Early Childhood Computer Use

One of friends is a technological Luddite. The computer she and her husband have in their home is about as old as I am, and they don't plan on getting another one anytime soon. She has a two year old little girl, Emily. Emily's an average child, funny and athletic, learning a lot every day. One day, I brought my laptop with me to their house and pulled it out to show something I had been working on and Emily was very curious about it. She wobbled over to me and watched what I was doing with my tiny portable mouse for about a minute, then grabbed it out of my hand and started navigating the menu on the screen. I kid you not. It took her about a minute to figure out what her parents insist they had never before shown her.

I'm reading a great deal lately about introducing computers to younger and younger students, including preschool students. At a conference I am helping to plan, two of the sessions address this very topic--at the teachers' requests I might add. Parents of our students constantly ask me for resources they can use with their 2 or 3 year old children.

On the one hand, I attended a great lecture by Dr. William Stixrud "How Today's Technology Affects a Child's Brain, Personality and Social Development" that pretty much said children are often not neurologically ready for computer use at this age period! He cites Jane Healy's 1999 book "Failure to Connect" and the Waldorf School approach to the issue. On the other hand, you have brain research on multitasking, like the NPR article "How Multitasking Affects Human Learning" which basically says that while it decreases the quality of the information learned, it can be done fairly well. A different part of the brain is accessed when trying to incorporate information acquired during focused versus multitask environments.

That leaves me with the question, will our brains evolve to multitask at greater and greater rates and increase the quality of information? If children are engaged in this process from the earliest ages, will it become innate the same way that it seems to be innate for a child to grab a mouse and move it around?

Will Our Kids Be Deaf at 20?

This morning as I was listening to my Bible, otherwise known as NPR Morning Edition, I heard a segement called "Kids' Use of Earbuds Worries Hearing Experts" about how kids are seriously damaging their hearing by listening to their MP3 players at decibel levels equivalent to chainsaws.

I need to start addressing this issue in my classes. Honestly, I haven't even started the process. But on the more laughable side, there's a rap you can listen to called "Turn It To The Left" that Ben Jackson performs for the kids about hearing loss. It's so awesome in its lameness the kids must love it. Give a listen on the NPR page link above. It'll make your day.

Generation Y's Goal

This week, I have been reading Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray Love. I've only read part one so far about how she learns to experience sensual (note: different from sexual) pleasure in Italy, mostly through food. It made me think about how the children I teach in technology class are soooooo all about gratifying their own pleasures. Every game we play or lesson they learn, they want to know how they will be rewarded. For a hard-working, internally driven person like myself, I see this as selfishness and weakness. A USA article I read recently helped me to see it differently:
Generation Y's Goal? Wealth and Fame
Essentially, 81% of 18-25 year olds cite being rich as their #1 goal and 51% said being famous. This is the first generation who is growing up seeing themselves as stars on American Idol, The Real World and the Apprentice. They think their lives are suitable for entertaining consumption on My Space and Facebook. Each is a modern day Narcissus. How do we help children whose worldview is shaped by this outlook?

Preparing Our Kids for An Unpredictable Future

This is a snippet of David Warlock's speech at NECC 2006. It's here because I heard his catchphrase about educating our children for an uncertain future at our Tech retreat this weekend in his Introduction to Web 2.0 workshop.

What is an Ed Tech Axis?

This whole thing got started when I was driving home from the AIMS Technology Retreat 2007, listening to John Mayer's song Bold as Love--which, I know, he copped from Hendrix. I was thinking about how I could join this vibrant, relevant world of blogging about educational technology issues. My first thought was Ed Tech Zen, but that one's taken already: http://edtechzen.blogspot.com/. But then John Mayer's slightly whiny, yet paradoxically soothing voice broke through with, "But I'm bold, bold as love...just ask the axis." Ding, ding! It all makes sense. The entire weekend, I had been discussing with fellow technology teachers, coordinators and leaders how I saw our children as divided. They see technology at school as something that is separate than the technology they use at home.

They learn rules for copyright, they learn appropriate, safe information to share about themselves online, they learn how to be good net "citizens." Then it all flies out the window when they go home to their IM, My Space and online gaming. Their avatars say and do things online they would never do. And this doesn't bother them in the slightest.

It bothers me. I had in mind an image of a stick person with a line drawn down the middle. That's how I saw our children's experience of technology. Then, this word axis comes to mind. No, not the axis of evil, but the educational technology axis. I looked it up online just to make sure I was being precise. What can I say, I was an English Ed major?

Here's what it said:

• a straight line through a body or figure that satisfies certain conditions


• the center around which something rotates
  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Sha-zam! That's the name of my new blog. Thanks, John. Forward, Into the Breach!