Home-school technologies: considering the family
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This research is a case study on issues around ubiquitous computing and home-school computing transitions.
If you are not familiar with the exact meaning of "ubiquitous computing", read this first.
This research interviewed 3 families about their reactions to ubiquitous computing technologies designed to support home-school transitions.
It is found that families were willing to use such technologies to share information among themselves, but that mechanisms for filtering this information would be a challenge for designers. Further, families were reluctant to share information with outsiders, such as teachers. The paper ends with a discussion on the implications of these findings for both future technologies and further research into their design.
This research attempts to answer questions on the safety and ethical concerns about protection of data, like:
- how do we justify increasing links between home and school, when children are often active in resisting such information transfer?
- how do we tie this in with research suggesting that the home is a site of ludic activity?
Data are gathered from family interviews. Three selected British families were invited to research laboratory to view some ideas for technologies that might support their homework.
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3 comments:
This is a typical qualitative research, like having some hypothesis questions, data collection,e.g.interview.
In this research paper, the methodology of question is interview with families. In this case study, I learn how to uses interview and how to set questions. Thanks for your summary.
Stella Im @LIST
This addresses a very interesting topic on children’s privacy in technological design, which actually moves beyond the world of ethics, and into the world of unwritten family rights. It raises the issue on how the technologies might affect relationship, not only within their families, but also between their family and the outside world. Older children are usually more strongly against technologies that record information about their activities. It is indeed a challenge for education practitioners to make sure technologies are configured in sympathetic ways.
As this particular study forms part of a three-year research project in technologies in the home and homework, would be interested to study the whole research project. And the findings from the annual conference on “human factors in computing systems” might also be of interest: http://www.chi2008.org/ CHI 2008.
irene
from the group four seasons
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