Learning from the children: exploring preschool children's encounters with ICT at home

Abstract

This paper is an account of our attempts to understand preschool children’s experiences with information and communication technologies (ICT) at home. Using case study data, we focus on what we can learn from talking directly to the children that might otherwise have been overlooked and on describing and evaluating the methods we adopted to ensure that we maximised the children’s contributions to the research. By paying attention to the children’s perspectives we have learned that they are discriminating users of ICT who evaluate their own performances, know what gives them pleasure and who differentiate between operational competence and the substantive activities made possible by ICT.