Search

This paper explores how a legacy digital artefact can be adopted within formal education settings and can be used by teachers and students to support teaching and learning activities within primary and secondary classrooms. In particular, through a comparative case study of three schools in the UK, the paper investigates the potential of using a virtual 3D model of the 1938 British Empire Exhibition in formal educational settings and highlights a number of salient issues and challenges that emerged. As the data suggests, engagement with the model created opportunities for playful learning, facilitated motivation and collaboration, and enhanced student interest. However, participation was often compromised by the wider pressures of the curriculum, assessment regimes and teacher time as well as technical barriers and limitations. In light of the above, the paper considers the range of actors and factors that underpin the outcomes and sustainability of such a project and concludes by considering the implications of these findings.

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about the largest disruption to formal education in recent history and has resulted in school closures and the move to online teaching and learning across the globe. Using data from interviews with 25 teachers and head teachers in England and Greece, this paper aims to capture educators’ experiences during emergency remote education (ERE) in spring-summer 2020 and contribute to current and future conversations about the post-pandemic school. Through a qualitative approach, the paper reports on the often improvised and compromised nature of online schooling during the first pandemic lockdown and presents the opportunities and challenges teachers experienced with the move to emergency remote education. It discusses how didactic modes of teaching prevailed, highlights the importance of parental involvement during ERE and argues that the move to online teaching and learning has accentuated digital inequalities. The findings of this study cast light on the hitherto unexplored area of ERE and offer original insights for future policymaking, research and practice on how schools can develop readiness and resilience to face future closures in a post-pandemic world.

Digital technologies now form an integral feature of the university student experience and there is a range of studies that explore digital technology use within a higher education context. However, very few of these studies focus on how doctoral students engage with digital technologies. This article aims to throw light on the digital practices of doctoral students and advance understandings of the changing nature of digital scholarship for them. Drawing on qualitative, in-depth interviews with 12 PhD students in a UK higher education institution, the article identifies seven distinct types of engagement with digital technologies and discusses the range of issues that underpin doctoral, digital scholarship practices. Furthermore, it argues that although the stereotypical portrayal of the PhD as a “lonely journey” is seen to be in decline, doctoral students at large exist and work “in a vacuum” rather than within interactive doctoral communities.

There has been a long tradition in education of viewing new technologies as a ‘technical fix’ that will help solve underlying problems and breathe new life into formal education (Robins and Webster...

As the previous chapter highlighted, the path toward implementing digital technologies into successful school collaboration is a complex one. Looking beyond the enthusiasm as well as skepticism that surround the educational potential of social media, a range of issues can be identified that are associated with the use of digital technologies for school collaboration. For instance, it emerged that the particular contexts and conditions within which the different case study projects were enacted largely shaped the use of the technologies and the modes of collaboration. While the availability of a range of digital tools created similar opportunities for the participants, the actual student and teacher engagement with the technologies and their participation in the collaborative projects shared similarities but also differed to some extent.

Following from the previous analysis, this chapter presents the case studies of two Greek schools that participated in web-based collaborative projects and their partners in Denmark and Italy respectively. Drawing on a range of empirical data, it aims to gain insight into the views and experiences of the teachers and students who took part in school collaboration and explore how they perceived and experienced twinning with their partner school abroad. The chapter starts by presenting in more detail the two Greek schools and their partners as well as the topic and the aims of the collaborative projects. It then goes on to describe the participants’ initial expectations, the range of inhibitors they faced during their collaborative journeys, and the actors and factors that shaped their participation.

The past two chapters reviewed a range of evidence from the case study projects—highlighting and illustrating the many issues underpinning schools’ engagement with the eTwinning initiative and revealing how a range of overlapping and interrelated factors can determine educational collaboration. In this chapter, a comparative approach to data analysis is taken that allows us to compare the data collected from the four diverse cases in terms of the study’s research questions. Given the main objective of this study to investigate the similarities and differences underpinning digital technology use for school collaboration across a range of classrooms, there is now a need to compare the four previously discussed cases. At the start of this book it was highlighted how the collaborative and other teaching and learning opportunities afforded by digital technologies were seen to resonate with the collaborative aims and flexible nature of the eTwinning initiative. This chapter will go on to bring together, summarize, and compare the findings from all four case studies—exploring how digital technologies were appropriated in practice and presenting the types of school norms and modes that did not fit comfortably with these perceived opportunities. This will be achieved by engaging in a comparative analysis and will be structured around themes rather than individual participants or projects— highlighting a number of underpinning issues that recur throughout the data while answering the four research questions of this study established in chapter 2: ● How can the use of digital technologies create opportunities for online student interaction and collaboration? ● How do these opportunities “fit” into existing school practices? ● What are the drivers and inhibitors for engaging with a collaborative project for teachers? ● What are the drivers and inhibitors for engaging with a collaborative project for students?

Online communication and collaboration: a reader, edited by H. Donelan, K. Kear, and M. Ramage, Abingdon, Routledge, 2010, 290 pp., £23.99 (paperback), ISBN-10: 0-415-56478-6 The rise of web 2.0 to...