School of Education

Room A47, Pathfoot Building
School of Education
University of Stirling
Stirling
Scotland
FK9 4LA

Tel: + 44 (0) 1786 467619

Lydia Plowman is Professor in the School of Education. She is a member of the advisory group for the ESRC/EPSRC initiative on technology-enhanced learning and Vice-Chair of the ESRC's Grant Assessment Panel for Education, Linguistics and Psychology. Before coming to Stirling, Lydia was Research Programme Manager at the Scottish Council for Research in Education and Senior Research Fellow in the School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex, as well as a teacher in Norfolk secondary schools for nine years.

Lydia has particular interests in digital technologies and children’s learning in a range of formal and informal settings.  She recently produced guidance for parents on young children and technologies, available on the CBeebies website, and coordinated the academic input on testing children's interactive play products for Which? magazine (January 2012), scrutinising manufacturers' claims for their products. (More content for subscribers is available at which.co.uk/edutoys.) She was one of the coordinators of Digital Childhoods, a series of events funded by the Scottish Universities Insight Institute, to enhance public awareness of research in the field of young children’s experiences with digital technologies and to address key issues with experts drawn from academia, the media, business, policy-making and the professions. She was Principal Investigator for Young Children Learning with Toys and Technology at Home, an ESRC-funded project (2008-2011) which investigates how children perceive, acquire and develop their experiences with technology at home.  This study develops findings from a cluster of projects on children's uses of technology in the early years.  She managed Interplay: Play, Learning and ICT in Pre-school Education (with Dr. Christine Stephen), which was funded by the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme until early 2006. The purpose of Interplay was to identify ways of enhancing young children’s experiences with ICT through guided interaction with practitioners, peers and parents. A project funded by a Becta Research Bursary, Children's access to ICT at home and their preparation for primary school, complemented Interplay by focusing on how economically disadvantaged pre-school children and their families use technologies at home. (To read the report of this study please click here). This project was managed with Joanna McPake and Christine Stephen and was developed into a study funded by the ESRC e-Society Programme (2005-2007). Entering e-Society investigated the early development of digital literacies among pre-school children aged three to five. The study focused on children’s home experiences, exploring the extent to which children’s developing digital literacies can usefully be compared with their developing print literacy and the opportunities for learning that families offer.

Lydia also managed Educational Research and the Design of Interactive Media in conjunction with Futurelab. This was a series of research seminars funded by ESRC and sponsored by DfES, Becta, Hewlett Packard and the Scottish Executive (2003-2004). The seminars explored the knowledge needs of designers and policy-makers and the ways in which educational research can inform their decision-making in the context of technologies for learning.

In addition, completed projects funded by the ESRC/EPSRC include:

• Principal Investigator for 'Developing research capacity in technology enhanced learning', a small scale  study for the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme to inform its programme on technology enhanced learning

◦  Principal Investigator for ‘Exploring and Mapping Interactivity with Digital Toy Technology’ (known as CACHET), a project funded by the ESRC/EPSRC PACCIT  Programme.

McPake J., Plowman L. & Stephen C. (forthcoming) Preschool children creating and communicating with digital technologies at home. To appear in British Journal of Educational Technology.

Stephen C. & Plowman L. (forthcoming) Guided interaction in preschool settings: exploring how adults can support children’s learning with digital media. To appear in translation in Digital Culture in Kindergarten (Digital kultur i barnehagen), eds. JK Torgerson & H Jaeger, Queen Maud University Press, Norway.

Plowman L. & Stevenson O. (forthcoming). Using mobile phone diaries to explore children’s everyday lives. To appear in Childhood: A journal of global child research.

Plowman, L., Stephen C. & McPake J. (2012) Young children learning with toys and technology at home. (6pp.) Research Briefing 8, School of Education, University of Stirling, April 2012.

Plowman L., Stevenson O., Stephen C., McPake J. (2012) Preschool children’s learning with technology at home. Computers & Education 59 (1) 30-37.. 

Plowman L. McPake J. & Stephen C. (forthcoming). Extending opportunities for learning: the role of digital media in early education. To appear in Contemporary Debates in Child Development and Education, eds. S. Suggate & E. Reese,  Routledge.

Plowman L., Stevenson O., McPake J., Stephen C. & Adey C. (2011). Parents, preschoolers and learning with technology at home: some implications for policy. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 27 (4) 361-371.

Plowman L. (2011) Rethinking young children and technology. Research Briefing One for Digital Childhoods. Scottish Universities Insight Institute, Glasgow.

McPake J. & Plowman L. (2010) At home with the future: influences on young children’s early experiences with digital technologies. Contemporary Perspectives on Early Childhood Education, ed. N. Yelland, pp.210-226, Open University Press, Maidenhead. Contact author for copy.

Plowman, L., Stephen, C., McPake, J. (2010). Growing Up With Technology: Young children learning in a digital world. Routledge, London.

Plowman, L., Stephen, C., McPake, J. (2010).  Supporting young children's learning with technology at home and in preschool.  Research Papers in Education 25 (1) 93-113.

Plowman, L., McPake, J., & Stephen, C. (2010).   The technologisation of childhood? Young children and technologies at home.  Children and Society. 24 (1) 63-74/

Stephen C., McPake J. & Plowman L. (2010) Digital technologies at home: The experiences of 3- and 4-year-olds in Scotland. Early Childhoods in a Changing World, ed. M. Clark & S. Tucker, pp.145-154. Trentham Books, Stoke-on-Trent.

Plowman L., McPake, J., Stephen C. (2008).    Just picking it up ?  Young children learning with technology at home.  Cambridge Journal of Education 38 (3) 303-319.

Plowman, L. & Stephen, C. (2008). The big picture? Video and the representation of guided interaction.  British Educational Research Journal, 34 (4) 541-565

Eagle S., Manches A., O'Malley C., Plowman L. & Sutherland R. (2008). From research to design: Perspectives on early years and digital technologies. Futurelab, Bristol.

Plowman, L. & Stephen, C. (2007). Guided interaction in pre-school settings. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 23 (1) 14-21.

Plowman, L., Misailidou, C. & Laurillard, D. (2007). Developing Research Capacity in Technology-Enhanced Learning.  Report to Teaching & Learning Research Programme, ESRC. 

Plowman, L. & Stephen, C  (2006). Supporting learning with ICT in pre-school settings.  Research Briefing for the  ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme.

Plowman, L. (2005). Educational Research and the Design of Interactive Media: Building collaboration  between designers  and researchers. (A guide to using and commissioning educational research and a database of education researchers specialising in the area of ICT, based on the ESRC research seminars.) Futurelab, Bristol. 

Plowman, L. & Stephen, C. (2005). Children, play and computers in pre-school education. British Journal of Educational Technology 36 (2) 145-157.

Plowman, L. (2005). Getting the Story Straight:  the role of narrative in teaching and learning with interactive media. In Cognition, Education  and Communication Technology, eds. P. Gardenfors & P. Johansson, pp. 55-76. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ. Contact author for copy.

Plowman, L. (2004) “Hey, hey, hey!  It’s  time to play.” Exploring and mapping  children’s  interactions with ‘smart’ toys.  In Toys, Games and Media, eds. J. Goldstein, D. Buckingham, G. Brougeres, pp. 207-223. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah , NJ. Contact author for copy.

Plowman, L. & Luckin, R. (2004). Interactivity, interface and smart toys. IEEE Computer,  pp. 98-100, February.

Plowman, L. & Stephen, C. (2003) A ‘benign addition’?  A review of research on ICT and pre-school children. Journal  of Computer-Assisted Learning. 19 (2) 145-158.

Laurillard, D., Stratfold, M., Luckin, R., Plowman, L. & Taylor , J. (2000) Affordances for learning in a non-linear narrative  medium. Journal of Interactive media in Education (2). 

http://www-jime.open.ac.uk

Plowman, L., Luckin, R., Laurillard, D., Stratfold, M. & Taylor,  J. (1999) Designing multimedia for learning: narrative guidance  and narrative construction. Proceedings of CHI '99, pp.  310-317. (ACM conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Plowman, L. (1996). Designing interactive media for schools: a review based on contextual observation. Information Design Journal 8 (3) 258-266.

Plowman, L. (1996). Narrative, linearity and interactivity: making sense of interactive multimedia. British Journal of Educational Technology 27 (2) 92-105.

Plowman, L. (1995). The interfunctionality of talk and text. Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work 3 (3/4) 229-246.

Plowman, L., Rogers , Y. & Ramage, M. (1995). What are workplace studies for? Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW ‘95), Stockholm, Sept. 1995, eds. H. Marmolin, Y. Sundblad & K. Schmidt, 309-324. Kluwer, Dordrecht.

Plowman, L. (1994). The ‘Primitive Mode of Representation’ and the evolution of interactive multimedia. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 3 (3/4) 275-293.

Plowman, L. (1993). Tracing the evolution of a co-authored text. Language and Communication 13 (3) 149-161.

Other  publications Aug 2001 - July 2006

Lydia's current research interests are in the role of toys and technologies in the everyday lives of young children aged three and four.   She is interested in the ways in which children perceive, acquire and develop their experiences with toys and technology at home and how their play and learning activities with these objects influence, and are influenced by, family practices.   Play and learning are examined through analysis of children's interactions with these toys and technologies and with parents, siblings and other children.  The concept of guided interaction is used to analyse these interactions and to develop earlier work which describes the processes of interaction between teachers, learners and technology.   Entering e-Society, for example, examined the ways in which parents supported their children's learning, even though they were unaware of the ways in which they did this, and in Interplay we loooked at the roles of early years professionals in supporting learning with technology in preschool settings.   This led to an analytical framework which illustrates guided interaction in proximal and distal dimensions and the modes by which it is enacted.  The concept enables practitioners, policy-makers and researchers to conceptualise teaching and learning with technologies in new ways: it is valuable both as a distinctive theoretical development of other sociocultural approaches which describe the different modes by which learning can be supported and as a tool to support changes in practice for education professionals, enabling them to articulate, reflect on and legitimise changes in pedagogy.  This change in the focus of my research beyond the compulsory years of schooling, formal learning environments and workplaces to the home and preschool settings has led to a shift in emphasis from standard computers and away from the desktop.  The research encompasses diverse domestic and leisure technologies from television to mobile phones and electronic toys.

Lydia Plowman has conducted many research and evaluation studies in the area of media and digital technologies focused on understanding how people interact with, and communicate through, technology and how this shapes, and is shaped by, processes of teaching and  learning.