Media Minds

Mediasnackers

2008-06-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

I just found Mediasnackers, a site for videocasts about children and new media that claims to be "topped full of yummy-youth-media-shots of tasty interviews, insights or event coverage." I like the content, and want to learn more about who created it and why. So far this is all I know: it's based in the United Kingdom and was founded by a guy named DK.

But already I'm a fan of its manifesto, part of which pushes its staff to "play constantly—with words, ideas, technology, platforms, structures and others. It's the best way to learn."

Writing about YouTube and kids for Parents' Choice

2008-06-17T08:10:00.001-07:00

Could YouTube lead to virtual field trips for young kids today? Maybe -- but if my experience is any indication, Moms and Dads sometimes need to close that browser window pretty darn quick. Here's a story I wrote for Parents' Choice this month that highlights the pitfalls and offers suggestions on more kid-friendly video outlets.

An excerpt:
"... we were clicking through other video clips, asking questions and talking about what we saw. We had taken a virtual field trip -- a mini excursion that lasted 15 minutes, cost nothing, and could be embarked upon as soon as curiosity struck.

But as I soon learned, YouTube field trips require adult chaperones..." Read more.

Reviews of NickJr.com, MyNoggin.com and PBSKids.org

2008-06-17T07:47:00.000-07:00

The June issue of The Childrens' Technology Review, edited by Warren Buckleitner, includes reviews of three of the most popular Web sites for preschoolers -- NickJr.com, MyNoggin.com and PBSKids.org.

If you are a parent trying to avoid banner ads and "free" trials that eventually end up on your credit card, these reviews are worth a read. MyNoggin, a $10/month subscription site, gets high marks for design and usability. PBSKids, which is free, fares well too. As Buckleitner noted about the pages within PBSKids.org, "you get the feeling that the people who designed these sites were more interested in learning than selling."

NickJr.com, on the other hand, is criticized for its advertising clutter and its "confusing mashup of inter-linking brands and services" that don't always lead children to the free games they come looking for.

In fact, Buckleitner has been writing up a storm on this topic lately. In a recent report for Consumer Reports' Web Watch, he shone a spotlight on many trouble spots in online Web sites for young children. (The report comes with a series of YouTube videos that are poignant and eye-opening.) And in a story for The New York Times last week, he offered suggestions on how to find digital toys and Web sites that match a child's stage of cognitive and motor development. Not everyone will agree with everything he recommends, but I'm happy to see him raise the bar for discourse on what makes sense for kids online. Go Warren!

Simulating "bugs in the walls"

2008-06-13T16:39:00.000-07:00

This past spring, in a few classrooms around Chicago, bugs were crawling through the walls. Students couldn't hear the critters, but they could see them on display screens posted around the rooms that provided a visual example of what was burrowing around in the sheetrock. With field guides in hand, these students tracked these bugs -- counting how many existed in each wall, taking notes of which ones laid eggs, and coming back after lunchtime or P.E. to see how the population had grown when they were gone.

If you happen to send your kids to the Chicago public schools, you might be relieved to hear that these bugs weren't real. They were a learning tool -- a simulation system designed by computer science and education researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Peter Malcolm, a graduate student (right, Peter?) at UIC presented a talk at IDC 08 about these "embedded phenomena" (You can read a little more on Tom Moher's page too.) The embeddedness extends beyond the little display screens around the room. It also refers to tiny nodes attached to the walls; students would use a stethoscope to press against the nodes and see zoomed-in pictures of the "bugs" in those particular places on the wall.

This combination of real and simulated material -- of display screens, field guides, and "pretend" populations to track -- led students to become incredibly animated about the work they were doing. "In the seventh grade class, one kid got so invested in his population," Malcolm said, "that he asked his teacher if he could come into to enter a measurement" on a day the school was closed.

There isn't much on the Web yet about WallCology, as it is called, except an academic paper , masters thesis and some other documents. But I suspect that I'm not the only one who will find these wall bugs to be a fascinating example of how technology could be used to turn kids on to learning.

Quilts, computers and kids learning math

2008-06-13T14:24:00.000-07:00

Triangles, squares, symmetry, fractions: Put together a quilt, and you are marinading yourself in mathematics.

So what would happen if you could get children to create "quilts" using computer graphics on a screen?

That is the research question that has propelled K.K. Lamberty in the computer science department at the University of Minnesota at Morris. In a presentation at IDC 08, Lamberty described her studies of how 4th and 5th grade students respond to a software program called DigiQuilt. Teachers in these classrooms challenge the students to, say, create a design for a quilt square using only one line of symmetry. Lamberty has recorded over 500 hours of video showing students grappling with those kinds of math challenges, while making some beautiful, colorful and creative designs in the process.

So did it work to teach math? Lamberty doesn't have data on test scores or mathematical abilities, but her early assessment is that at the very least children were engaged with the projects, talking to each other about the designs they were creating and helping each other over hurdles in understanding geometry and fractions. Call me a sucker for color and shape, but it sure looked like fun.

A toymaker-ivory tower mashup

2008-06-12T19:34:00.000-07:00

A mission of IDC 2008 at Northwestern is to foment conversations between designers of children's electronic media and the academics who test how children might respond to them.

One example spotlighted this morning was the Fisher-Price "Play Is Learning Council" that, for two years, brought childhood experts and media researchers together with designers to ensure that new toys fit a child's needs and stage of development.

"We would show them toys and they were not shy about tearing them apart," said Kathleen Alfano, director of child research at Fisher-Price.

Seemingly brilliant designs don't always hold up when tested with real kids. Scott Traylor, founder of the research company 360Kid, showed how tricky it can be to create a stylus-type application for young children who don't yet have perfect motor control in their hands. And Erik Strommen, founder of the tech-toy consultancy Playful Efforts, amused the audience with stories of how young kids couldn't resist pressing the TV-screen belly of an interactive Tinky Winky prototype when asked to wake it up.

Just what is "Interaction Design for Children"?

2008-06-12T19:03:00.000-07:00

Today I'm here in Evanston, Ill., where Northwestern University is hosting an international conference for about 150 people who work in a field called "interaction design for children."

Just what does that mean? I wondered myself, and I'm not 100 percent sure even today. But from what I gather, it's an approach to designing a product (software program, toy, whatever) that gives high value to the way a user will interact with it.

As designer, consultant and entrepreneur Nathan Shedoff once wrote, interaction design can go by other names too, like information design, instructional design, or "just plain common sense."

This conference -- Interaction Design for Children 2008 -- puts the emphasis on how designers can create toys, software, games, Web sites and tools for children that take into account their motor skills, their cognitive skills, their desires, their experiences, their potential for using it in ways that adults may not expect.

Justine Cassell, a Northwestern professor who is internationally known for her work on children and technology, is leading the conference. (I'm looking forward to picking her brain about new projects in her Center for Technology & Social Behavior.)

A note on me and full disclosure

2008-06-12T18:14:00.000-07:00

As a reporter, I believe it's important to try to avoid entanglements and stay relatively independent. But given my freelance budget, I've also got to accept payments for much of my travel and speaking. So I'll do my best to be transparent about which organizations are paying my way when I attend conferences. Last month, I blogged about the Joan Ganz Cooney symposium after having moderated a panel there on literacy technologies. In that case, the Cooney center paid for my travel and hotel. The NAEYC institute that I just blogged about was on my dime. The next conference (IDC '08, which I'll start writing about tonight) is at Northwestern. I've been invited to facilitate a panel about "screen cultures," and IDC '08 is sponsoring my travel, lodging and a small honorarium.

Subverting superheroes

2008-06-11T07:37:00.000-07:00

Superheroes often swoop into the conversation when preschool educators talk about the impact of the media. Children latch onto the imagery of Batman (if they aren't too scared by it), pretend to be Superman, jump and kick their way into the roles of Power Rangers. For many teachers (and parents), this is problematic. Suddenly the playground is a screaming zone of chasing and pulling, and sometimes kicking and wrestling too. Coping with the aggression can wear on the most stalwart teacher.

One of the sessions yesterday at the NAEYC Institute focused on how the Joyce M. Huggins Early Education Center at Cal State-Fresno moved from banning superhero play to a qualified embrace of it. The point was not to immerse children in mass media imagery. Instead, through the use of fairy tales and other story telling techniques, the kids were encouraged to create their own superheroes (like "Night Man" and "Underwater Girl"), draw them, create paper mache models of them and build story books. "We were repositioning mass media images for literacy development," said Sharon Arias, a teacher at the center.

Educators listening intently to Arias. But they had questions: How did parents feel about the new emphasis on superheroes? (Arias said they came around to like it, but acknowledged that there were reports of more night wakings and "being scared.") How did teachers handle moments of aggression? (By showing students how to pretend to be aggressive, instead of actually pulling a jacket or hurting someone.)

I sensed a skepticisim in the room. And I admit that I too, having written a chapter in my book on how 2- and 3-year -old children respond to fearful, aggressive imagery, came away with a lot of questions. But the output of the children couldn't be disputed: home-made books, stories and artwork showed a grasp of story-telling that seemed rare among children this young.

Speaking of superheroes, I should mention that Diane Levin (see my post from yesterday) and Susan Linn of the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood (who was with me on the panel about technology and play) raised some provocative points about the marketing of PG-13 movies to toddlers and preschoolers.

One of Levin's examples was The Incredible Hulk, coming to theaters this summer and aimed at adolescents. She showed a slide with a photo of "The Incredible Hulk Smash Hands," a toy from a few years ago that is labeled as being recommended for children 5 and up.

Computer use in Reggio Emilia preschools

2008-06-10T08:37:00.001-07:00

A hot new approach to preschool education is called the Reggio Emilia method, in which children exert control over their learning while teachers guide and document much of what they see, touch and explore.

In a session here at the NAEYC Institute, attendees were shown how Reggio schools use technology. Dee Stegelin of Clemson University and Lenna Young of the TRI-County Technical Institute hosted the session, providing lists of technology that are used, and often necessary, to the Reggio approach. Digital cameras, for example, are essential. And computers, they said, should be in the classroom -- not in laboratories down the hall.

"Computers are used a lot in Reggio schools," Stegelin said. Examples given included the use of KidPix software and word processing systems to give children a way to document and easily distribute stories of what they have seen and heard.

"Use your words": Giving parents language to talk about media

2008-06-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

Diane Levin, an author and professor of early childhood education at Wheelock College in Boston, gave a 2-hour talk here this morning about media's influence on children. She focused on the bad: too much violence, too much commercialism, too much sex. But the end of her session struck me as useful -- not just for early childhood educators, but for parents too. She gave examples of how to talk to kids about what they are seeing and hearing.

"This is very different than just saying 'No'," Levin said.

In one example, she showed a dialogue between a teacher and her elementary school children (kindergarteners, I think) about whether toy guns should be allowed to be created in one of the hands-on crafts centers. She suggested that teachers ground the conversation in safety -- "We want to feel safe" -- and then asking children questions like: 'Do you like it when your friends point a gun at you? What should you do?' and enabling children to voice their ideas about what to say when a friend pretends to shoot.

Levin has a new book, So Sexy So Soon, coming out in August from Random House.

What do cartoons have to do with learning to read?

2008-06-10T05:21:00.000-07:00

A lot, if you follow the arguments made by representatives for PBS. who gave a presentation at the NAEYC Institute yesterday.

Super Why! and Word World, two new TV shows for children ages 4 to 6, are part of a national five-year research project investigating whether targeted media can help young kids learn to read.

"We want to tap into the powers of characters that are so beloved on PBS," said Jayne W. James, executive director of the Ready to Learn program for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. Leaders of the program stress, however, that this is not about simply getting kids to fall in love with Princess Presto (a SuperWhy character with a magic spelling wand and a bouncy pink dress). "The shows don't evolve from a cute idea," James said. "They are grounded in research."

The shows are also making their way across platforms, onto the Web and into iPods, and the research project includes a study of how -- and if -- that makes a difference. Audience members got a peek at one part of this yesterday: Jen Rodriguez of PBS showed the beta version of PBS Kids Island, a free carnival-like world where children can play literacy games on the computer.

I've been interested in the Ready to Learn program for several years and will be waiting with baited breath for the results of the current studies. Alas, solid data won't be out for many more years, but I'll be keeping my eyes open for tidbits.

Focusing on creative playtime (and using video to do it)

2008-06-09T14:56:00.000-07:00

There's something delightful about watching young children immerse themselves in make-believe worlds, and although there are no kids here at this NAEYC institute in New Orleans, there have been several opportunities to watch videos of kids playing "pretend."

This morning in a session organized by the Alliance for Childhood, I gave a talk called "Video Screens and Cardboard Boxes," in which I showed a home video of my girls playing with two big boxes and some oversized pieces of chalk -- all of which was inspired by their watching of Pinky Dinky Doo on Noggin. (One of my points was that we need to be more specific in talking about technology: Let's look more closely at what content and forms of technology inspire versus stifle creative play.)

An hour later, video clips were the highlight of a presentation by Deborah Leong of the Metropolitan State College of Denver and Elena Bodrova of Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning. They started by zooming in on theories of how children's play evolves, first with simple props but then graduating to moments of role-play and "invisible" friends. These are levels of play that can be hard to grasp when you read about them on paper, but that become perfectly understandable when you see the kids playing.

The larger point of Leong and Bodrova's talk, however, was to recommend the use of video and photographs as a way of giving preschoolers "virtual field trips." Their research, they said, has shown that today's children need some guidance on how to play pretend. In their experience, adults in children's lives often say they are too busy to bring their children along on shopping outings or let them get involved in preparing dinner.

This is why, they said, teachers have to step in. "Teachers have to teach play intentionally," Leong said.

They suggest showing children videos of people interacting in various settings -- such as bakeries where cashiers talk to customers or medical offices where doctors treat patients. (They described real-life field trips too, but pointed out that they aren't always possible.) These videos, they said, give children new ideas for play, leading them to re-enact what they saw -- with and without guidance from nearby preschool teachers.

By the end of the session, a representative for the Fred Rogers Institute was chatting with Leong about how to use old clips of Mister Rogers' field trips to bring more videos into her preschool curriculum. (Anyone remember that field trip episode of Mister Rogers at the crayon factory?)

Early childhood educators talk tech

2008-06-08T15:49:00.000-07:00

Picture a preschool teacher, and someone on the cutting edge of technology may not be the first image to come to mind. But this year, the professional development institute for the National Association for the Education of Young Children is focused on children and technology -- and part of it is a recognition that computers, software and interactive games are aimed at children before they hit kindergarten. I'll be blogging from the NAEYC institute over the next couple of days in New Orleans. I suspect that much of the conversation will be about teacher preparation, like how educators might be able to use some new tracking and assessment tools. But I'll zoom in on the sessions that focus on how new media technology is being used among children in preschool and early elementary grades.

I'll also have my own two cents to throw into the pot, with a presentation I'm giving bright and early tomorrow morning about technology and child's play. Don't be shy about posting what you think.

The Post's obesity series: Touching on video games and food marketing

2008-05-21T11:12:00.001-07:00

I've been impressed with The Washington Post's weeklong series on childhood obesity, which has covered multiple different angles on this topic with great graphics and video too. A story titled "Two Worlds, One problem" by Annie Gowen explored how obesity is an epidemic in both the suburban environment (where kids seem to have so many options for activity and still grow fatter) and the inner cities (where safety is a concern for outdoor play.) Gowen told the story of parents in Centrevile, Va., who were trying to tackle their son's growing waistline using different tactics. Some of them involved media: "Now McDonnell also locks up the Nintendo video game system," she wrote, "and has parental controls on the television.

Exploring another element of media's impact was Vicky Rideout, a vice president for the Kaiser Family Foundation, who answered questions for the Post's online chat today. The foundation has published several studies on the influence of media and marketing on child health using well-designed surveys and focus groups. Rideout's talk today focused on how and if the marketing of high-fat, high-sugar foods may be implicated in children's unhealthy habits. This is a topic to which I devoted a chapter in my book as well. (I devoted several pages, for example, to the saga of the Disney Princess "Fruit Snacks" and my girls' unshakable desire for them.) During my work on the book, I was surprised to discover that current science points to junk-food advertising, instead of sedentary lifestyle, as the most plausible reason for the link between childhood obesity and TV watching.

Madden Football and learning math

2008-05-19T08:08:00.000-07:00

More than a week ago I moderated a panel for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center's inaugural symposium. About 200 folks with money, power, influence and interesting ideas about technology and learning crammed into a room on the top floor of the McGraw-Hill building on 6th Avenue in NYC and exchanged promos for their products, programs, agendas and aggravations.

Scott Traylor of 360Kids has ably blogged about the event and highlighted the comments of Connie Yowell, director of education at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. At one point, Yowell asked the audience if they could see the learning that took place when children played Madden Football, a popular and long-running videogame produced by Electronic Arts. A sprinkling of attendees raised their hands for "yes." As Yowell said, "If you can’t understand where learning is happening through the Madden game, then we’re in the wrong paradigm. If you’re stuck in conversations about whether or not the Encyclopedia Britannica is better than Wikipedia, then we’re in the old paradigm."

I too was fascinated by her remarks. But I've got questions about Madden Football and whether the learning moments of the game are explicit enough to really help the kids of today become the math whizzes we'll need tomorrow. Seems to me a great topic for some real research, honestly. Is anyone out there following 10-year-olds who are growing up on videogame football to see where they end up? And do children learn more being in the game (via video simulation) than watching the game on TV and doing the mental calculations in their heads of plays tried and yards run? Anyone know teachers who are riffing off of these games in their classes? Email me if you've got some good leads. Thanks.

The next Sandbox Summit: NYC in September

2008-05-19T06:36:00.001-07:00

The Sandbox Summit started as just an event, a few days of forums and exhibits at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this past January. A couple hundred people turned out to listen to industry experts talk about how technology is changing the way children play. (I made remarks introducing one of the panels and blogged a little here.)

Now the Sandbox Summit is becoming something more -- a continuing forum, both on and offline, designed to look more deeply at the question from all sides, including educators, company leaders, health experts, child advocates and parents. The advisory board was announced last week and I'm excited to be a part of it. Journalists are supposed to avoid joining boards, and I thought hard about this one. But since I'm already a regular writer for Parents' Choice, the foundation that started the Sandbox Summit, I recognize that I'm already in the mix and invested in helping to further the conversation. As with this blog, my goal is to continue investigating what we know -- based on scientific research wherever possible -- about how electronic media is affecting the way we, as human beings, learn and think.

The next Sandbox Summit, titled The New Playing Fields, is scheduled for September 24 in New York City.

Paneling a la Virginia Heffernan

2008-05-19T06:07:00.000-07:00

I always enjoy Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times Magazine. (If you're a wordie, check out her piece on OED.com, the Internet-based, subscription-based Oxford English Dictionary.) But it was her blog post about the tribulations of moderating a recent panel about women in film that made me smile this weekend. "It was fun, but I don’t really understand panels," she wrote, "and I really shouldn’t do them because I’m a loser moderator." Here, here, sister. I moderated a panel about literacy and technology earlier this month at The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and although my charge was to "start a conversation," I was a little preoccupied with just trying to make sure that the speakers stuck to their allotted five minutes. To get a real conversation going, you need to ban Powerpoint. But in today's visual culture, that ain't so easy.

Still, there were certainly some provocative ideas to tease out -- so I'll be writing more about the Cooney panel soon.

When word problems are a problem

2008-05-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

Kenneth Chang had a fascinating story in the New York Times last week: Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices. The story describes a new study showing how children might learn mathematics best if they are taught in the abstract ((t + 1) = 400 - 50t) versus the concrete (One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour toward Station B. A second train ...etc, etc.).

As Chang wrote:

Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler
did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a
randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in [the April 25] issue of
the journal Science.

The study reminded me of a story I wrote for the Times several years ago ("Testing: None of the Above") about how science and math questions on standardized tests can trip up students -- especially the brightest ones.

And how does this relate to technology? Good question, though I suspect that a lot of animations, games and educational videos directed at children today are rooted in "real world" problems, not abstractions. A worthwhile research question might be: Are these approaches the best way to prime kids for math, even if they seem more engaging than old-fashioned equations?

New-fangled writing, old-fashioned reading

2008-05-06T08:52:00.000-07:00

Two new reports came out last week:

"Writing, Technology and Teens," from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the College Board's National Commission on Writing.
"What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools," by Renaissance Learning.

The writing study was based on a national telephone survey of teens and parents. To hear a great discussion of its findings, go to Kojo Nnamdi's April 29th radio show.

The reading study is, according to Renaissance, the first report to get at what kids are actually reading rather than which books are purchased or assigned in class. The company's software captures data on what children read by quizzing them about details in the stories they have read. More than 63,000 schools use the software. "We are in the unique position of having arguably the world’s largest single database of student book-reading behavior," wrote Roy Truby, a senior VP for Renaissance and co-author of the report.

Quick take-aways from both: Teenagers are, in fact, writing a lot these days -- but it's texting and IMing, not the formal writing that educators say they need. In fact, the teenagers themselves say that they don't consider their informal writing to be real writing.

And the books that schoolchildren read? It depends, of course, on what grade you're talking about. In first grade, Dr. Seuss books are at the top. In 9th-12th grade, it's To Kill a Mockingbird. Interestingly, in high school, Night by Elie Wiesel is the 2nd most-often read book among top achievers.

"Let's fight fire with fire"

2008-04-24T02:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-20T04:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-07T09:01:00.000-07:00

"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?

Parents sound off on whether TV belongs in a child's bedroom

2008-03-18T06:11:00.001-07:00

According to 2005 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 43 percent of children ages 4 to 6 have a television in their bedroom. The numbers are lower for younger children, but still suprisingly high and disturbing to many experts in child development, who note that several studies show correlations between bedroom TVs and lower achievement at school. (I don't have easy access to data for bedroom TVs with older children but will look it up. Stay tuned.)

Last week, BabyCenter.com opened an unscientific poll asking, "Does your child have a TV in his or her room?" When I checked the results this morning, about one-quarter of parents had responded that, yes, there is a TV in their child's bedroom. Does it belong there? That question has prompted hundreds of parents to chime in on the BabyCenter.com bulletin boards. Opinions run strong against the idea and many parents say that "no TV in the bedroom" is one rule they will stick by even as their children get older. But some parents say the context of their household (not to mention the layout of the house itself) plays a role. One mother wrote that her daughter has a TV with a DVD player in her room, but that the TV isn't hooked up for service. "She can only watch DVDs on it," she wrote. "On Sunday, she has movie time while I get the house cleaned."

See the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2006 report, "The Media Family," for several tidbits of interesting data and in-depth discussion of the topic. One surprise from their research, which I wrote about in my book, is that parents were putting the TVs in the bedrooms not because they didn't know what to do with extra TVs (which was expected to be the answer) but because they wanted to be able to use the TV in the family room for their own shows.

What are they listening to?

2008-03-18T05:56:00.000-07:00

Disney has hired Arbitron to help it track the listening behavior of children and adolescents, according to Radio Ink and Cynopsis: Kids. As Cynopsis wrote, "This marks the first time that Arbitron will measure the radio listening behavior of kids and tweens."

So how much do teens listen to the radio in the first place? Here's some new data about online listening that provides some answers. Arbitron released some early results yesterday from its study, with Edison Media Research, about online listening habits. The company says that 33 million Americans age 12 or older listen to a radio station over the Internet during an average week (an increase from 29 million one year ago) and that there is also a strong connection between online radio listening and social networking sites.