No abstract

While social inclusion projects have centred on digital technology for a long time now, they have remained silent about educating and empowering children to act as technology makers and shapers, not merely passive users. We have organized, together with children, digital technology projects that we now critically examine from the perspective of inclusion/exclusion. The paper shows that in social inclusion projects, there is exclusion taking place in a multitude of forms, shaped by a variety of rules and powers. We use nexus analysis as a theoretical and methodological tool that guides us to study inclusion/exclusion as processes, within which both discourses and concrete actions are to be acknowledged as well as historical and interactional aspects-both at individual level and at the level of social structures. Our study shows that inclusion and exclusion may be intentionally accomplished by children themselves, those may result without any intentional effort because of circumstances and those may also be done for children by various kinds of adults.Although children's empowerment and agency are significant, also adults play a decisive role. Implications for social inclusion and digital technology education research and practice are discussed. Nexus analysis is suggested as a useful means for revealing and managing the complexity involved in social inclusion/exclusion.

Abstract. Children's participation in information and communication technology (ICT) design is an established interdisciplinary research field. Methods for children's participation have been developed, but a closer link between theory and design has been called for, as well as an examination of various participants influencing children's participation in ICT design. This paper addresses these gaps by introducing the research strategy of nexus analysis as a promising theoretical framework. Especially the concepts of 'interaction order' and 'historical body' are utilized in the analysis of six empirical studies on ICT design with children. The analysis shows that through the participating children there were also 'others' involved, multiple voices to be heard, often invisible but informing design. Some of these 'others' have already been acknowledged in literature but the issue has not been examined in depth and common vocabulary for this is lacking. Some practical implications will be offered by illustrating how to consider these concepts in different phases of ICT design: when establishing relationships with children, involving children as participant designers, and analysing the results of these participative processes.

No abstract

This paper examines video diaries gathered from 10-11-year-old pupils with the aim of inquiring children's technology use in their everyday life. A discourse lens is utilized to provide novel insights into the nature and use of videos and diaries in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research and design. The paper shows how the children, given the same assignment, produced their video diaries from a range of different positions such as 'a diarist', 'a news anchor' and 'a stage performer', and through a variety of widely known genres such as 'an intimate, confessional diary entry', 'a news broadcast', and 'a homework assignment'. The children also smoothly moved between the positions and genres sometimes changing them several times even during one video clip. Our findings bear implications on two types of HCI research: firstly, studies using diaries for research and design purposes and, secondly, studies interested in videos produced by the research subjects. The paper emphasizes videos and diaries as a multifaceted resource not only revealing facts from the producers' lives but also playful experimenting with different positions and genres highlighting constant identity exploration and construction going on during the creation of the data. During the data analysis it is useful to consider within what kind of positionings and genres the pieces of data or 'facts' have been created as these genres and positions always frame and limit what is said and how. The paper also suggests that researchers could try to guide the research subjects to adopt certain positions and to rely on certain genres in producing their diaries or video clips to obtain better-focused data for particular research or design purposes. On the other hand, challenges involved with this kind of an attempt are also highlighted.