Kylie J Stevenson

This article outlines an evidence-based model of children’s digital citizenship stakeholder engagement, reporting the final outcome of a project conducted in the Asia Pacific region, titled Digital Safety and Citizenship Roundtables: Using Consultation and Creativity to Engage Stakeholders (Children, Policy Influencers, Industry) in Best Practice in India, South Korea, and Australia. This qualitative research positioned young children aged 3 to 13 years as key stakeholders in their digital citizenship development. Their views were communicated to adult stakeholders with an interest in digital citizenship policy and practice. The authors outline the 4A model, based on evidence collected from child and adult stakeholders, which offers a set of principles to guide stakeholders when they engage in children’s digital citizenship development. This article conveys how the authors have championed an innovative, child-centred, participatory research approach that facilitated the inclusion of children’s voices in the development of digital citizenship policy and practice.

In order to understand grandparents’ types of engagement, or lack of it, in their grandchildren’s interactions with digital technologies, it is first useful to identify three things. One is grandparents’ perspectives on the influences shaping modern parenting that were explored in the preceding chapter. These can inform grandparents’ understanding of why their children, as parents, act in certain ways, including how they try to manage their children’s technological experiences. Second, it is important to appreciate grandparents’ own understanding of their grandparenting role and its limits. These possibilities are initially outlined in the literature review and then explored further in reporting the Toddlers and Tablets findings. And third, while acknowledging the range and diversity of grandparenting, it is necessary to examine grandparents’ own perceptions of the place of touchscreens in children’s lives. In the light of these three factors, it is easier to understand any grandparent interventions. Lastly, interview material from the parents also provides some clues to how parents evaluate grandparents’ actions....

The easy interface of touchscreen technologies like tablets and smartphones has enabled children to access the digital world from a very young age. But while some commentators are enthusiastic about how this can open a new world for fun, learning, and developing digital skills, others see the dangers of yet more screens, inauthentic play, and time spent isolated with electronic babysitters that detract from interaction with parents and learning social skills. Taking five as the age when children transition into formal education, this book draws on a three-year research project examining the realities of under six-year-olds' experiences of these technologies in the UK and Australia. With a theoretical context including Vygotsky, Bruner, Bronfenbrenner and Flewitt, the book examines how parents of young children evaluate the opportunities and risks of children's digital media use in the context of other significant influences such as children's time with grandparents, early childhood care and education. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 22 families, and rich ethnographic data from observation and exchanges with their 29 children, aged four months to five years, the book reveals how digital technologies complement and challenge important aspects of daily life for infants, toddlers and preschoolers.

This white paper communicates research activities and findings investigating digital safety and digital citizenship through multistakeholder collaborations in three countries—India, South Korea, and Australia. Performed by an Edith Cowan University-based research team from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, supported by the LEGO Group, this research additionally responds to many recent policy and practice reviews arguing for institutional and policy engagement in the Asia Pacific (APAC) that build children’s digital safety, literacy and citizenship. These include the UNESCO data-driven report, Digital Kids Asia Pacific (DKAP): Insights into children’s digital citizenship (UNESCO, 2019), an earlier UNESCO review of policy, Building digital citizenship in Asia Pacific through safe, effective and responsible use of ICT (UNESCO, 2016) and a UNICEF scoping paper, Digital literacy for children (Nascimbeni & Vosloo, 2019). These reports highlight the importance of stakeholders engaging with new ways to foster digital literacy and digital citizenship...

This report talks about a teamwork project between the LEGO Group, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child (Digital Child) and Edith Cowan University (ECU).

In 2022, the LEGO Group, ECU and Digital Child researchers teamed up to ask children and adults in India, Korea and Australia about digital citizenship. We collected all this information together and compared our results, and then made some suggestions about how we can all do things better to help kids be safer, smarter, and happier online.

This article arises from recent industry-partner research between the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, the LEGO Group, and Edith Cowan University (ECU), examining new ways of communicating children’s perspectives of digital citizenship to policy makers and industry in a project called Digital Safety and Citizenship Roundtables: Using Consultation and Creativity to Engage Stakeholders (Children, Policy Influencers, Industry) in Best Practice in India, South Korea, and Australia. We posed the research question: What are children’s everyday experiences of digital citizenship in these countries, and how might these contribute to digital citizenship policy and practice? In research roundtables, we immersed children aged 3 to 13 in a three-pronged child-centred multimodal methodology that included drawing, show-and-tell discussion, and a block building activity. It is this third block-related method that this article investigates: the project’s adoption of an activity using the LEGO® brick whereby the children expressed their views about their everyday digital worlds via brick toy constructions. In this article, we explain how such toy play can be used as a communicative strategy to give children agency so that they can creatively interject their voices into ongoing discussions about children’s digital citizenship. Such an approach takes a children’s rights perspective and considers the ethics of research with children, whereby “young children have rights; [and] they are agents and active constructors of their social worlds” (Sun et al.). The project was also subject to a rigorous human ethics approval process at ECU. This article highlights the benefits of the brick toy as a communicative device for amplifying children’s voices about their everyday experiences of media and digital cultures and ends by illustrating some of the children’s views depicted in their brick toy creations.

This literature review is the first outcome of a research partnership between the LEGO Group, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child and Edith Cowan University (ECU). This literature review provides the background for further stages of the project, including roundtables with child and adult stakeholders, and subsequent reports synthesising the outcomes of these roundtables, the literature and research findings.