Being a rock musician

VIGNETTE 3 Being a rock musician

John’s mother categorises people as a ‘people person’ and a ‘machine person’, saying that she is a ‘people person’ and that John is a ‘machine person’. The family computer was on a desk in the dining room, and the father also brought a laptop computer home from work, and used the software Word and Excel (and less frequently PowerPoint) when working at home. Mum, a school librarian, used a computer at work and was not interested in using it at home. John (aged 16) used the home computer for playing collaborative games on the Internet, for communicating with his friends on MSN Messenger and for downloading tabs for his band (‘if I need vocals for like anything I’m doing in my band then I’ll get them off the Internet’) and for school work (for ‘scientific research’).

These interviews were carried out in 2003, and in 1999 we had carried out an earlier study of young people’s use of the computer at home as part of the Screen Play Project. What had changed since the 1999 study was the type of computer-based technology that was available in the home. In comparison with 2003, in 1999 the vast majority of young people in our study did not have access to the Internet, or to MSN Messenger or to music software. As we discussed above, by the time of writing this book the specific software and resources available to young people in the home had changed again, with a wide range of social software becoming available. So the type of technology entering the home is continuously changing and in relatively rapid ways.

However, analysis of the 2003 interviews suggests that despite this, what stays the same is the way in which young people’s use of ICT in the home is embedded within the social and cultural practices of the home and friendship groups. What young people choose to use the computer for outside school very much relates to their personal interests and identities (for example, being a rock musician).

166 What does the research tell us? is constructed as the ‘expert’ computer user and home use centres

around this expertise. Interestingly, in Alan’s family it seems that his appropriation of a large bedroom for his computer and associated technology is (possibly unknown to him) modelling his older sister’s home office. Within other families there is more of a distributed approach to the development of expertise, and the home is a space for shared knowledge creation, with everyone bringing into the home what they know and have learned from outside.

By 2003, when the Internet was widely available in the home, schoolwork seemed to be being constructed as doing ‘research’, and in some families the computer was being constructed as ‘a teacher in the corner’. As we discuss in Chapter 10, at the heart of high- quality teaching is the ability to make skilful judgements about the knowledge students need to learn, in what order it is made available and how it is engaged with. Whereas family and friends can also play

a role in supporting learning in the home we might want to question the impact on learning if parents delegate this responsibility to the ‘computer in the corner’.