Recently, many schools in Sweden have made large investments in order to keep pace with the spread of digital devices. Students have been equipped with their own laptop or iPad, often accompanied with expectations of changed pedagogical practices. However, parallel to these pedagogically motivated initiatives, the classrooms have become connected from within through the students’ own smartphones. In Sweden 98% of upper secondary school students have a smartphone and almost everyone is connected to the internet on a daily basis (Alexandersson & Davidsson 2014), and also in other European countries the availability of smartphones are high among young people. Smartphones, whose handy size makes them discrete and easy to handle, have not only altered the conditions for text messages and browsing, but also enabled students to be constantly connected and read, write, listen to, watch content and communicate with the surrounding world from the classroom. However, knowledge about the role of the smart phone during lessons is sparse. In this paper we present result from an ongoing study where student’s use of smart phones at school are mapped and examined.

From a teacher perspective, and in the public debate, smartphones in the classroom are often said to cause a lot of frustration (cf Katz 2005) and a recent study argue that student’s school results increase if mobile phones are prohibited during lessons (Beland & Murphy, 2015). In parallell, researchers also question the traditional image of classrooms, teaching, learning and results and advocate a perspective where learning processes must be understood in relation to activities both in and outside the classroom (cf Erstad 2012).

Also, several studies show how the smart phone links the lives of young people on- and off-line (Forsman, 2014; Erstad, 2010). Raine and Wellman (2012) describes that these changing patterns of communication implies a shift from a life in which relationships and power relations are characterized by meeting face-to-face, to a life where everyone carries their own personal network. The smart phone puts people in a network society where you can easily keep in touch with other people and where you can do many things at the same time. The smart phone also makes it possible to have permanent access to, comment on, and produce media content. The trend towards to being constantly connected via smart phones and other digital tools is also described by White and Le Cornu (2011) in relation to different usage patterns. They define people as "visitors" or "residents" online. Visitors are going online in terms of the tools used to perform tasks while residents look upon the web as a place to be permanently present at. To use smart phones as a resident, which probably a majority of Swedish pupils are doing, can lead to dissolution of the boundaries between the private and the public sphere (Ling & Yttrium, 2002). It is therefore interesting to study how students' private lives are linked with activities in the classroom. The aim of this presentation is to describe when and how students use smartphones in a year nine classroom. Based on this description we also intend to discuss what social and pedagogical implications that students’ use of smartphones could have.

Alexandersson, K & Davidsson, P. (2014). Eleverna och internet. Stockholm: .se. Beland, L-P. & Murphy, R. (2015). Ill communication. Technology, Distraction and Student Performance. Paper published by Centre for Economic Performance. London Schools of Economics and Political Sciences. Drotner, K. (1992). Modernity and Media Panics. I: Skovmand, Michael & Kim Schröder (red.). Media Cultures. Reappraising Transnational Media. London: Routledge. Erstad, O. (2010). Content in motion. Remixing and learning with digital media. I: Drotner, K. & Schrøder, K. (eds.) Digital Content Creation. Perceptions, practices & perspectives, New York: Peter Lang, s. 57−74. Erstad, O. (2012). The learning lives of digital youth— beyond the formal and informal. Oxford Review in Education, Vol. 38 (1), pp. 25–43. Forsman, M. (2014). Duckface/Stoneface. Ungas onlineaktiviteter ur ett genusperspektiv. Stockholm: Statens medieråd. Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32(10), 1489-1522. doi: 10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00096-X Goodwin, C. (2007). Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society, 18(1), 53-73. doi:10.1177/0957926507069457 ten Have, P. (1999) Doing conversation analysis. A practical guide. London: Sage. Katz, J. (2005). Mobile Phones in Educational Settings. I: A Sense of Place: The Global and the Local in Mobile Communication, ed. Kristof Nyiri (Vienna, Austria: Passagen Verlag. Ling, R.& Yttri, B. (2002). Hyper-coordination via mobile phones in Norway. Katz, J. & Aakhus, M. (eds.), Perpetual Contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lumme, P. (2013). Social media competence of pupils, parents and teachers – new challenges for media education. Paper presentation at EARLI 2013, Munich, Germany. Nevile, M., Haddington, P., Heinemann, T. & Rauniomaa, M. (2014). On the interactional ecology of objects. In M. Nevile, P. Haddington, T. Heinemann & M. Rauniomaa. Interacting with objects. Language, materiality and social activity. Amsterdam, Phi: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Paakkari, A. (2013). Learning Knowledge Work. Smartphones, Classroom and the Economy. Paper presented at FiDPEL Conference, 2013.University of Oxford, England. Raine, H. & Wellman, B. (2012). Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press. Sahlström, F., Valasmo, V., Paakari, A., Slotte-Lüttge, A. (2015). Mobile phone in classrooms and its relation to classroom interaction. Paper presented at NERA conference 2015, Gothenburg 3-5 March, Sweden. Sidnell, J. & Stivers, T., (2013). The handbook of conversation analysis. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell White, D. S., & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A New Typology for Online Engagement. First Monday, 16(9).