The growing use of new forms of surveillance technology across the day-to-day lives of children and the spaces they inhabit brings with it potential changes to childhood experience. These technologies may change the way children interact with others and the way they come to understand the world around them. This article investigates the nature of these changes by looking at the impact of new surveillance technologies on a child’s experience of trust. It aims to show that an increased surveillance presence across a child’s everyday activity may be denying children important opportunities both to trust others and to be trusted.
Children are at the forefront of the rapidly changing technological landscape, living in a world where both physical and virtual spaces are an intertwined part of daily experience. As an example of a child's changing relationship with new technologies, this article explores the increasing presence of surveillance technologies in the day-today spaces children inhabit. It suggests that childhood experience needs to be understood in the context of fluid and interdependent relations with others and the worlds around them, including their relationships with new technologies in the surrounding environment. At the same time, it is important to retain a view of the child that is more complex than what is simply gleaned through their relationship with new technologies, even as this becomes a prominent mode of interaction with others and the world around them.
This paper reports from a pilot study investigating the ways digital documentation platforms are changing educators’ work in early childhood education. Digital documentation platforms are secure websites or application software, enabled by computer, smartphone, or tablet technologies, allowing educators to record observations of children’s learning as text or in visual forms, to which interpretations or commentary from educators, family members, and children are added. This paper examines how these platforms orient the ways educators see and articulate young children’s learning. Video stimulated recall interviews with educators (six in total) at four ECE sites across Australia and New Zealand were analysed. Key concepts are offered in relation to how digital platforms shape the learning that is seen by early childhood educators: tag-ability, trackability, completeness, and co-constitution. Each of these concepts is problematised in relation to contemporary ECE practices and the persuasiveness and ubiquity of the visual in discourses of documentation.
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