Collaborating around digital tabletops: children’s physical strategies from the UK, India and Finland

We present a study of children collaborating around interactive tabletops in three different countries: the United Kingdom, India and Finland. Our data highlights the key distinctive physical strategies used by children when performing collaborative tasks during this study. Children in the UK tend to prefer static positioning with minimal physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in India employed dynamic positioning with frequent physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in Finland used a mixture of dynamic and static positioning with minimal physical contact and object movement. Our findings indicate the importance of understanding collaboration strategies and behaviours when designing and deploying interactive tabletops in heterogeneous educational environments. We conclude with a discussion on how designers of tabletops for schools can provide opportunities for children in different countries to define and shape their own collaboration strategies for small group learning that take into account their different classroom practices

Cyber-relations in the Field of Home Computer Use for Leisure: Bourdieu and teenage technological experts

This article highlights the practice of a group of New Zealand teenagers who are considered by their family and themselves to be technological experts. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s key concepts of habitus, field and capital, this text identifies and discusses the cyber-relations that constitute the practice in the field of home computer use for leisure. The purpose of this article is to claim that though this field is predominantly a field of leisure, these are valid sites of informal learning. As almost all of the experts in the study gained their expertise through independent means, with minimal input from their schooling, discussion focuses on what these informal trajectories to technological expertise might mean for pedagogy and formal learning within schools

Information Technology in Secondary Schools and its Impact on Training Information Technology Teachers

There are concerns about the teaching and learning of information technology (IT) in English state secondary schools (ages 11-18 years), and the way IT resources and the curriculum are organised. These circumstances affect students who are training to be IT teachers when they are on teaching placement in secondary schools. They may find that the curriculum model used in one teaching placement school is very different from that used in another; contact with pupils may be too brief, causing difficulties with teacher-pupil relationships; different approaches to teaching and learning may be encountered; there may be difficulties with continuity and progression in the IT curriculum; and expected standards may not be consistent. Student teachers may be better qualified and have more practical experience of IT systems and resources than their subject mentors in schools. However, these may regard students as lacking in basic subject knowledge as the hardware and software in schools do not match students’ previous experiences. Few of the above concerns are unique to Bachelor of Education and Postgraduate Certificate of Education courses in IT; however, they can be relatively more significant. Some helpful strategies are suggested