Christmas WS's!
I came across this interesting study on digital tweens and I thought I’d share a couple of pertinent points. First, let me give you some background.
Families Matter: Designing Media for a Digital Age is a report compiled by the Joan Ganz Cooney Centre. Results from a survey of more than 800 parents of children ages 3-10 looks at how US parents feel about raising kids in a digital age and the digital consumption of these kids. As part of this report, they bring into play two case studies of two eight-year-old girls from different background. You can learn more about Katie and Victoria in this Mindshift article.
The conclusion this report draws is that technology is a part of the fabric of their homes and that the children are exposed to and use technology in their daily lives. But rather than replace or eliminate activities, such as drawing, playing outside, doing homework and chores, technology is an additional layer on top of these activities.
Now for the two points I took away from this report:
First, the researchers spoke about the virtual worlds of Club Penguin and Webkinz. In our household we’re certainly familiar with Webkinz as our daughter has an account. The report states that these worlds offer kids opportunities to decode, respond and create multimodal texts in a playful space. However, and here’s the important point: “whether they actually become better readers and writers—or just fall victim to the commercialized practices that operate across online and offline worlds has yet to be seen.” As parents, we also question the ‘learning’ element of these games and take the marketing language with a pinch of salt.
The second point I took away from this report was that access to technology does not guarantee that children will use those resources in productive and enriching ways. This is where family members come into play. The researchers found that parents and older siblings largely shape the quality of the younger child’s digital experience. We certainly see this too in our family. A family friend introduced us to scratch.com (you may remember I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago) and we showed it to our daughter, who is glued to this programming tool.
These statements certainly left me with food for thought. What are your kids’ digital experiences like?
