Towards digital disconnection in Danish educational policy

Abstract

When talking about the introduction of digital media into childhood and education, it has been common to talk about technology’s positive potential for personalized learning, for increased access to knowledge, for the acquisition of important future competences, media literacy etc. These arguments are situated in a broader societal discourse about the potential of digital technologies as such. There is how-ever a significant amount of evaluation reports that problematize the evidential basis of those claims. The emergence of the field of digital disconnection studies could offer novel approaches to understanding the relationship between education and technology. Our hypothesis is that digital disconnection literature could reveal reasons to argue for disconnecting from digital media in childhood and education. This could e.g., be mandated by findings in domains where warning flags have been raised based on perceptions of heightened health risks, cyberbullying, loneliness, exposure to online porn, distraction, manipulative features in online services etc. The aim of the article is to bring discussions from disconnection studies to the field of information- and communications technology (ICT) in education. It is a novel contribution that aims to relate the literature from digital disconnection studies to dominant literature on the purpose and value of ICT in education.