Digital resources permeate today's society and are everyday objects in many children's lives. As there is a need for more studies about children's rights concerning issues of protection as well as influence and participation in relation to digital resources, this article explores preschool practitioners’ reflections on children's rights in the context of their digital teaching practices. We examine possibilities and constraints in practice, using affordances as an analytical lens. The data comprise 13 individual interviews with Swedish preschool practitioners, based on video stimulated reflection on digital activities observed in their preschool setting.

The findings suggest that practitioners see digital resources as having the potential to support children's rights, particularly in promoting participation and transcending physical boundaries. However, they emphasise the importance of being active and critical practitioners, noting that digital resources alone do not automatically facilitate children's rights.

In conclusion, our contribution lies in unpacking the affordances of digital tools in preschool settings through the lens of children's rights, while also offering concrete examples of how this work can be applied in practice. Hence, the study offers practical implications for educators, policymakers and curriculum developers seeking to integrate digital resources in preschool education while upholding children's rights.

Background

In many countries, essential infrastructures, like power systems, are often taken for granted and thus invisible to ordinary people. However, because of energy transitions and climate impacts, the power system in countries such as Sweden is changing. For example, due to variable renewable power sources and increasing demand there is a potential need to deal with changing conditions, including disruptions at an end-use level, which makes the energy system come to the foreground. As argued in the paper, deeper knowledge about people’s understanding of a changing energy system is needed to support households in taking on new roles. The aim of this study was to explore energy resilience from a household perspective by investigating how households make sense of possible future power deficit scenarios. The concept of household energy resilience was used as a lens. Twelve interviews were conducted with people from seven households participating in a trial with remote-controlled heat pumps. The participating households all lived in detached houses in Sweden.

Results

The findings illustrate how the households relate to energy resilience through diverse approaches. More specifically, they anticipate the need to become resilient while questioning the idea that they should have to become resilient, and negotiate resilience as a shared responsibility between the different stakeholders of the grid. These insights reveal conditions under which households anticipate taking more active roles in a changing energy system. However, the insights also show that other energy actors need to communicate clearly which responsibilities they are taking on to support households and the energy transition overall. Households cannot be expected to embrace household energy resilience without reciprocity and other actors’ taking on responsibility.

Conclusions

Our results show that there is potential for more active and engaged electricity end-users, beyond, for example, flexibility programs. However, households’ active participation, including becoming more energy resilient, is conditional on challenges of value, involvement, and reciprocity. The results will be of interest to professionals involved in electricity supply-related matters including suppliers, policymakers, and researchers.

This study investigates the phenomenon of digital stress among administrative staff engaged in hybrid work at a Scandinavian university in the post-pandemic era. Following COVID-19, organizations have incorporated hybrid work models that offer employees flexibility in their work environments. While this transformation presents opportunities for enhanced productivity and comfort, it simultaneously introduces challenges, including communication difficulties, employee isolation, and blurred boundaries between work and leisure. Digital stress has emerged as a significant concern affecting both individual well-being and organizational effectiveness.

Empirical research examining digital stress in educational institutions remains limited. This study addresses how digital stress manifests in hybrid workplace settings and investigates perceptions of digital stress among management and employees. By examining the stressors that university administrative staff face, this research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of digital stress in organizational contexts and introduces the concept of 'the silent struggle' to shed light on such experiences. 

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has quickly gained a prominent role in discussions within education, especially regarding issues such as plagiarism, assessment, and personalized learning experiences. This position paper advocates for research on how GenAI transforms disciplinary knowledge and redefines subject-specific teaching practices. Through a historical exposé on the role of digital technology in education, this inquiry foregrounds an epistemic perspective that examines how research in technological advances is altering the nature of knowledge and its acquisition. Consequently, the TPACK framework is revisited to highlight the complex interplay of technology, pedagogy, and content in the era of GenAI, sparking critical examination of how it alters the conditions for teachers and teaching. It underscores the importance of studies that explore the meaning of TPACK in the evolving landscape and that enhance the framework with contemporary subject-specific examples rooted in practice.

Research often defines Work-integrated Learning (WIL) as an educational approach that provides students with work-based experiences. In this article, we argue that this approach definition of WIL is nonsensical and maintains a research terminology that fails to capture what WIL is, namely, a multidimensional learning phenomenon.

Drawing on this argument, this article aims to explore and problematise how the term WIL is used in contemporary research. To achieve this aim, we draw on contemporary research and conduct a text analysis of 48 extended abstracts that were accepted for an international WIL conference in December 2022. The text analysis generated three recurring research phenomena that we relate to research. These are (i) WIL avoidance, when the WIL term is evaded although it could verywell have been used, (ii) WIL washing, when the WIL term is used in a hollow manner, and (iii) WIL ambiguity, when the WIL term is used vaguely. We scrutinise how these research phenomena and the approach definition of WIL pose challenges to establishing a comprehensive research terminology that can bring about an increased understanding of what WIL is. Finally, we call for research to use a more careful and nuanced terminology that acknowledges WIL’s multidimensional nature.

While social media in an educational context has interested researchers for a long time, its use in vocational education constitutes a sparsely explored field of research. In this study, we explore how three vocational teachers in Sweden make sense of Instagram in their teaching practice through interviews and analyses of their Instagram accounts over time. Technological frames are used as a theoretical lens to explore how teachers perceive the nature, the strategy, and the use of Instagram at an individual level.

Results show that initiatives, motivations, and approaches clearly differ among the teachers and that questions about accountability and expectations on the teacher and the accounts remain vague. Contributions include demonstrating how vocational teachers make sense of Instagram and how it can be linked to different levels of engagement that are rooted in diverse perceptions of how their role and their practice can be supported. 

This edited collection presents a Nordic perspective on intensified discussions concerning digitalization and digital competence in the current trends of educational work. Using a multidisciplinary and holistic approach, the book compares Nordic countries' attitudes towards the digitalization of education and demonstrates the Nordic region's position as digital front-runners in a European and global context. The book provides up-to-date cases and future-oriented perspectives on digitalization and digital competence in educational work. Chapters use empirical data gained from policy documents, interviews, and questionnaires to present nuanced discussions, theoretical perspectives, and implications for the future of digitalization in education. Ultimately, this book's reach far exceeds that of its Nordic contexts and will be of use to postgraduate students, researchers, and scholars across the globe involved with digital education, teacher education, and educational policy and politics more broadly . . .

[Introduction]:

In the digital age, education has undergone a significant transformation. With the proliferation of technology in learning environments, the education sector has witnessed a dramatic increase in the generation of digital data. Consequently, over recent decades, learning analytics (LA) and educational data mining have evolved into significant areas of research, with the purpose of enhancing education at all educational levels (Deeva et al., 2021).  . . .

During the autumn, winter and early spring of 2022/2023, Europe faced rapidly increasing energy prices and threats of power cuts. The situation was consequently labelled an “energy crisis”, and one sector that was severely affected was households. In response to the situation, European households made efforts to reduce and time-shift their energy use to mitigate the effects of the crisis. Considering that domestic energy practices are often difficult to change, particularly in the long term, we find this effect of the energy crisis on households important to understand more deeply. In this paper, we use social practice theory to investigate how Swedish households responded to the crisis and what changes they made in terms of re-configurations of their practices. The aim was to contribute knowledge on how households adapt to a changing energy system with volatile prices, limitations in electric power, and threats of energy crisis. We conducted two rounds of semi-structured interviews with 9 households in single-family houses in the middle and south of Sweden during and after the crisis, in total 18 interviews, to examine what re-configurations of practices emerged and which persisted over time. The results show that significant changes were apparent in primarily the practice domains of heating and hygiene. While some of these changes were temporary, other re-configurations of energy practices persisted beyond the months of crisis and high prices, indicating that meanings of frugality and sufficiency were strengthened. Our results demonstrate that households were reminded of certain electricity use that is otherwise typically backgrounded in homes and that the energy crisis stimulated re-configuration and re-examination of norms as well as reflection on electricity use in general. Finally, we discuss the effects of the energy crisis on household practices in comparison with other crises and disruptions, and point to the importance of communicating clearly with households about the societal effects of their efforts, in order to manage the legacy of this crisis for similar future crisis situations.