Carolina Martínez

This study furthers the understanding of how student teachers make didactic choices when designing digital competence education. It investigates what age groups student teachers choose to include in digital competence education, how they motivate these choices, and how their choices can be understood within the context of the university course in which they designed this education. The material includes 48 papers written by student teachers within a Swedish university course in which they each designed a project intended to promote digital competence among pupils in school-age educare (children aged 6 to 12 years). These papers were analyzed using a mixed-method approach involving both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The perspectives on age as a didactic dimension developed by Klafki and Comenius and the concept of boundary-work were used as a theoretical framework to analyze student teachers’ didactic choices. The results show that students most commonly choose to include older pupils, namely those in Grade 3 and 4 (9–10-year-olds), while paying less attention to the younger pupils. They motivated their choice of age groups based on arguments related to three key themes: children’s media use, children’s capacities, and their own future needs and circumstances as teachers. One implication of the study is that teacher education courses on digital competence should emphasize age as a didactic dimension and encourage student teachers to critically reflect on their assumptions about children’s age and capabilities.

The extent and quality of social support for learning provided by warm experts has received limited scholarly attention. Using a sequential exploratory mixed-methods approach, and a point of departure in theory regarding opportunities for and barriers to learning, the study starts with qualitative interviews with 22 individuals aged 70-94. Relationships between older adults and their children and grandchildren are analyzed, and experiences of opportunities and barriers for learning are identified. These findings are operationalized into items in a survey distributed to a representative sample of Sweden’s population aged 65-90 (n=1,610), to measure variations in the quantity and quality of social support for learning. Findings reveals that children are mainly engaged as warm experts, and the more frequently families meet, the more frequently support for learning takes place, and the higher the perceived quality. Age, income and education, show no relationship with the perceived quality of social support for learning.

Recent scholarly attention has focused on YouTubers' advertising practices and their influence on young followers' understanding of commercial content. Although previous studies primarily explore children's advertising literacy, they often treat YouTubers' influencer marketing as a unified phenomenon. This article distinguishes between two types of advertising: sponsored content and merchandise (merch) advertising. Merch advertising is viewed as more personally connected to the YouTuber than third‐party sponsorships. The study examines how children, ages 10–13, interpret these forms of advertising within parasocial relationships with YouTubers. Based on group interviews with 19 Swedish children, the analysis explores appropriation, moral economy and parasocial relationships. The findings reveal that children find sponsored content more intrusive and deceptive than merch advertising, which is discussed more as a product. These results highlight the importance of a nuanced understanding of YouTubers' advertising practices in research involving children and YouTubers.

Children have the right to accessible and reliable public sector communication. However, our understanding of children's perspectives on digital communication from the public sector remains limited. This study addresses this gap by analysing how children aged 10–11 (n = 18) evaluate a Swedish municipality's digital communication regarding leisure activities on websites and social media during group interviews. Using John Dewey's theory on judgement, the study identifies seven core principles children used in their evaluations: proximity, comprehension, inclusion, in‐depth information, accurate information and authenticity, influence and mistrust. These findings can inform the development of public sector communication to better support children's rights.

From the very outset, the domestication approach was inspired by an ambition to inform policy debates. This was obvious in early delineations of the approach in the 1980s. However, later research inspired by the notion of domestication has often come to overlook this ambition. This chapter presents three examples of analyses that engage with the notion of domestication in everyday contexts, while also explicitly addressing policy. The first case is based on data collected two decades ago when home computers with Internet connections had started to become commonplace in Swedish households. The second case focuses on how Swedish teachers deal with children’s mobile phones in leisure-time centres. The third case draws on interviews with older adults covering their reflections on and use of ICTs. This chapter argues for and illustrates the policy relevance of domestication research, and points towards the future. As media technology develops, it becomes of continuous importance to offer insights from domestication research. Studies can contrast, challenge, and hopefully feed into the formation of insights into what is going on in and around media technology. To do so, policy relevance needs to be explicitly formulated and communicated to relevant stakeholders as an integral part of research practice.

The concept warm experts originally referred to people who helped their friends and family to come to terms with home-based computers and Internet connections. As digital technologies have continuously come to permeate our everyday lives, the tasks for warm experts have grown in kinds and character. The present study contributes to our understanding of warm experts by exploring the learning process involving the warm expert and the less knowledgeable other(s). Drawing on interviews with older adults (70 to 94 years of age), the study specifically explores older users’ experiences of learning about digital media with children and grandchildren. The results reveal how interaction with warm experts constituted important learning opportunities for the older adults, in which they developed their skills in using digital media. However, establishing potential learning situations and learning from warm experts was not a straightforward matter, but surrounded by a multitude of barriers structuring the possibilities for learning. This shows how the role of the warm expert is fluid and materializes in different ways in different situations. The warm expert can take the position (or be positioned) as one who solves technical issues. The warm expert can be one who fails in teaching, or one who adopts the position as a warm teacher and contributes to learning among the less knowledgeable user. In order to also be a warm teacher, the warm expert needs to understand the specific learning needs and styles of the less knowledgeable other and adapt to these needs.

This article explores the usability of domestication theory in an educational setting integrating a wide variety of information and communication technologies (ICTs). More specifically, the article analyses domestication of digital media in the Swedish leisure-time centre (LTC), an institution in which children receive education and care before and after compulsory school. The study draws on qualitative in-depth interviews with 21 teachers as well as observations of LTCs. The article reveals what it means to have limited agency as an educator when ICTs are appropriated, and further illustrates the contradictory fact that mobile phones are objectified as stationary technologies. It also shows how both devices and content are incorporated in ways that are perceived suitable to the LTCs’ educational moral economy. An especially interesting finding is the extent to which domestication theory sheds light on power relations when applied outside of the domestic sphere.

Digital competence and its different dimensions – among them responsible online communication – are competencies that children need to develop for their present and future lives. This article analyzes how teachers promote responsible online communication in Swedish leisure-time centers (LTCs). Based on 20 in-depth interviews, the results show how teachers promote responsible communication mainly in spontaneous situations using mediation strategies such as active mediation, co-use, and participatory learning. The study also identifies educational simulation as mediation strategy. The participants focused primarily on teaching children how not to hurt other people online, as well as issues concerning online safety and privacy. One conclusion is that children’s self-selected media use in the LTC provided extended opportunities for promoting responsible online communication.

This article focuses on the leisure-time center (LTC) as an arena for developing critical digital literacy. The main research question concerns how Swedish leisure-time teachers (LT teachers) work to promote critical digital literacy. In addition to this, the article directs attention to one specific aspect of critical digital literacy, namely, critical understanding of Internet advertising. The second research question thus concerns how LT teachers approach Internet advertising in the LTC, and whether their approaches to advertising encourage a critical understanding. The study is based on 20 in-depth interviews with Swedish LT teachers, and Buckingham's (2015) conceptual framework for critical digital literacy is used to analyze and discuss the data. The results reveal a broad range of approaches and practices, from not promoting critical digital literacy at all, to planned learning activities and spontaneous discussions that encouraged critical reflections about digital media. The participants concentrated on source criticism, photo manipulation, and discussions with children about their digital media usage. There were also different approaches to Internet advertising, from not addressing this issue to critical reflections regarding the role of advertising. The participants also described uncritical ways of relating to Internet advertising, such as approaching advertising as a form of entertainment. The article discusses the implications of these results for policy, teacher education, and future research.

When children use the Internet, they commonly choose to watch their favorite YouTubers. In this article, we aim to deepen the understanding of how children make sense of YouTubers as a phenomenon, and the role of microcelebrities in children’s everyday life. The study is based on group interviews with 9- and 12-year-old Swedish children, and pays specific attention to how they make sense of the video “♥Pin up tutorial (JFR.SE)♥,” produced by the YouTuber Misslisibell. In the analysis, we explore how the children construct and negotiate Misslisibell as celebrity, celebrity endorser, and young girl. Particularly salient were children’s negotiations around the YouTuber’s celebrity status, children’s normative discussions around Misslisibell’s YouTube practices related to her young age, and children’s various interpretations of the video as advertising, “tips,” and as a space for learning. These multifaceted and sometimes contradictive ways of making sense show the multiplicity of meanings YouTubers have for children.