"Let's fight fire with fire"

Analyzing the effect of new media on children is like trying to get your arms around a school of fish. The little buggers just slide on past, and you swallow a lot of water in the process. But here's another institution that has decided to give it a try: The Future of Children, a joint initiative of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and the Brookings Institution.

Yesterday, the group held a forum to promote the release of a policy brief and new volume of its journal dedicated to electronic media and children. "What we learned," says Elisabeth Hirschhorn Donahue of Princeton University, "is that content matters." The second half of the forum focused on how media -- big and small, old-fashioned TV and social networking sites -- can be used to get positive social messages to children and adolescents. "Let's fight fire with fire," said Isabel Sawhill, a senior editor for The Future of Children.

During the forum, a smattering of policy wonks, communications scholars and health experts were treated to new forms of public service announcements that included the use of text-messaging, user-generated content, viral video and Web sites. Examples came from the 4parents.gov (a campaign to get parents talking to kids about sex), an HIV-awareness campaign on Think MTV , Stay Teen (to reduce teenage prenancy), and That Guy (to halt binge drinking).

Some other tidbits:

• Television use isn't going down with the rise in other electronic media, Hirshhorn says. Instead, "all these other things have added on top of it" and "multi-tasking is on the rise."
• This summer, futureofchildren.org will feature a database that allows researchers to examine media consumption by state.
• Three concerns were voiced by members of the audience yesterday: Where do we get the funding for positive social marketing? How do we get these messages into schools? And how do we measure whether any of it works?

Picking programming: My piece in today's Washington Post

I'm excited to report that I've got an article in the Outlook section of The Washington Post today. It's about how parents -- myself included -- need to select videos and TV programs for their children that take into account what their children can actually comprehend and make the most of.

In the final copy edit, however, a couple of sentences were cut. One noted that, according to well-designed studies, the social and academic gains that preschool-age children receive from Sesame Street may last through high school. The other sentence described the ills of background TV.

Here they are, for the sake of posterity:

It’s the same with Sesame Street. Many parents of infants figure that if
the show’s good for preschoolers, it’s probably good for a 10-month-old, too.
But that’s just not true, says Rosemarie Truglio, vice president for education
and research for Sesame Street. Yes, well-designed studies have shown that the
program’s academic and social benefits last into the high school years,
regardless of family income or education. But the show isn’t designed to be
comprehensible to children younger than 2.

Finding good programming for young children isn’t just about public television. And it’s certainly not about leaving PBS on regardless of whether the kids are watching (a strategy I've heard from few parents). Studies show that background TV can lead children to bop distractedly from one toy to another, and it could interfere with speech and language development.

Thinking differently about reading, gaming, and cheating

"The problem is that educational game designers have approached the problem backward: Rather than striving to get games into education, educators should be investigating ways to get education into games." -- Karl Royle, University of Wolverhampton School of Education

I pulled this quote from the most recent issue of Innovate, in which Royle writes about how to improve upon popular videogames (including first-person shooters for, presumably, adolescents) to slip in more opportunities for learning, whether introducing scientific concepts or higher-level reading skills.

His article reminds me of recent findings from the Cooney Center, which issued a call to fill the edu-game gap. And it also ties into the work of James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Royle dives into a discussion of "cheats" that reminds me of Gee's proposal that children gain skills in reading when they pore over the extra textual stuff that come with games, like "cheats" (hints for moving forward in a game) and web sites that help them to master the videogame's world.

Royle continues the theme: "External cheats require users to read complex instructional text in order to solve a problem, promoting literacy. The search for cheats is itself pedagogically important; the moment a player searches for extra knowledge, an independent learning strategy is invoked."

It would be fascinating to see some research on this, comparing children with and without access to (or with and without the desire or encouragement to use) those texts and documents that might push the envelope of their literacy learning. Perhaps studies like that are out there and I haven't yet come across them?