The Future Digital Innovators: Empowering the Young Generation with Digital Fabrication and Making

So far, the implications of digital fabrication and making on digital innovation and the future of IS discipline and profession remain unexplored. This is where this study contributes and it does so by focusing on the perspective of the young generation, in whose hands the future of IS profession, indeed, lies. Digital technology has become intimately intertwined with our everyday life. New stakeholders take part in its development and innovation processes, including children. Calls for offering more in-depth technology knowledge for children have emerged within research on digital fabrication and the maker movement: children need to be educated to design, make, and build new technology. We critically examine existing studies on digital fabrication and making with children, in order to see what the potential of digital fabrication and making for empowering children to become digital innovators of the future is. Implications to IS research, practice, and education are presented

Mundane or Magical? Discourses on Technology Adoption in Finnish Schools

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have truly entered our everyday life, both work and leisure. This applies especially to the lives of our children: the children of today have been surrounded by ICT from their birth – personal computers, the Internet, mobile phones, video games, and social media have been an integral part of their everyday life from the early childhood. School should be able to adapt to this change, but this seems to be challenging to achieve: schools are lagging behind the recent developments in ICT. We inquire the reasons for these challenges as regards ICT adoption in the Finnish schools from the perspective of the school principals, i.e. the ones expected to lead their schools to utilize ICT in its full potential. This is a nexus analytic inquiry that first examines these principals’ discourses on ICT and change, revealing several different discourses on them both, constructing the objects of talk in various ways. Afterwards, the study identifies influential participants helping or hindering in the process of change as well as broader societal themes or values that act as drivers of or barriers to change, as pictured in the principals’ talk. Implications for theory and practice are discussed