Hope collection

How can early childhood educators effectively use digital technologies to expand children's learning beyond traditional play-based pedagogies?

Practical Advice/Tips for Practitioners

• Be critical and intentional:
  Use digital technologies deliberately to support varied learning outcomes, avoiding assumptions about positive or negative impacts.

• Broaden technology use:
  Move beyond touchscreens to introduce robotics, coding, and virtual reality, diversifying children's digital experiences and learning possibilities.

• Address gender equity:
  Challenge gender norms by providing inclusive, non-stereotyped digital play opportunities to ensure equal engagement and participation.

• Reflect on personal beliefs:
  Regularly review your own values regarding technology to ensure equitable digital access and opportunities for all children.

• Integrate digital literacy:
  Teach children digital safety and networking skills as essential competencies alongside traditional play activities.

Abstract

Digital play is a pedagogical construct used in early childhood to explain young children’s engagement with technologies. Digital play draws upon theories of play to explain young children’s learning with technologies. This paper proposes the further development of digital play by examining how the digital aspect of digital play may also be interpreted. This is achieved using the notion of technical code from critical constructivism to show how historically-valued knowledge shapes technology use in practice. Technical code illustrates how alternative knowledge sources can be used to remediate technological understandings in practice, known in sociocultural terms as new knowledge formations.

Full paper access

Edwards, Susan. (2021). Digital play and technical code: What new knowledge formations are possible? Learning, Media and Technology. 46(3), pp. 306-319.

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Contact the researcher

Professor Susan Edwards
Suzy.Edwards@acu.edu.au

Learn more about Professor Susan Edwards’s research