ABSTRACT
One of the key debates in primary education is around the location and nature of its work in the digital age. This debate, held in the press, on TV, in schools, on social media and in teacher education, takes in a vast range of issues and responsibilities. These range from the statutory obligation to teach the computing curriculum through to attempts to link other subject areas, such as literacy, with digital practices, such as film-making, animation, video games and social media. It is further complicated by the messy and problematic issues of both safety and access, with some schools taking a pragmatic position and encouraging a wider integration with the online world and wider, popular media culture, and others taking the view that children need to be protected at all costs from the inherent risks of digital activity. A further connected range of issues concern the extent to which ‘big data’ are used or misused in the context of schools, with so much information collected about children from the minute they enter formal education. Indeed, there are widely differing views about whether or not the reductive nature of a curriculum based on testing is being manipulated at some level in the various algorithms and datasets, to produce policy outcomes over learning gains for our children (Selwyn and Facer, 2013). Thinking about education in the digital age means also, therefore, thinking about the relationship of home to school, of knowledge to information and of what counts as ‘learning’ in an age in which so much is available on-screen to discover. It also asks us to think about the spaces in which we learn and how many of these are in school, how many out of school, in a ‘third space’ of an after-school club or other space between educational settings and home. These aspects have all been highlighted in a report for the Cambridge Primary Review exploring the implications of the digital for primary schools, which states that:
The digital age has implications for curriculum, pedagogy and schools’ wider role in supporting children’s emotional and social life, and indeed raises questions about the purpose and nature of schools themselves, and how schools’ work relates to the wider political, economic and commercial context.
(Burnett, 2016: 3)