Education

Life is digital, as Deborah Lupton wrote in 2015 (Lupton, 2015), but is education digital, too? There is no doubt that teaching and learning have increasingly been linked to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the digital world has gradually become an outstanding topic of interest within the Sociology of Education. This chapter will present some key issues concerning the transformation of education in a digital society, with a focus on the formal learning environment. The aim is to analyze some of the changes resulting from the propagation of digital devices in education from a sociological point of view, in order to understand where and how educational practices, processes, and governance are being reconfigured, uncovering continuities and discontinuities of education in the digital era. To study the impact of ICTs in formal education is an opportunity to re-interpret the longstanding issues of inequality and inclusion, access and participation, and to verify whether traditional sociological concepts are still able to adequately explain recent change and current configurations in the relationship between education and the digital so-ciety.