Finding connections between mobile technology and kids

Yesterday I attended the Children's Mobile Technology Workshop at the University of Maryland. It was a two-day conference funded by the National Science Foundation and hosted by Ben Bederson and Allison Druin of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, a hive of activity on the Maryland campus that focuses on improving user interfaces and making sense of how humans best engage with computers.

Participants hailed from industry, non-profit organizations, K-12 institutions, and academe. We spent the day in a tight room with a smart board and several rows of swivel chairs, where people balanced laptops on their knees and wore badges with affiliations like Motorola or The Center for Children and Technology or UNICEF. Not everyone was an evangelist (Chris Hoadley, an associate professor of information sciences at Penn State gave a stirring and thoughtful talk about ecology and technology that I want to revisit in future writing), but most participants were on a mission to bring new technologies to at-risk children, whether in the inner cities of Texas or villages of Rwanda. Their only question is how to do it in a way that makes a positive impact. It's a huge question -- one that doesn't have one-size-fits-all answers. I look forward to following what they find out.