel from the everyday to the more formal and who should take responsibility for this, how we might measure it and above all what will happen to our societies if we don’t take on this responsibility.

A full PDF of the talk can be found here. A video of the talk can be found here.

This short co-authored commentary published in the Teachers College Record here, examines the growth of new digital platforms that link families, children, and teachers through the well-known example of ClassDojo. We argue that the ubiquity of platform use is a relatively new phenomenon in schools, that it is not driven by findings from empirical research, but rather the result of a perfect storm of popular psychology and market forces.

These platforms allow for communication between teachers and families in real time and across many languages. Teachers can send pictures of children, comment about student behavior, achievements, or activities, share information about upcoming programs, and more, all via a self-contained online platform or app on a phone. Parents in turn may message the teacher (usually via smart phone), but not other parents. Although they build on seemingly established and normed forms of communication between teachers and parents, we challenge how platforms like ClassDojo create and shape behavioral norms for families and teachers. For example, what impact does the digital footprint of a student’s classroom behavior have on how their parents treat them at home? And to what extent might casual family conversations become centered on the concerted calculation of ClassDojo avatar points, akin to how our daily “steps” (vis-à-vis the Fitbit) have come to stand for how far we have walked in a given day?

We put forward this commentary as part of a broader call to action for the field to consider how interactions via platforms may be shaping family relations with schools and to continue to foreground in our collective studies the more general ways that the “datafication” of education is transforming teaching and learning practice. 

I just gave this talk at the children’s media symposium at the University of the Sunshine Coast. I reflected on how  living in a digital society affects debates about the  purposes and reception of children’s media culture and literacy, and examined how debates about children’s media have been challenged by the advent of datafication and platformization. I concluded by arguing that”digital literacy” is a fragile concept relying on individualised instrumental cognitive attributes and that we need to think of literacy more as a set of social relationships involving partnerships between publishers, regulation, rights and social norms as much as we need to focus on supporting and developing individual capabilities.

I have a short afterward in this book, exploring intrinsic and extrinsic values attributed to what it means to being educated. The book offers a series of practical, local but system wide and socially responsible practices, policies and analyses to support the ways that education can work at its best.

This event brought together scholars related to datafication, childhood, and privacy in order to address concerns around how the actions of children, both in and out of school, are becoming increasingly monitored and datafied using digital technology.

Some key, guiding questions were set out here: can schools and families resist the datafication of childhood?; what issues associated with the datafication are unique to children and young people?; what role can the nation state play in regulating multinational technology companies?; how does datafication change the process of schooling? What can or should schools do to ensure the ethical uses of data?; How can we ensure young people’s rights are protected without limiting the potential of digital systems and communication?

Further information on the day, including details on the program and speakers, can be found here and a link to the stream of the event can found here

This new research initiative investigates the pedagogic dimension of digital platforms. It draws on older theoretical traditions that use pedagogy as a way of describing and explaining the relationships between individual and society, agency and structure. 

We want to explore what it means to conceive:

• of the relationship between people and their platforms as a pedagogic relationship, 
  • and how such conceptualisations might advance study of platforms in general. 

And, additionally, using the term pedagogy in its more specifically educational sense:

• to explore the relationship between learning, schooling and education systems as they are now moving into and across emerging platforms, 
  • thus, advancing scholarship about the uses of platforms in Education.

At the moment the initiative asks 4 kinds of questions.

1. What kind of conceptual framing is most useful to make sense of “a platform”?
2. Do platforms have a pedagogy? or What is the pedagogic relationship between people (often constructed as users or clients or citizens) and specific platforms?
3. Do the new platforms now present in schools change the practices of education and the relationship between social actors in the school system
4. What is the pedagogy of educational platforms

The initiative brings together a range of scholars from Australia and the US and as a dedicated PhD scholarship. The website for the project can be found here.

This new edited volume comes out of work I’ve been doing with the Playful Learning Centre at the University of Helsinki over the past few years can be found here.

The book brought together internationally renowned scholars to investigate and reflect upon the significance of introducing multiliteracies in the education of children (0–8 years old) and the challenge of enhancing professional development opportunities of early years practitioners. 

The collection brings together curriculum innovation and reform and the changing media ecology of young children’s learning lives in a single volume. It provides insights into Finnish early years education in terms of policy, practice, and research with a specific focus on the enhancement of children’s multiliteracies. Case studies from around the world explore co-developing practices between researchers and teachers, the development of communities and the ways in which different classroom interventions draw on new kinds of teacher knowledge.