Those kids today: A debate by the academic set

Usually I'm straddling two very different territories -- writing about education issues for the youngest students one day and the oldest the next. For several years, I've been digging into research on early learning and childhood. But I started my career writing about higher education, and I still find myself writing plenty of stories that explore how technology is reshaping campus life or what privacy means for college students.

So it was great fun last week to come across a series of essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education that crossed the chasm to debate how the upbringing of today's kids is molding the next generation of college students. It's called the Wired Youth Dialogue. I can't find a direct link to it, or I'd send you right there. But first see the Sept. 19 post by Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University who wrote The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (2007), a provocative book whose title enflames many people who work closely with kids and technology. A new essay by Bauerlein, "Online literacy is of a lesser kind," was published in The Chronicle Review the same day.

Then go to the essay by Siva Vaidhyanathan that cringes at the idea that young people can or should be lumped into any "generation," for so many of them are so different. For one, not all of today's kids, he writes, are as tech-savvy as we might think. As a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, Vaidhyanathan says he has witnessed that "the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class. Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years."

Lastly, to get a breather from this back-and-forth, check out Thomas A. Workman's essay "The Real Impact of Virtual Worlds." He offers five "norms of the digital culture" that he says can explain how students think about technology. For example, he says, students think of the Internet as a playground. Here are the outlines of his argument:

• Digital Norm 1: Internet use as play.
• Digital Norm 2: virtual identity as fictionalized personas
• Digital Norm 3: virtual socialization as a complement to live community
• Digital Norm 4: the global town square
• Digital Norm 5:online community as a response to barriers to live interactions

I've never come across Workman's writing before, but I'm impressed. He's an assistant professor at the University of Houston-Downtown, and previous articles by him, listed on his homepage, focus on interventions for binge drinking on campus. Maybe this is his first shot at writing about the impact of online technologies. But given what I've observed and read about "digital youth," this strikes me as a well-reasoned and insightful take on how kids are growing up today. He ends with this prescription for the older generation: "Our best preparation, then, is to train our own minds to think digitally, just like the students', so that we can best create policies, programs, and interactions that enable a student to connect the two worlds in ways that are productive, satisfying, and meaningful."

Q-and-As that got me thinking

I've been commissioned to do several in-depth interviews with thought leaders who are sparking new conversations about technology, creativity and childhood. (Thanks to Claire Green of Parents' Choice for the opportunity.)

The first two are now online at the Web sites for Sandbox Summit and Parents' Choice, as part of what is being called "Digital Dialogue."

• A conversation with Sir Ken Robinson
• A conversation with Nichole Pinkard

The interviews were great fun and sparked ideas for me, at least, for future articles on education, technology and play.

Social versus solitary: Making sense of today's trends

Children are losing all semblance of being social beings these days. They just sit by themselves watching TV, clicking around on the computer or locking into the games on their Game Boys, oblivious to the real world.

Children are more socially active than ever. They play videogames with their friends, either sitting together on the couch, laughing and jostling each other over friendly competition, or interacting in online spaces that give them a broad sense of the world in which they live.

Which of these statements reflects what is really going on? That's what social scientists want to know. Two reports released this month, which I mentioned in my earlier post, highlight the discrepancies. A Harris Interactive poll showed that the vast majority of children play with their favorite toy by themselves. A Pew poll showed that 65 percent of game-playing teens play with other people who are in the room with them, and that only 24 percent say they only play alone.

I'd venture that 1) both statements can be true, and we need to figure out which children have a harder time finding activities and resources that encourage socialization and 2) we are talking about apples and oranges. The Harris poll asked about children 8 years and up about their favorite toys. The Pew poll asked teens about videogames.

I'm intrigued by the path taken in Grand Theft Childhood, the new book by Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson. Using solid data from a large federally funded study, they were able to separate the strands and see which children may need more real-life support, and which ones are able to use technology in positive ways. For example, one of the four reasons that kids give for playing videogames is because it helps build friendships. But for kids who play M-rated (translation: violent) games, the four top reasons were different. They wanted to compete and win, they wanted a way to get their anger out, they wanted to tinker and 'mod' games and they liked the with weapons. (For more, see p. 114 of the book). Could there be a way to use data like this help to pinpoint helpful interventions for different children with different needs?

Sand in my shoes: Take-aways from the Sandbox Summit

Last Wednesday in New York City about 250 people gathered for the latest installment of The Sandbox Summit, a series of conversations about how technology is changing the nature of kids' play. Here are a few notes on what I took away with me that day -- some virtual sand in my shoes, you might say.

Gears engaged by Google
The morning started with Andy Berndt, managing director for Google Creative Lab, who gave the keynote. I missed my early morning train from D.C. (victim of a lost cabbie), and, alas, the first part of his remarks. But I heard that it hinged on bike parts -- the power of interchangeable parts and toys that let kids build, fix, rebuild and create. Amy Kraft, a freelance educational media producer, took notes and offers a great take on her new blog, Media Macaroni. Check it out.

I did catch, however, one of the last questions that Berndt answered, which was, What are your kids watching on TV? His answer: "Not terribly much."

"Scratching" the surface of toy delight and disappointment
Mitch Resnick of M.I.T. talked about Scratch, a programming tool for kids that uses colorful, easy-to-understand graphics to help them build animations and games. It was opened about a year ago and the Web site now showcases more than 200,000 projects, Resnick said. He argued that simply talking about technology "as a uniform category" doesn't help when considering new dimensions of toys. "I ask, will this enable the children to explore?" he said. "Sadly, when I go into the toy store, the vast majority don't do that."

Michael McNally, brand relations director at LEGO Systems, said he thought parents "abdicate responsibility" for choosing good toys, listening instead to "whatever the commercials on television tell them." He described how he had once talked his daughter down from her initial excitement for a toy with sparkly packaging. "I want this! I want this!" she exclaimed. "What does it do?" McNally asked. When looked more closely and realized that she didn't really know, she put the package back on the shelf and selected a jigsaw puzzle instead.

Nancy Shulman, director of the 92nd Street Y Nursery School, provided this rule of thumb for parents: "If you can't play with it in at least three ways, leave it behind."

Survey shows gender-based and solitary play
Boys want toys that spark challenges and "winning." Girls want toys that allow them to play pretend and foster relationships. That's the (stereotypically troubling) word from Harris Interactive, which released new survey results from 1353 children over 8 years old who agreed to participate in Harris Interactive's online research panel.

When children were asked, "How do you usually play with your favorite toy?" a commanding majority said they played alone, with 84 percent of girls and 78 percent of boys choosing to answer "by myself" rather than with parents, friends, siblings, grandparents or someone else.

This mark of solitary activity left some in the audience scratching their heads, wondering whether this is a sign of isolation or simply dependent on the way children interpreted the question. Videogames still come out near or at the top in ranks of favorite toys -- and arguments can be made that videogames can be both solitary and social activities. (A Pew report last week, for example, showed that teenagers who play videogames -- which is nearly all teens -- are often playing with other people.)

Quality toys: 6 principles and 10 tips
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a developmental psychologist at Temple University, suggested that today's companies (tech or not) should consider these principles that come out of social science research on what children need. Toy developers, she said, should create toys that:

• Support active, not passive, learning
• Are flexible
• Invite social play
• Spark innovation and imagination
• Make it real
• Don't promise what they can't deliver (i.e., "brain growth")

Carly Shuler, a fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and Carla E. Fisher, an educational technologist, presented "10 tips for developing quality toys", and the first several tidbits advocated applying child-development principles and taking the time to read the research and do some solid tracking and observation on how children interact.

For the full 10 tips, see the PDF of their presentation and Scott Traylor's helpful analysis at 360Blog.

Show and tell: the quick pitches
A few companies evidently showed enough creative pluck to be selected to show their stuff at the end of the summit. They included: Dizzywood, Huru Himi, kidthing, NextNewNetworks, and Sabi Games. The last project to take the stage? The new SesameStreet.org, with special guest Rosita.

Making science friendly

A friend of mine just introduced me to Radio Lab. (Thanks Jeff). I'm listening to the most recent podcast, Making the Hippo Dance, as I write. It's about the sludge that science writers must trudge through before reaching the mountaintop, about the difficulty of filtering through the good stuff (the readable, fun, fascinating parts) from the boring stuff (the acronyms, the nitpicking, the caveats, the qualifiers) while still getting the story right.

Just listening, I'm absolutely energized with that feeling of recognition: Yes, yes! This is exactly what is so tricky about writing about science (and education too, for that matter). And this is why audio and video can be so helpful.

When it comes to helping children learn -- and understanding what smart journalism with multimedia can do -- these radio hosts have a lot to teach us.

As kids belly up to the media buffet...

The NYT has a special section on children's health today, and I contributed a story on how to make healthy choices at the media buffet. It includes a sidebar list of Web sites, online games and (for parents) review sites that are worth taking a peek at.

What it doesn't include is a paragraph about new research on videogames because it got chopped to make room in the newspaper's print layout. So for those of you following along, here it is:

Content matters for video games too, experts say. Research presented at a recent meeting of the American Psychological Association showed a connection between violent games and hostility in children, but it also highlighted a link between good behavior and games that rely on cooperation. A new book, "Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do," uses data from a five-year study to parse the differences further. The authors, Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, said only some subsets of players — like girls who play violent games every day, for example — were more likely to bully.

Grand Theft Childhood includes several other provocative results too. I suspect I'll be writing more about that book in the future.

New kids on the block: 3 blogs and 1 search engine

I've recently come across three interesting blogs that deserve a shout out.

• Schoolhouse Rock on Slate.com by Paul Tough, who has written some fascinating and thoughtful pieces for the New York Times magazine about education reform (he's got a new book out this month, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America)
• The Online Mom by Monica Vila, a parent and tracker of how consumer electronics are marketed to kids
• Tech Savvy Mama by Leticia Barr, a mother of two in Maryland and technology coordinator for a public school in Montgomery County

Also, if you haven't heard of it already, AskKids.com -- a service of the search engine Ask.com -- is an interesting experiment in how to offer a Web-browsing experience for children that doesn't lead them too far astray.

What does a quality preschool look like?

Gillian, my 4 year old, just started her first week of being the "big kid" in preschool. This will be the final year of watching my kids hold those big dripping paint brushes in front of tottering easels and ride big wheels in the parking lot. This the last year of letting the morning revolve around snack. Yeah, it's true: I'm a little sad, already waxing nostalgic.

After years of writing about the science of early childhood and watching my kids go through 5 years (collectively) of preschool, at two different places including a parent-run co-op, I often have friends ask me: So what does a good preschool look like? What does "quality" really mean?

The easy answer is: look for small class sizes and qualified teachers. But that doesn't tell the whole story, and "qualified teachers" can mean different things to different people. At my daughter's half-day school, for example, the teachers don't have associates or bachelor's degrees in early childhood. They have bachelor's degrees in other subjects, with, say, an emphasis on physical therapy or science or dance, and they take professional development courses on how the cognitive development and needs of young children. Their "quality" comes from their ability to think creatively in engaging 2, 3 and 4 year olds -- whether it is letting them go wild with "shaving cream painting" or helping them to verbalize their frustration with a peer who won't share.

A report published yesterday by the National Institute for Early Education Research offers more evidence of the value of "quality" schools. It, too, emphasizes the importance of teacher education and low class sizes, but doesn't point to any one type of preschool (public, private, etc) as being better than another. On a general level, the report is quite helpful in spelling out the benefits. What it doesn't do is offer more specific guidance on spotting stellar programs, the kind that in an ideal world we would want for all children.

So maybe it's time to focus in on what and how children are taught -- to zoom in on the strategies and curricula that are most helpful to young kids. In the magazine Science last November, several researchers (including Steve Barnett, the author of this week's NIERR report) provided a fascinating look at how a Denver-based program called Tools of the Mind can help young children with cognitive development. I blogged briefly about this program in June after hearing one of its founders, Deborah Leong, talk about how to capitalize on "pretend play" -- and use video that stimulates pretend play -- to help children practice with new words and new settings that may improve their critical thinking skills. (See focusing on creative playtime (and using video to do it), June 9, 2008.).

The Science article was an example of how to use rigorous scientific methodology to discover how children learn best. Research-based reports on other approaches-- Science has had a few articles on the Montessori method, for example -- have also demonstrated some positive impact.

What, you might ask, does any of this have to do with electronic media and kids? More than you might think. We can use some of the same insights that come from research on preschools to make better judgments about when to use media with kids -- and when it gets in the way.

What teaching strategies and methods have you witnessed in preschools? Which ones are worth digging into?

NIEER to my heart

Happiness. I just read the July/August issue of the National Institute for Early Education Research, which not only includes a great article on whether new media may help children, it also includes a pull-out box with the "Three C's" that I highlight in my book: content, context and the individual child. The three C's are based on peer-reviewed research of how young children are affected by screen media. I found that by asking themselves questions around those guideposts -- what is on the screen? is it offering opportunities for conversation later? is my child engaged or scared? -- parents can come to easier and smarter conclusions about when to turn on the tube.