Children’s Interaction with Digital Media

Background and Goals

Digital technologies are omnipresent in children’s everyday lives and have become essential in their education. I spent two months at a school in East London to conduct a digital storytelling workshop. I worked closely with a group of 13 - 14 years old to create a short film of 2-3 minutes based on one of their cherished memories.

The workshop aimed to:

• Observe children’s interaction with digital media in their day to day

• The role of digital media in contemporary education

• Use co-creation as a research method to creatively involve young participants in the research process

Results

• Most children had gotten their first social media accounts at this age. Particularly, Instagram played a big role in how they collected and shared personal memories.

• Children had issues transferring images from social media back to their phone storage to use in their films. Memory objects like images and films were dispersed between their phones, social media and family archives.

• Children chose personal memories that reflected an extraordinary event in their lives e.g. travelling, a football match, illness within their family or a burglary.

My Learnings

• The school’s IT infrastructure should be closely considered before choosing the methods for the workshop.

• Conducting research requires following school rules, which gives less opportunity to speak to children outside the classroom and reinforces power inequalities between researcher and participants.