I samspel med surfplattor : Om barns digitala kompetenser och tillträde till digitala aktiviteter i förskolan

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores how children and teachers interact with tablet computers in everyday activities in preschool. The study focuses on how teachers organise the digital activities, how children make sense of institutional frameworks when interacting with their peers in these activities and how children access and organise their participation in digital activities. Of particular interest are the digital competencies displayed by children as they participate in digital activities with teachers and their peers.The empirical data was collected during an eight-month video ethnographic study of children between the ages of three and five at a Swedish preschool. The video recordings and field notes were collected during participant observations and analysed using an ethnomethodological approach to conversation analysis. Detailed attention was given to embodied features of interaction, which was critical for the analysis. In terms of findings, the thesis shows that when participating in collaborative interaction with tablet computers the children also oriented themselves towards - and renegotiated - the institutional conditions they found themselves in. The children´s digital competencies were demonstrated by the way they dealt with the technology and navigated and solved problems in the applications they used. The children were found to have developed access strategies for their participation in digital activities. The children also oriented themselves to socially expected ways of participating in the activities. The results also show that the digital competencies required by children in digital activities are dependent on the collective work of the participants in these activities. This study demonstrates the importance of studying children's digital competencies in relation to how they use digital technologies in specific social contexts, and that the introduction of tablet computers in a preschool context involves complex interactional work for teachers and children alike.