Informal learning with ICTs in the home

Socio-cultural theory suggests that the context in which cultural tools are used shapes their transformative possibilities: in other words, the affordances of information and communication technologies lead to radical changes in human activities in some contexts, but this effect varies between contexts and in some is very greatly reduced. One of the best examples demonstrating this is the stark difference between young people’s experiences of using ICT at school and at home. Homes are all different, of course, but for many young people a computer with a broadband Internet connection is readily accessible at home to use for extended periods, without undue restrictions on what they use it for. They may have to negotiate to take turns with their siblings, and parents may impose some rules about the length of time they spend, the extent to which they use the computer for playing games and, if connection to the Internet is by an expensive dial-up service, the time spent on-line. However, by comparison, at school there are always many more restrictions: typically, students have access to computers for limited periods of time, for purposes speciﬁ ed by the teacher, access to the Internet may be restricted by ﬁ lters, and because a large number of people are likely to be on the system at the same time the speed of Internet connection will often be slow.

Computers came into young people’s homes very rapidly. My colleague, Cathy Lewin (2004) reports from the ImpaCT2 evaluation carried out for the UK government that, during the year 2000 to 2001, from a sample of 2,100 the proportion of students between 10 and 16 who reported having a computer at home rose from 81 per cent to 90 per cent, with some skewing towards higher percentages among older students. During the same period Internet access at home among this sample rose from 59 per cent to 73 per cent. Since 2001 there has been widespread provision of broadband to homes throughout England, replacing slower dial-up services and young people’s personal ownership of a computer or laptop is increasing. A pattern that emerges clearly from research is that young people spend much more time using ICT at home than at school. For example, Lewin reports on students’ logs of their use of ICT that

a sub-sample of 280 primary school students reported spending on average one hour

a week using a computer at school and three hours at home. The 115 secondary students who kept logs reported on average 2.5 hours a week using a computer at school and 10 hours at home, of which 3.5 hours of home time was spent on school- related activities. Word processing and accessing the Internet were the most frequent home uses of ICT for school work. For leisure, the Internet, CD-ROMs, email and chat were the most popular and, interestingly, not word processing. Lewin reports that of 227 respondents to a questionnaire about use of the Internet, 81 per cent said they spent more time on the Internet at home than at school. In the logs and in hand- drawn concept maps of ‘computers in my world’ young people in the same study

40 Understanding innovation reported extremely varied uses of ICT at home, including in many cases pursuing

specialist interests to ﬁ nd information, downloading music and images, or producing and printing their own material.

A key difference between using ICT at home and at school is between informal and formal learning, hence we should not be surprised to fi nd a replication of Lave’s (1996) fi nding that learning in informal settings is ubiquitous and continuous whereas ‘it often seems nearly impossible to learn in settings dedicated to education’ (ibid., p. 9). What is at stake then becomes the nature and quality of the learning in informal settings. In the various research studies, ICT is observed entering homes and becoming embedded in family life, at fi rst with some uncertainty about its purposes. Downes (2002), reporting on a study carried out with 500 children in Australia between 1995 and 1998, said that they thought of the computer as either

a toy or a ‘playable tool’ – saying things like, ‘I played typing stories’ and ‘I played the encyclopaedia’. From their descriptions it was clear that they used the computer for ‘exploratory learning and “learning by doing”, demonstrating the co-agency of the relationship between computer and child’ (ibid., pp. 30–1). Similarly, in the ImpaCT2 evaluation we found that students habitually referred to their computer use at home as ‘playing games’ and reserved the word ‘learning’ only for activities that they engaged in at school: when they were asked to list their ICT activities at home it was clear that ‘games’ was a generic term used for a wide range of activities and categorised in this way because the computer was perceived as a site for leisure and autonomy. Facer et al. (2003), reporting on research between 1998 and 2000, describe how adults construct the family computer variably through discourses of entertainment, education and work, which parallel the ﬂ uidity of their constructions of childhood. Facer et al. provide photographs showing the various locations in which computers are positioned in the homes they visited, suggesting that ‘ownership’ varies: sometimes the computer is perceived as a shared resource for all the family and sometimes as more personally owned by a child, a sibling or

a parent. They suggest that key features of ICT, such as the volume and speed of information and varied forms of interactivity, create a ‘life on the screen’ which is ‘powerfully engaging’ but that these features are not apparent from young people’s accounts of using ICT at school. The problem they suggest is that ‘at present, in school, computers are seen primarily as a resource for learning rather than a context for learning’ (ibid., p. 232). At school, computer use is planned to support more rapid and more effective acquisition of a prescribed curriculum, whereas it is clear from the way that it is used at home that the computer’s appeal to young people is that it accords them the same status as adults and gives them access to choices. The Internet allows them to take control, provides direct links with popular culture through accessing music and images, and keeps them in contact with their friends through messaging services and chat rooms. Since Downes (op. cit.) and Facer et al. (op. cit.) completed their studies most young people in England have acquired MP3 players and mobile phones and are able to access the Internet away from home. The technologies are merging: phones are turning into digital cameras and becoming Internet-enabled, MP3 players are extending to store and play back video ﬁ lms as well as music.

Inside innovation 41 This mismatch between ICT use at home and at school is a cause for concern,

mainly because it indicates the extent of the lost potential for ICT to transform schooling. A closer examination also reveals that there are aspects of ICT use that home does not provide, and moreover that ICT use at home is strongly differentiated between homes, not so much through what is traditionally called ‘the digital divide’ (access or non-access to a computer and the Internet ) as through the family’s cultural ambience or ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1977, pp. 183–5). Angus et al. (2004) describe the wide variation in computer and Internet use by four families, three of which were recipients of a special offer that aimed to ‘make technology affordable for all Australians’ and one which had already had a home computer and Internet access for some time. Differences in the patterns of family life and inequalities of aspirations quickly led to different patterns of computer use, with the least-advantaged family making much less use of the educational advantages offered by the Internet. This was compounded by a lack of empathy among teachers for the children from the most disadvantaged home, manifested for example in their failure to recognise and value the ICT skills of the family’s teenage boy. The mother in this family used ICT to enhance her social life through participation in chat rooms, but this did not add to the family’s cultural capital in any way. In another of our own studies (Lewin et al. 2003) we found, similarly, that the real digital divide was not between those with and without access to ICT at home, but related to the purposes for which home computers were used: only the students from advantaged homes used ICT for school-related work, either of their own volition or because their parents suggested it. Had teachers requested that ICT should be used for homework many others would have had the facilities to do so, but teachers operated a

de facto policy of not setting ICT-related activities for homework for reasons of equity. This differential between kinds of use, rather than merely access to, ICT has been called by Natriello (2001) the ‘second digital divide’.

The implications of all this research are clear: schools need to ﬁ nd ways of using ICT that give young people the transformed learning opportunities that some are already experiencing with ICT at home. This would involve giving students more time for extended engagement with ICT and encouraging them to use it to extend their creativity and productivity and take greater responsibility for their learning. At present the support for ICT use in the home is very unequal. There are also areas of ICT use, such as work with spreadsheets and calculations, that are virtually absent from patterns of ICT use even in homes with high cultural capital (Facer et al. 2003, pp. 235–6). It is clear from these research studies that there is a vital role for schools to play in helping children to acquire new digital literacies: skills in searching for, and selecting, websites, identifying their provenance, discriminating between their qualities and using them appropriately to produce new knowledge representations. November (2001) urges the importance of teaching essential digital literacies without which students using the Internet are open to misinformation and deception. Kerawalla and Crook (2002) in a study which shows strongly differentiated patterns of ICT use in homes and a prevalence for games playing, even in homes where parents have purchased the computer and software with speciﬁ c educational purposes, recommend that schools should ‘respect and locate within the classroom children’s spontaneous

42 Understanding innovation achievements on home computers’ and ‘incorporate ICT more prominently into the

school–family dialogue’. It may be that the potential for ICT to transform pedagogies and learning in schools will come only when all students have continuous access to small, robust Internet-linked laptops but together these research studies provide the explanatory evidence needed to develop and implement prototypes of innovative practice such as that described in Chapter 3.

Informal learning with ICTs in the home