ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors focus on a digital 'imperative' that all schools were facing around the time of their fieldwork – that is the increasing prevalence of personal digital technologies across school campuses. They aim to start work in Mountview, Lakeside and Middleborough at a time when education technology commentators were speculating how the fast changing nature of personal technology ownership and use might alter the ways in which digital technologies are appropriated within education. Mountview, Lakeside and Middleborough were keenly aware of the expectation for schools to maintain a 'ubiquitous' state of access to digital technology – that is the school ensuring that every student and teacher has a computer. The schools had all developed official 'one-to-one' policies in efforts to guarantee that personal technologies were on hand to support teaching and learning. The authors' investigations illustrate how the mass presence of personal technologies quickly becomes subsumed into existing conditions and arrangements of school organization and control.
