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REDI researcher wins Outstanding Book Award
Associate Professor Jo O’Mara and co-authors Professor Linda Laidlaw and Dr Suzanna Wong have received the 2023 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award for Secret Lives of Children in the Digital Age: Disruptive Devices and Resourceful Learners. This award recognises outstanding scholarly books in the field of education and the social sciences.
When assessing nominated books the Society’s reviewers consider how well each text, among other attributes, assists readers in understanding the relationship between education and the social complexities in which schools are contextualised and in fostering inquiry into the history, current status, and future alternatives of teaching, learning, and education.
Over the past decade, digital technologies have rapidly transformed how children learn, play and communicate. Secret Lives of Children in the Digital Age: Disruptive Devices and Resourceful Learners offers an examination of the impact of digital technologies on children, their families and their teachers. While ease of access to enormous knowledge bases presents many benefits and advantages, mobile screen technologies are often perceived by parents and teachers as disruptive and worrisome.
This book suggests that while teachers, parents and governments are focused on protecting children, what is often neglected is children’s own agency and capacity to engage with mobile technologies in ways that support them in pursuing their own interests, pleasures and learning. This text works to disrupt boundaries in research, policy and practice, between home and school, and across virtual and actual worlds, positioning children as both users of media texts and coproducers of digitally mediated knowledge, with peers, family and teachers.
This award is a testament to the quality of the authors’ work and the importance of their contribution to the field.
