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This article contributes to the sociology of education and technology by providing a cultural analysis of scepticism towards new technologies in school, using reactions to the telepresence robot 'AV1' as its case. AV1 is designed to connect 'homebound' students with their 'school-based' teachers and classmates. Despite its idealistic purpose, the robot has been met with significant scepticism by Norwegian school workers. To understand why, the article proposes the novel concepts of 'educational purity' and 'technological danger' to highlight the shared beliefs that underlie school workers' concerns. We find that school workers see AV1 as threatening key ideals of schools being pedagogically oriented, physically copresent and bounded institutions -- all concerns that reflect widespread ideas about how technologies tend to (not) function within educational contexts. In highlighting these symbolic tensions between new technologies and schools, the article sets a course for future studies into the cultural sociology of education and technology.

'Homebound' children are unable to attend school for illness-related reasons. To lessen their predicament, schools have begun experimenting with 'telepresence robots' that can enable remote participation. While promising, we know little about the use of telepresence robots in practice. To begin to redress this, we draw on 159 semi-structured interviews to explore the experiences of 37 child users of the robot 'AV1' in Norwegian schools. The children's experiences varied, with some benefitting greatly and others not getting any benefit from using the robot. To explain these variations, we reconstruct the robot's "critical component structure" -- that is, the assembly of sociomaterial elements that determines whether and how the robot works in practice. We also explore the benefits of using the robot when these critical components align. In so doing, we provide in-depth knowledge about the potential and prerequisites of using telepresence robots in schools -- to the benefit of users, producers and scholars of telepresence technology.

The text material analysed in this article consists of 20 teddy-diaries that circulated between the families of 6-year-old children in Beijing, China and in Oslo, Norway. The circulation process makes teddy-diaries highly normatively saturated domestic stories from families with 6-year-old children. A quantitative analysis of these texts inspired by Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) developed by Harvey Sacks (1972) reveals what is deemed significant relations for children in each culture. By identifying actions and contexts that are described as relevant and appropriate for these significant relations, the researcher can also achieve a better understanding of how these relations are constructed as socializing relations in the everyday lives of children. The article finds that the learning styles and positioning of the child in everyday lives is participatory, play and peer oriented in Norway and instructional, encouraging and progress oriented in China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]