Perceptions and Analysis of Digital Risks

1Digital Risks: An Obstacle or a Lever for Education?

1.1. Introduction

Given the challenges of new technologies that society must face, the notion of risk has become a difficult one to grasp, because it refers to dreaded events and individuals’ worries and fears. For the sociologist Ulrich Beck (2008), risks no longer come only from outside (natural risks). Modern society, with its technological progress, in particular, generates risks in the sense that it debates them abundantly and seeks to prevent them in increasingly optimal ways: this is the emergence of a “risk society”. The introduction of digital technology into schools and families has generated numerous myths (Musso 2008; Amadieu and Tricot 2014) and unfounded fears (Cordier 2015; Plantard 2016) that are also widely debated. Digital refers in discourse both to computer tools or techniques (Internet, computers, smartphones, web platforms, etc.) and to uses. Indeed, the digitization of many practices has increased the number of situations in which digital tools are used, be it for information, communication, transmission and so on. Students, as well as teachers starting their careers, are now part of a generation that has grown up with the evolution of digital technologies and has built its practices and representations around them.

This leads us to examine the conceptions of digital technology among this new generation of teachers and the status they grant to digital literacy. In this chapter, we propose characterizing ...