Flemish high school students' everyday use of communication technologies for schoolwork-related communication

Abstract

By combining network data from a third grade in a Flemish high school (14–15-year olds, N = 147) with interview data obtained from eighteen of the pupils, more insight is provided into high school students' everyday use of communication technologies (CT) for school-related communication. The study departs from an “affordances of technology” perspective, taking both technological characteristics of CT and social context factors into account for explaining CT use. Each technology provided a specific combination of affordances: SMS afforded information acquirement, and served as a communication hub; instant messaging afforded information acquirement, discussing groupwork and exchanging documents and E-mail afforded exchanging documents and discussing groupwork. The telephone was not frequently used for communication about school. The findings could not be explained by solely looking at technological characteristics: they needed to be interpreted (1) in the context of teens' overall use of CT and (2) by taking social context factors into account.

Keywords:

• affordances of technologies
• communication technologies
• high school students
• schoolwork
• social network analysis

Notes

^1. In Flanders, the pupils choose one predefined cluster of courses (e.g., focus on science, focus on ancient language) and spend most of their time in the company of the group of pupils that chose the same cluster.

^2. It has to be noted that in the network analysis the use of CT to talk about school in general was measured (could also include gossip about teachers etc.), while in the interviews the focus was specifically on talking about schoolwork.

^3. The densities were compared using the bootstrap procedure for estimating the standard errors of network measures that was proposed by Snijders and Borgatti (1999), and implemented in UCINET under ‘network>compare densities>paired’ (Borgatti, Everett, & Freeman, 2002). This method is analogous to the paired sample t-test in classical data analysis.