Rebecca Eynon
Biographic Data
| ID | 93213 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebecca Eynon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebecca |
| FAMILY NAME | Eynon |
| SIGNATURE | EYNON R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2074-5486 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 93 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Trajectories and togetherness: How technologies for homework are (re)configuring home-school relationships
Turning back the page on digital literacy: The role of traditional literacy in shaping digital practices
The precise definition of digital literacy has long been contested. Although early definitions recognised the importance of traditional literacy (the ability to read and write) for engaging in digital practices (Gilster 1997), this connection is often overlooked in recent scholarship, policy initiatives, and digital literacy frameworks. This article draws on ethnographic data from two secondary schools in England to present a case that highlights…
Computational social science and critical studies of education and technology: An improbable combination
As belief around the potential of computational social science grows, fuelled by recent advances in machine learning, data scientists are ostensibly becoming the new experts in education. Scholars engaged in critical studies of education and technology have sought to interrogate the growing datafication of education yet tend not to use computational methods as part of this response. In this paper, we discuss the feasibility and desirability of th…
Uncovering Edtech's Embedded Values: Making the Case for Socio‐Technical Audits in Ethnographic Inquiry
Drawing on three ethnographic studies of secondary schools in England, this article makes a case for “socio‐technical audits”—a method combining technological walkthroughs with observations, workshops, and interviews—as part of ethnographic inquiry. A case example is presented to illustrate how the integration of socio‐technical audits enables articulation of the underlying logics of technologies, while producing empirically grounded, contextuall…
Toward a sociology of education and artificial intelligence
It almost goes without saying that artificial intelligence (AI) appears to be of major social, economic, political and cultural significance – a set of technologies that have been placed at the for
Looking back and looking forward: Past and present editors on 20 years of critical perspectives in learning, media, and technology
Anniversaries of all kinds are good opportunities to look back and reflect, as well as to look forward to the future. Learning, Media and Technology is now 20 years old, but it also has a longer hi
Widening the Digital Divide: The mediating role of Intelligent Tutoring Systems in the relationship between rurality, socioeducational advantage, and mathematics learning outcomes
This study examines how the effects of school socioeducational advantage and rurality upon mathematics learning outcomes, are impacted by students’ usage of the ITS platform AdaptiveMath. Activity log data from the AdaptiveMath platform was merged with school sociodemographic data from the public MySchool database. The final analytic sample comprised of 66,451 Australian high school students across 304 schools in Years 7–10, who used the Adaptive…
How AI Works: Reconfiguring Lifelong Learning
Lifelong learning is a current policy focus in many countries, with AI technologies promoted as both the motivation for the need for lifelong learning (due to its assumed role in social change) and as an important way to ‘deliver’ learning across the life course. Such policies tend to be instrumental and technologically deterministic, and there is a need to properly theorize the relationships between AI and lifelong learning to better inform poli…
When public policy ‘fails’ and venture capital ‘saves’ education: Edtech investors as economic and political actors
Educational technology (Edtech) investors have become increasingly influential in education; however, they remain under-researched.We address this deficit and introduce the grammar and landscape of Edtech investment into education research.We empirically examine venture capital Edtech investors and argue that they are economic and political actors.Investors construct the Edtech industry through their investment and advancing particular imaginarie…
Utilising a Critical Realist Lens to Conceptualise Digital Inequality: The Experiences of Less Well-Off Internet Users
This study aims to contribute to existing understandings of the relationships between social inequality and Internet use through 30 in-depth interviews with people in Britain who have digital access, are digitally competent, and use the Internet for a broad range of purposes, yet come from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Using a critical realist lens, it examines the everyday experiences and implications of using the Internet for this group. Th…
The Ethics of Using Digital Trace Data in Education: A Thematic Review of the Research Landscape
This article presents the findings of a systematic qualitative analysis of research in the ethics of digital trace data use in learning and education. From the resulting analysis of 77 peer-reviewed studies, we (1) map the characteristics of research by study type, academic community, institutional setting, and national context; (2) identify the primary ethical concerns and related responses; and (3) highlight the research gaps. Four areas of foc…
Lifelong learning and the Internet: Who benefits most from learning online
This paper uses nationally representative survey data of adults Internet use in Britain to examine current patterns in the uptake of lifelong learning via the Internet. We develop and test a model that accounts for structure, agency and outcomes using structural equation modelling to address two questions: (1) how structure (as measured by age, gender, SES, Education and ACORN) is related to personal and capital enhancing outcomes of learning onl…
Crafting worldly spaces: The role of the educator in shaping student agency in Minecraft
The use of video games in schools is not new. However, classroom use of video games may be poised for a dramatic shift as billion dollar video game franchises such as Assassin’s Creed and Minecraft
Becoming digitally literate: Reinstating an educational lens to digital skills policies for adults
The development of digital skills for all is a key focus of many educational policies across the globe. Despite the significant attention paid to the nature and suitability of such policies targeted at young people, there has been far less focus on digital skills policies targeted at adults. This article contributes to this literature. It outlines current digital skills policy in England. Having established this background, it analyses 30 intervi…
Methodology, Legend, and Rhetoric: The Constructions of AI by Academia, Industry, and Policy Groups for Lifelong Learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) is again attracting significant attention across all areas of social life. One important sphere of focus is education; many policy makers across the globe view lifelong learning as an essential means to prepare society for an "AI future" and look to AI as a way to "deliver" learning opportunities to meet these needs. AI is a complex social, cultural, and material artifact that is understood and constructed by differen…
The Mobilisation of AI in Education: A Bourdieusean Field Analysis
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently hailed as a 'solution' to perceived problems in education. Though few sociologists of education would agree with its deterministic claims, this AI solutionist thinking is gaining significant currency. In this article, using a relatively novel method for sociology - a knowledge graph - together with Bourdieusean theory, we critically examine how and why different stakeholders in education, educational tech…
What’s next for Ed-Tech? Critical hopes and concerns for the 2020s
Platformizing Knowledge: Mess and Meaning in Web 3.0 Infrastructures
This panel focuses on the way that platforms have become key players in the representation of knowledge. Recently, there have been calls to combine infrastructure and platform-based frameworks to understand the nature of information exchange on the web through digital tools for knowledge sharing. The present panel builds and extends work on platform and infrastructure studies in what has been referred to as “knowledge as programmable object” (Pla…
Historical threads, missing links, and future directions in AI in education
Artificial intelligence has become a routine presence in everyday life.Accessing information over the Web, consuming news and entertainment, the performance of financial markets, the ways surveillance systems identify individuals, how drivers and pedestrians navigate, and how citizens receive welfare payments are among myriad examples of how AI has penetrated into human lives, social institutions, cultural practices, and political and economic pr…
Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: Digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency
The first special issue of Learning, Media and Technology of 2020, entitled ‘Education and technology into the 2020s: speculative futures’, presented a series of papers looking to the future of cri
Is digital upskilling the next generation our ‘pipeline to prosperity’
The British government is claiming digital skills will deliver economic growth to the country and social mobility to young people: its ministers call it ‘a pipeline to prosperity’. While declaring this pipeline, the government assumes the needs of the economy and young people’s needs are (or should be) synchronised. We challenge this assumption and the policy it sustains with data from questionnaires, workshops and interviews with 50 young people…
Moving on up in the information society? A longitudinal analysis of the relationship between Internet use and social class mobility in Britain
Many universal access policies are based on the assumption that the removal of the digital divide will enhance social mobility. But this assumption is not supported by the available evidence. Using four waves of longitudinal data from Britain we show that Internet use has a positive effect on social class mobility, while controlling for age, gender, education, health, and previous social class membership between 1997 and 2013. In doing so, we con…
Neoliberal gremlins? How a scheme to help disadvantaged young people thrive online fell short of its ambitions
Numerous academic studies highlight the significant differences in the ways that young people access, use and engage with the Internet and the implications it has in their lives. Trying to address such inequalities is complex, and the outcomes of digital inclusion schemes are rarely uniformly positive or transformative for the people involved. Therefore the hope of such schemes that if sufficiently empowered, incentivised and aspirational, the di…
Development and validation of the Internet Skills Scale (ISS)
Although a number of instruments have been used to measure Internet skills in nationally representative surveys, there are several challenges with the measures available: incompleteness and over-simplification, conceptual ambiguity, and the use of self-reports. Here, we aim to overcome these challenges by developing a set of reliable measures for use in research, practice, and policy evaluations based on a strong conceptual framework. To achieve …
Family dynamics and Internet use in Britain: What role do children play in adults' engagement with the Internet
The importance of considering the family context in the adoption and use of the Internet are well recognised. Supporters of the digital inclusion agenda often see children as a way to increase the digital skills and use of the Internet by parents and older adults. However, there is a limited amount of research that has explored whether this is really the case. Using two nationally representative survey data sets from Britain, this paper aims to b…
Digital natives: Where is the evidence
Generational differences are seen as the cause of wide shifts in our ability to engage with technologies and the concept of the digital native has gained popularity in certain areas of policy and practice. This paper provides evidence, through the analysis of a nationally representative survey in the UK, that generation is only one of the predictors of advanced interaction with the Internet. Breadth of use, experience, gender and educational leve…
Distinct skill pathways to digital engagement
Digital literacy and inclusion have been two important, largely separate, areas of study that examine the relationships between Internet skills and engagement. This article brings together these areas of research by testing a model that assumes specific pathways to inclusion: specific sociodemographic factors predict specific digital skills and specific digital skills predict related types of engagement with the Internet. Analyses of nationally r…
Adults learning online: Digital choice and/or digital exclusion
Using a nationally representative British survey, this article explores the extent to which adults are using the internet for learning activities because they choose to (digital choice) or because of (involuntary) digital exclusion. Key findings suggest that reasons for (dis)engagement with the internet or the uptake of different kinds of online learning opportunities are somewhat varied for different groups, but that both digital choice and excl…
When public policy ‘fails’ and venture capital ‘saves’ education: Edtech investors as economic and political actors
Educational technology (Edtech) investors have become increasingly influential in education; however, they remain under-researched.We address this deficit and introduce the grammar and landscape of Edtech investment into education research.We empirically examine venture capital Edtech investors and argue that they are economic and political actors.Investors construct the Edtech industry through their investment and advancing particular imaginarie…
The Mobilisation of AI in Education: A Bourdieusean Field Analysis
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently hailed as a 'solution' to perceived problems in education. Though few sociologists of education would agree with its deterministic claims, this AI solutionist thinking is gaining significant currency. In this article, using a relatively novel method for sociology - a knowledge graph - together with Bourdieusean theory, we critically examine how and why different stakeholders in education, educational tech…
Is digital upskilling the next generation our ‘pipeline to prosperity’
The British government is claiming digital skills will deliver economic growth to the country and social mobility to young people: its ministers call it ‘a pipeline to prosperity’. While declaring this pipeline, the government assumes the needs of the economy and young people’s needs are (or should be) synchronised. We challenge this assumption and the policy it sustains with data from questionnaires, workshops and interviews with 50 young people…
Moving on up in the information society? A longitudinal analysis of the relationship between Internet use and social class mobility in Britain
Many universal access policies are based on the assumption that the removal of the digital divide will enhance social mobility. But this assumption is not supported by the available evidence. Using four waves of longitudinal data from Britain we show that Internet use has a positive effect on social class mobility, while controlling for age, gender, education, health, and previous social class membership between 1997 and 2013. In doing so, we con…
Becoming digitally literate: Reinstating an educational lens to digital skills policies for adults
The development of digital skills for all is a key focus of many educational policies across the globe. Despite the significant attention paid to the nature and suitability of such policies targeted at young people, there has been far less focus on digital skills policies targeted at adults. This article contributes to this literature. It outlines current digital skills policy in England. Having established this background, it analyses 30 intervi…
Methodology, Legend, and Rhetoric: The Constructions of AI by Academia, Industry, and Policy Groups for Lifelong Learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) is again attracting significant attention across all areas of social life. One important sphere of focus is education; many policy makers across the globe view lifelong learning as an essential means to prepare society for an "AI future" and look to AI as a way to "deliver" learning opportunities to meet these needs. AI is a complex social, cultural, and material artifact that is understood and constructed by differen…
Networked Individuals and Institutions: A Cross-Sector Comparative Perspective on Patterns and Strategies in Government and Research
Discussion of the role of the Internet in government and research tends to be "institution-centric" in that e-government and e-research initiatives are both anchored in top-down strategies to provide information resources to citizens or researchers by place-based institutions, including governments and universities. In both institutional arenas, the diffusion of these services has been limited to small albeit growing proportions of their target a…
Utilising a Critical Realist Lens to Conceptualise Digital Inequality: The Experiences of Less Well-Off Internet Users
This study aims to contribute to existing understandings of the relationships between social inequality and Internet use through 30 in-depth interviews with people in Britain who have digital access, are digitally competent, and use the Internet for a broad range of purposes, yet come from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Using a critical realist lens, it examines the everyday experiences and implications of using the Internet for this group. Th…
Barriers to Networked Governments: Evidence from Europe 1
Progress towards realizing the full potential of ‘e‐government’—using digital technologies to improve public services and government–citizen engagements—has been slower and less effective than the technologies’ take‐up in spheres such as e‐commerce. Evidence from across Europe reported here, including an online survey and case studies, indicates a significant reason has been an overly narrow focus on substituting electronic for traditional servic…
Universities in Transition: Commercialization and the 21st Century University
The Global Virtual University, by John Tiffin and Lalita Rajasingham. London: Routledge Falmer, 2003. xiv + 166 pp. $28.95 paper. ISBN 0415287022. • The Digital Revolution and the coming of the P
Networked Individuals and Institutions: A Cross-Sector Comparative Perspective on Patterns and Strategies in Government and Research
Discussion of the role of the Internet in government and research tends to be "institution-centric" in that e-government and e-research initiatives are both anchored in top-down strategies to provide information resources to citizens or researchers by place-based institutions, including governments and universities. In both institutional arenas, the diffusion of these services has been limited to small albeit growing proportions of their target a…
Adults learning online: Digital choice and/or digital exclusion
Using a nationally representative British survey, this article explores the extent to which adults are using the internet for learning activities because they choose to (digital choice) or because of (involuntary) digital exclusion. Key findings suggest that reasons for (dis)engagement with the internet or the uptake of different kinds of online learning opportunities are somewhat varied for different groups, but that both digital choice and excl…
Digital natives: Where is the evidence
Generational differences are seen as the cause of wide shifts in our ability to engage with technologies and the concept of the digital native has gained popularity in certain areas of policy and practice. This paper provides evidence, through the analysis of a nationally representative survey in the UK, that generation is only one of the predictors of advanced interaction with the Internet. Breadth of use, experience, gender and educational leve…
Teenagers and Technology
The popular media often presents a negative picture of young people and technology. From addiction to gaming, the distractions of the Internet, to the risks of social networking, the downsides of new technology in the lives of teenagers are often over-blown. Teenagers and Technology presents a balanced picture of the part played by technology in the lives of young people. Drawing on extensive interviews conducted over several years, this book off…
Distinct skill pathways to digital engagement
Digital literacy and inclusion have been two important, largely separate, areas of study that examine the relationships between Internet skills and engagement. This article brings together these areas of research by testing a model that assumes specific pathways to inclusion: specific sociodemographic factors predict specific digital skills and specific digital skills predict related types of engagement with the Internet. Analyses of nationally r…
Family dynamics and Internet use in Britain: What role do children play in adults' engagement with the Internet
The importance of considering the family context in the adoption and use of the Internet are well recognised. Supporters of the digital inclusion agenda often see children as a way to increase the digital skills and use of the Internet by parents and older adults. However, there is a limited amount of research that has explored whether this is really the case. Using two nationally representative survey data sets from Britain, this paper aims to b…
Development and validation of the Internet Skills Scale (ISS)
Although a number of instruments have been used to measure Internet skills in nationally representative surveys, there are several challenges with the measures available: incompleteness and over-simplification, conceptual ambiguity, and the use of self-reports. Here, we aim to overcome these challenges by developing a set of reliable measures for use in research, practice, and policy evaluations based on a strong conceptual framework. To achieve …
Neoliberal gremlins? How a scheme to help disadvantaged young people thrive online fell short of its ambitions
Numerous academic studies highlight the significant differences in the ways that young people access, use and engage with the Internet and the implications it has in their lives. Trying to address such inequalities is complex, and the outcomes of digital inclusion schemes are rarely uniformly positive or transformative for the people involved. Therefore the hope of such schemes that if sufficiently empowered, incentivised and aspirational, the di…
Is digital upskilling the next generation our ‘pipeline to prosperity’
The British government is claiming digital skills will deliver economic growth to the country and social mobility to young people: its ministers call it ‘a pipeline to prosperity’. While declaring this pipeline, the government assumes the needs of the economy and young people’s needs are (or should be) synchronised. We challenge this assumption and the policy it sustains with data from questionnaires, workshops and interviews with 50 young people…
Moving on up in the information society? A longitudinal analysis of the relationship between Internet use and social class mobility in Britain
Many universal access policies are based on the assumption that the removal of the digital divide will enhance social mobility. But this assumption is not supported by the available evidence. Using four waves of longitudinal data from Britain we show that Internet use has a positive effect on social class mobility, while controlling for age, gender, education, health, and previous social class membership between 1997 and 2013. In doing so, we con…
What’s next for Ed-Tech? Critical hopes and concerns for the 2020s
Platformizing Knowledge: Mess and Meaning in Web 3.0 Infrastructures
This panel focuses on the way that platforms have become key players in the representation of knowledge. Recently, there have been calls to combine infrastructure and platform-based frameworks to understand the nature of information exchange on the web through digital tools for knowledge sharing. The present panel builds and extends work on platform and infrastructure studies in what has been referred to as “knowledge as programmable object” (Pla…
Historical threads, missing links, and future directions in AI in education
Artificial intelligence has become a routine presence in everyday life.Accessing information over the Web, consuming news and entertainment, the performance of financial markets, the ways surveillance systems identify individuals, how drivers and pedestrians navigate, and how citizens receive welfare payments are among myriad examples of how AI has penetrated into human lives, social institutions, cultural practices, and political and economic pr…
Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: Digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency
The first special issue of Learning, Media and Technology of 2020, entitled ‘Education and technology into the 2020s: speculative futures’, presented a series of papers looking to the future of cri
The Ethics of Using Digital Trace Data in Education: A Thematic Review of the Research Landscape
This article presents the findings of a systematic qualitative analysis of research in the ethics of digital trace data use in learning and education. From the resulting analysis of 77 peer-reviewed studies, we (1) map the characteristics of research by study type, academic community, institutional setting, and national context; (2) identify the primary ethical concerns and related responses; and (3) highlight the research gaps. Four areas of foc…
Lifelong learning and the Internet: Who benefits most from learning online
This paper uses nationally representative survey data of adults Internet use in Britain to examine current patterns in the uptake of lifelong learning via the Internet. We develop and test a model that accounts for structure, agency and outcomes using structural equation modelling to address two questions: (1) how structure (as measured by age, gender, SES, Education and ACORN) is related to personal and capital enhancing outcomes of learning onl…
Crafting worldly spaces: The role of the educator in shaping student agency in Minecraft
The use of video games in schools is not new. However, classroom use of video games may be poised for a dramatic shift as billion dollar video game franchises such as Assassin’s Creed and Minecraft
Becoming digitally literate: Reinstating an educational lens to digital skills policies for adults
The development of digital skills for all is a key focus of many educational policies across the globe. Despite the significant attention paid to the nature and suitability of such policies targeted at young people, there has been far less focus on digital skills policies targeted at adults. This article contributes to this literature. It outlines current digital skills policy in England. Having established this background, it analyses 30 intervi…
Methodology, Legend, and Rhetoric: The Constructions of AI by Academia, Industry, and Policy Groups for Lifelong Learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) is again attracting significant attention across all areas of social life. One important sphere of focus is education; many policy makers across the globe view lifelong learning as an essential means to prepare society for an "AI future" and look to AI as a way to "deliver" learning opportunities to meet these needs. AI is a complex social, cultural, and material artifact that is understood and constructed by differen…
The Mobilisation of AI in Education: A Bourdieusean Field Analysis
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently hailed as a 'solution' to perceived problems in education. Though few sociologists of education would agree with its deterministic claims, this AI solutionist thinking is gaining significant currency. In this article, using a relatively novel method for sociology - a knowledge graph - together with Bourdieusean theory, we critically examine how and why different stakeholders in education, educational tech…
Utilising a Critical Realist Lens to Conceptualise Digital Inequality: The Experiences of Less Well-Off Internet Users
This study aims to contribute to existing understandings of the relationships between social inequality and Internet use through 30 in-depth interviews with people in Britain who have digital access, are digitally competent, and use the Internet for a broad range of purposes, yet come from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Using a critical realist lens, it examines the everyday experiences and implications of using the Internet for this group. Th…
When public policy ‘fails’ and venture capital ‘saves’ education: Edtech investors as economic and political actors
Educational technology (Edtech) investors have become increasingly influential in education; however, they remain under-researched.We address this deficit and introduce the grammar and landscape of Edtech investment into education research.We empirically examine venture capital Edtech investors and argue that they are economic and political actors.Investors construct the Edtech industry through their investment and advancing particular imaginarie…
How AI Works: Reconfiguring Lifelong Learning
Lifelong learning is a current policy focus in many countries, with AI technologies promoted as both the motivation for the need for lifelong learning (due to its assumed role in social change) and as an important way to ‘deliver’ learning across the life course. Such policies tend to be instrumental and technologically deterministic, and there is a need to properly theorize the relationships between AI and lifelong learning to better inform poli…
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Public relations (18 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Social Media and Politics (12 works) · World Wide Web (12 works) · Social science (11 works) · The Internet (11 works)