Beyond Technology: Children's Learning in the Age of Digital Culture

By David Buckingham , Cambridge : Polity , 2007 ISBN 9780745638805 ( hb), £55.00; ISBN 9780745638812 , 224 pp , £15.99 ( pb) In the last two decades there has been a growing body of research and literature regarding children and young people, and the role that nascent and more established information and communication technologies (ICTs) play in definitions of childhood, family, schooling, learning and literacy. As the title suggests, the main argument of the book is developed around the relationship of children with learning, technology and digital culture. As the author states in the preface (pp. vii–viii), this book is aligned with debates that argue against the hype surrounding the transformative potential of ICTs for childhood, learners and schooling (e.g. Papert, 1993; Tapscott, 1997), focusing instead on a series of key questions on the response of schools and educators to the role of digital media in young people's lives, but also to issues about mediated learning. The aim of this book is to ‘pick apart some of the contradictory discourses about technology in education … and to provide some indications of practice that I believe are genuinely new and challenging’ (p. 13). As such, through the book's structure, the author interestingly switches from rhetorical articulations to evidence-based practice, from producers to policy-makers and users, from school to home, from theoretical debates about technology, learning, play and literacy to evidence-based conditions and nuances of current use, and from that, to propositions about the future relationship between schooling and digital media culture. The first two chapters explore the key discourses articulated by major producers in the field of educational technology and by the related educational policy-makers in Britain. A consistency in discursive themes surrounding educational technology is presented among producers and government policy bodies; although both represent shifting assumptions, they continue to point to a view of technology as: ‘enriching, empowering and emancipating’, ‘motivating and exciting’ and bringing a competitive edge for performance and attainment. While there is evidence of policy and commercial assumptions, shifting from an earlier need (from the mid-to-late 1990s) to respond to the ‘Information Society’/‘Knowledge Economy’, towards a clearer focus specifically on learning and on the ‘embeddedness’ of technology in the curriculum, what remains is a provision of education that is ‘marketised’ (both in terms of schooling and educational materials), as the author argues, through political and corporate mediators as well as through public–private partnerships. Notwithstanding challenges in the assumptions behind such directions (including often misguided definitions of ‘informal’ and ‘personalised’ learning and a course for technology embedded-ness, mobility, immediacy and choice), other political values and imperatives also come to the fore, not least because regulation, bureaucratisation and surveillance both of teachers and students, also become greater. Contextualisations of such arguments are offered by theoretical threads in these chapters, and are brought further forward in chapter 3, where the broader debates on childhood and on technology use in education are considered. Buckingham carefully points to the false assumption that individuals including teachers, parents and students accept policy or commercial rhetoric categorically; and argues against polarised — either techno-utopian or -phobic — analysis, calling for more nuanced approaches about the use of technology and about its relevant users’ knowledge of it. Likewise, chapters 4, 5 and 7 draw on past and more recent evidence about the conditions of use and effectiveness of such technology in both school and at home and assess the links, gaps and digital divides between and within the two locales, while also challenging presumed notions of the so-called ‘digital generation’ by looking more carefully at the role of digital media cultures in the lives of young people. Chapters 6 and 8 return to one of the main questions raised in the book, surrounding the response of schools to digital media by exploring debates on first, the relationship of learning and games and secondly, the issue of ‘skills’ and competencies. A recognition that is expressed here points to a gap between young people's everyday lifeworlds outside school and their experiences of schooling systems (in Britain at least). This is one example of what the author calls the ‘new digital divide’. Buckingham argues for a response from schools that involves a wider ‘awareness of the range and diversity of young peoples’ experiences of media and technology outside school’ (p. 98), as well as an increased ‘emphasis on developing children's critical and creative abilities with regard to new media’ (p. 144). Part of the recommendations that are offered about the role of schooling in the age of digital culture (chapter 9), stem from a critical discussion on the more productive framework of ‘digital media literacy’; a framework that involves both changing notions of the relationship between technology, learning and culture, but also rethinks how to teach not just with or through media and digital technologies, but also, about them (see also Livingstone and Bober, 2004; Selwyn, 2006). Though rich in empirical accounts and dense in theoretically informed analyses, this book is written in a clear and sophisticated prose. Avoiding either technological determinism or technological aversion, David Buckingham offers insightful arguments that stem out of research and critical and discursive analyses exploring the nature and cultures of digital media production and use corresponding to contemporary youth in the UK. In these ways, Buckingham seeks to contextualise wider questions of power and control surrounding digital media production, representation and consumption.