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.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Provocative articles on child's play
NPR and The New York Times Magazine played with "play" in two recent pieces that are very well done. Don't miss:
"Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills," by Alix Spiegel, which ran on NPR's Morning Edition on February 21.
"Taking Play Seriously," by Robin Marantz Henig, in the NYT Sunday Magazine on February 17.
Spiegel's story zooms in on research by Laura Berk, who figures in one of the chapters of my book. Berk's research on executive function, self-regulation and dramatic play is fascinating. I talked to Berk about whether what's on the screen can affect the way children engage in imaginative play after the TV is off. She had some great points about how children will act out what they have seen and observed in others -- and how children who have witnessed moments of aggression on TV may act that out later.
It's worth noting, too, that research on Barney shows the flip side: Yale University researcher Dorothy Singer has seen children play more cooperatively and kindly after watching a Barney episode than children who didn't see the show.
"Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills," by Alix Spiegel, which ran on NPR's Morning Edition on February 21.
"Taking Play Seriously," by Robin Marantz Henig, in the NYT Sunday Magazine on February 17.
Spiegel's story zooms in on research by Laura Berk, who figures in one of the chapters of my book. Berk's research on executive function, self-regulation and dramatic play is fascinating. I talked to Berk about whether what's on the screen can affect the way children engage in imaginative play after the TV is off. She had some great points about how children will act out what they have seen and observed in others -- and how children who have witnessed moments of aggression on TV may act that out later.
It's worth noting, too, that research on Barney shows the flip side: Yale University researcher Dorothy Singer has seen children play more cooperatively and kindly after watching a Barney episode than children who didn't see the show.
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