On the role of awareness systems for supporting parent involvement in young children's schooling

This paper reports on an investigation of how Awareness Systems can support communication between busy parents and young children at school. The study involved the deployment and test of a rudimentary awareness system so that surveying opinions and wishes regarding this type of technology would be grounded upon concrete experiences. The prototype was installed in a classroom for two weeks and connected five families with their children. Overall, parents appreciated receiving awareness information and did not experience it as an undesirable distraction. Both they and their children did not experience privacy problems. They raised concerns about the possibility of children becoming more dependent upon their parents from such technology and stated they would not want to receive information that they would not be able to react upon.