The new digital divide: digital technology policies and provision in Canada and Australia

This chapter is a comparative study of the policies and provision of mobile touchscreen digital devices in Canada and Australia. The current environment for language and literacy teaching is changing at an extremely rapid rate as the use of mobile devices becomes embedded into educational practice and expectations rise that children be digitally literate. The emergence of new policies to address these devices has been developing alongside changes in pedagogy in schools, with policies often playing “catch-up” with school and system practices. We consider how the digital technology policies for mobile touchscreen devices in early years school settings are written and enacted in Alberta, Canada and Victoria, Australia. In considering the ways in which policies were impacting upon the everyday practices of literacy teachers in our study, we surveyed documents from education department/ministry websites, school district/board websites, individual school websites, surveyed articles from popular and online media as well as teacher interviews. Rather than engaging with the pedagogical affordances of mobile devices, these texts tended to focus on risk management and “domesticating the devices”.