Flickr: Category 5 TV

By Hall Davidson

For educators interested in incorporating video into classroom lessons, here are seven projects to dive into.

1.   TURN AN iPAD OR (OTHER MOBILE DEVICE) INTO A VIDEO MICROSCOPE. For less than $8, an iPad can be used as a 45x microscope to capture still images or videos from leaves, household objects, insects, or anything that warrants closer inspection. With an $0.80 grommet from a hardware store, super glue, and a 45x power microscope (usually found for less than $5), the camera in the iPad or mobile phone can become a microscope. This is how it works: the grommet (think of it as a ½-inch rubber washer) is glued around the camera opening, and the microscope plugs into it. You can see how it’s done on this YouTube video, step-by-step.

2.   MAKE VIDEOS FROM VIDEO GAMES. Any technology that produces a ‘video out’ signal can create content for media projects. Students have done this with MineCraft and Halo. Teachers can use the video characters to teach math concepts or build curriculum-based stories with students.  Essentially, the computer becomes a camera with video screen capture or for media files generated by the game. You can do this with devices like EZcap and Dazzle. Screen capture can be done in QuickTime 10 (Mac) or CamStudio (PC), or many other screen capture alternatives.  This YouTube video explains how to connect EZcap, and these YouTube videos show how-tos using Macs.

Hall Davidson

Cinemagram

3.   VIDEO-MAKING ON THE iPAD/MOBILE. A huge variety of sophisticated video effects can be done on mobile devices — some of which used to require a television studio and entire crew! You can use fun effects like Green Screen MovieFX, an app for iPads, iPhones, and Windows phones, which allows for a color in a video shot live to become a pre-set video. Cinemagram, a new app that allows part of a video to be frozen while the rest of video continues, is also fun to play with. Coaches Eye, which allows coaches or teachers to slow down, mark up (like on ESPN), and comment on student videos shot on cameras or phones works great for assessing videos. And MadPad, a multiple-screen video display that can be crafted into a math, social studies, or vocabulary game is another great tool to play with.

4. MORPHING. Morphing images means transforming one image smoothly into another (remember the end of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video?) You can blend student’s images from their earliest elementary school grades through graduation and then segue into futuristic images, or blend two images of a student into his or her hero, or into the center of their report, or into animals or any other images that lend themselves to class subjects. Software that can be used: Morpheus, FantaMorph, MorphX, and free websites such as MorphThing.com.

5. QR CODE GAME OR SCAVENGER HUNT. QR Codes — those little squares that, when viewed through smartphones lead to videos, sounds, or websites — can be used to create multiple-choice questions and answers. Here’s how: a QR is “broken” into pieces that are linked to questions and answers. Students can drag the piece next to the answer they think is correct into a grid, and the pieces form a QR code. If the answers are all correct, the QR code reveals a video. If not, nothing happens. But students can adjust answers until they get it right. To make it easier (for the teacher) and more visual, each QR code piece is colored. The grid, coloring, and QR code construction can all be all done in PowerPoint, but any software with graphic capabilities, such as HyperStudio, works well too. The low-tech alternative is to simply cutting up a QR Code and stash it along the path of a scavenger hunt. The teams can bring back the pieces and reassemble them to uncover the video, still, or sound that the QR code that appears on their smartphone.

6.   TRANSFORM AN OLD CAMCORDER TO A GREAT WEBCAM. There are legions of old digital camcorders in parent and teacher closets. Maybe they ate tapes. Maybe they were too big, or just outdated. These broken or discarded camcorders can be connected to a computer for use in online conversations, as a document camera, or for scientific observations. Any camcorder that allows a “video out” connection will works, but those that are designed to connect to a computer are easier to use. These usually have “DV” (digital video) printed somewhere on the camera and, hidden under a black flap is the DV connector. Even if the camcorder doesn’t record anymore, or the tape motor is broken, this will work. The great lenses on those camcorders are a tremendous asset. A classroom talking with an expert, for example, could let the teacher zoom in student faces. Once the connection is made, the preferences or options in Skype, FaceTime, QuickTime, etc., are set to show the camcorder instead of the built-in camera or webcam. A mini-tripod can hold the camera steady.

7.   CREATE A MEDIA FESTIVAL. Celebrate the works of your students by putting on a media festival, showcasing their work in media, digital content, games, and music. The California Student Media Festival can be used as a prototype of how to model such a festival; find resources for guidelines, entry forms, judging rubrics, and structures for guidance.

Find more details about specific apps and more here.

Hall Davidson is senior director of Global Learning Initiatives at Discovery Education.

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Looking into the proverbial crystal ball, a slew of technology experts weighed in on the Future of the Internet V survey conducted by Pew Research and Elon University, and came up with a predictably mixed scenario: It’s complicated.

Asked to consider the future of the Internet-connected world between now and 2020 and to choose from two statements, of the total 1,021 responses, 55% agreed with this optimistic view:

“In 2020 the brains of multitasking teens and young adults are “wired” differently from those over age 35 and overall it yields helpful results. They do not suffer notable cognitive shortcomings as they multitask and cycle quickly through personal- and work-related tasks. Rather, they are learning more and they are more adept at finding answers to deep questions, in part because they can search effectively and access collective intelligence via the Internet. In sum, the changes in learning behavior and cognition among the young generally produce positive outcomes.”

But 42% were less enthusiastic about the impact of wired life:

“In 2020, the brains of multitasking teens and young adults are “wired” differently from those over age 35 and overall it yields baleful results. They do not retain information; they spend most of their energy sharing short social messages, being entertained, and being distracted away from deep engagement with people and knowledge. They lack deep-thinking capabilities; they lack face-to-face social skills; they depend in unhealthy ways on the Internet and mobile devices to function. In sum, the changes in behavior and cognition among the young are generally negative outcomes.”

These points of view are presented in the context of statistics that show Internet and media use completely permeating young people’s lives. From the Pew Internet Project: “95% of teens ages 12-17 are online, 76% use social networking sites, and 77% have cell phones. Moreover, 96% of those ages 18-29 are internet users, 84% use social networking sites, and 97% have cell phones. Well over half of those in that age cohort have smartphones and 23% own tablet computers like iPads.”

Focusing the work of educators on shaping students’ use of and attitude towards technology is crucial in paving the way for a more positive outcome, many respondents said. “The changes in behavior and cognition in the future depend heavily upon how we adapt our pre-school-through-college curricula to encompass new techniques of learning and teaching,” wrote Hugh F. Cline, an adjunct professor of sociology and education at Columbia University who was formerly a senior research scientist at a major educational testing company based in Princeton, NJ. “If we simply continue to use technologies to enhance the current structure and functioning of education, our young people will use the technologies to entertain themselves and engage in online socializing and shopping. We will have missed enormous opportunities to produce independent life-long learners.”

Some educators who took the survey were critical of the effect of technology on their students “hyper-connected” lives.

“I have seen a general decline in higher-order thinking skills in my students over the past decade,” wrote one respondent. “What I generally see is an over-dependence on technology, an emphasis on social technologies as opposed to what I’ll call ‘comprehension technologies,’ and a general disconnect from deeper thinking. I’m not sure that I attribute this to the so-called ‘re-wiring’ of teenage brains, but rather to a deeper intellectual laziness that the Web has also made possible with the rise of more video-based information resources (as opposed to textual resources).”

Another respondent who has been a college-level professor for 12 years weighed in: “Students do not know how to frame a problem or challenge. They do not know how to ask questions, and how to provide enough detail to support their answers (from credible sources). Technology is playing a big part in students not only not being able to perform as well in class, but also not having the desire to do so.”

But the writers of the survey posed an important question about why educators noted these negative impacts: “Is this at least partially due to the fact that they are still trying to educate these highly connected young people through antiquated approaches? Perhaps those who have argued for education reform would think so.”

The need for instant gratification and shallow learning and interactions were the main negative points made about impacts of tech-dependent lives. “Technology is taking our collective consciousness and ability to conduct critical analysis and thinking, and, in effect, individual determinism in modern society,” said cyber-security expert Richard Forno. “My sense is that society is becoming conditioned into dependence on technology in ways that, if that technology suddenly disappears or breaks down, will render people functionally useless. What does that mean for individual and social resiliency?”

Alexandra Samuel, director of the Social + Media Centre in Vancouver, Canada, offered a less tentative, more proactive approach and thinking about the issues: “If we can stop fretting about what we’re losing we can make room to get excited about what we’re gaining: the ability to multitask, to feel connected to ‘strangers’ as well as neighbours, to create media unselfconsciously, to live in a society of producers rather than consumers,” she said. “The question we face as individuals, organizations, educators and perhaps especially as parents is how we can help today’s kids to prepare for that world—the world they will actually live in and help to create—instead of the world we are already nostalgic for.”

Other highlights from the study:

• Barry Chudakov, a Florida-based consultant and a research fellow in the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto: “Technology will be so seamlessly integrated into our lives that it will effectively disappear. The cognitive challenge children and youth will face (as we are beginning to face now) is integrity, the state of being whole and undivided. There will be a premium on the skill of maintaining presence, of mindfulness, of awareness in the face of persistent and pervasive tool extensions and incursions into our lives. Is this my intention, or is the tool inciting me to feel and think this way? That question, more than multitasking or brain atrophy due to accessing collective intelligence via the internet, will be the challenge of the future.”

• Alvaro Retana, a technologist with Hewlett-Packard. “The people who will strive and lead the charge will be the ones able to disconnect themselves to focus on specific problems.”
• Jessica Clark, a media strategist and senior fellow for two U.S. communications technology research centers: “Every new generation finds creative and groundbreaking ways to use the new technologies to explore and illuminate human truths and to make dumb, sexist, horrifying schlock. Multitasking young adults and teens will be fine; they’ll be better at certain types of tasks and worse at others. Their handwriting will be horrendous. Their thumbs will ache. Life will go on.”
• Communications scholar Sandra Braman of the University of Wisconsin: “Are the deep skills acquired by those with a lot of gaming experience transferable to the meat flesh world? That is, do those who can track multiple narratives simultaneously practice that same skill in environments that aren’t animations and have buttons to push? The second is will. Do those who can, to stick with the same example, track and engage with multiple narratives simultaneously choose to do the same with the meat-flesh political environment? The incredibly important research stream that we have not seen yet would look at the relationship between gaming and actual political activity in the meat-flesh world. My hypothesis is that high activity in online environments, particularly games, expends any political will or desire to effectively shape the environment so that there is none of that will left for engaging in our actual political environment.”

REGARDING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE:

Tin Tan Wee, an internet expert based at the National University of Singapore: “Current educational methods evolved to their current state mostly pre-internet. The same goes for a generation of teachers who will continue to train yet another generation of kids the old way. The same goes for examination systems, which carry out assessment based on pre-internet skills. This mismatch will cause declension in a few generations of cohorts. Those who are educated and re-educable in the internet way will reap the benefits of the first option. Most of the world will suffer the consequence of the second. The intellectual divide will increase. This in turn fuels the educational divide because only the richer can afford internet access with mobile devices at effective speeds.”

REGARDING WIRING OF THE BRAIN

Communications professor Jeff Jarvis: “I do not believe technology will change our brains and how we are ‘wired.’ But it can change how we cognate and navigate our world. We will adapt and find the benefits in this change.”

REGARDING THE NOTION OF DIGITAL NATIVES

David Ellis, director of communications studies at York University in Toronto: “I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad or anti-social about smartphones, laptops, or any other technology. I do, however, believe we are entering an era in which young adults are placing an inordinately high priority on being unfailingly responsive and dedicated participants in the web of personal messaging that surrounds them in their daily lives. For now, it seems, addictive responses to peer pressure, boredom, and social anxiety are playing a much bigger role in wiring Millennial brains than problem-solving or deep thinking.”

REGARDING HUMAN EVOLUTION

David Weinberger, senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society: “Whatever happens, we won’t be able to come up with an impartial value judgment because the change in intellect will bring about a change in values as well.” Alex Halavais, an associate professor and internet researcher at Quinnipiac University: “We will think differently, and a large part of that will be as a result of being capable of exploiting a new communicative environment,” he noted.

It’s a fascinating read, with lots of thought-provoking perspectives from experts, students, and educators. Be sure to read the report in full here.

Flickr: JuliaKoz

The following are excerpts from from “Kids Closer Up: Playing, Learning, and Growing with Digital Media” by Lori Takeuchi, International Journal of Learning and Media, Spring 2011, Vol. 3, No. 2, Pages 37-59. To protect the children’s identities, all names are pseudonyms, and location details have been altered. Read the first post in the series: A Look Inside the Digital Lives of Tweens.

According to some scholars, digital media provide young people with the tools, spaces, and communities to develop the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and social practices needed for full participation in contemporary society as consumers, producers, and civic actors. Surely all children can learn something through their use of digital media. But some of these lessons hold greater value to their present and future lives than others.

Researcher Jackie Marsh argues that virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Webkinz can “offer young children a wide range of opportunities to decode, respond to and create multimodal texts in a playful space, significant activities in a new media age.” She postulates that reading Club Penguin’s newspaper, for example, can help foster children’s reading comprehension skills and that its chat feature provides a fun context for children to practice writing and use text to negotiate, collaborate, and evaluate. If and when more work, play, and learning activities are embedded in virtual worlds, as many predict they will be, current young members of Club Penguin and Webkinz will be prepared to navigate these spaces and communicate as members of online communities. However, whether they actually become better readers and writers—or just fall victim to the commercialized practices that operate across online and offline worlds has yet to be seen.5

From a developmental perspective, the fact that Katie is not a budding moviemaker is perhaps understandable, as is the fact that Victoria is not designing outfits on Photoshop and then uploading her creations to share with other young fashion designers online. They are just eight. Is it even realistic to expect girls of this age to participate in the artistic expression and civic engagement activities that proponents of digital media say these tools support? Do developmental reasons argue against postponing these expectations until adolescence, when the user interface of sophisticated programs like Photoshop and iMovie will make more sense, when parents are more willing to allow their children to participate in online communities, and when youth have developed better judgment about content, audience, and online safety? What about encouraging 8-year-olds to play outside with friends, siblings, and pets to develop physical coordination with real objects, rather than with virtual ones inside?

Creative expression and civic engagement using digital media may be eventual goals, but, as the two cases illustrate, technology holds a different set of opportunities for young children than it does for teenagers. In Katie’s and Victoria’s cases, I did not observe cell phones, video games, mobile devices, and online virtual worlds providing the vehicles and spaces for them to meaningfully communicate, coordinate, and negotiate with peers and relatives—at least not in the same ways these platforms are being appropriated by teenagers.

What I did witness, however, is how digital media are giving Katie and Victoria opportunities to develop identities as autonomous learners and technologically capable individuals and to try on various versions of their future selves, as fashion designers, aestheticians, and PDA-toting career women. I also got a glimpse of how Victoria uses digital tools at home to practice skills that may later serve her academically, such as reading onscreen instructions and newspapers, searching for information on the Internet, and word processing.

The two case studies illustrate that mere access to digital resources is not enough to guarantee that children will use those resources in productive and enriching ways. Parents and other family members largely shape the quality of the girls’ experiences, through deliberate acts of providing and regulating and through less conscious modeling of behaviors and attitudes that may stoke their daughters’ interests.

Read the full report, Families Matter: Designing Media for a Digital Age

But inequities exist. Katie, for example, is not receiving as much adult encouragement to visit Web sites with more onscreen text or to make use of productivity software as her best friend Victoria is. But do current disparities matter? When the girls reach age 16, will it have made any difference that when they were 8 Victoria dabbled in Microsoft Word and Windows Paint and Katie did not? Is there a reason to encourage children this young to engage with digital media in deeper ways than playing simple games alone? Or will other factors, such as school courses and adolescent sociality, level the playing field when youth reach the age at which technological fluency will have more immediate bearing on their academic success and future career choices?

What can we learn from the case studies of two little girls? Katie’s and Victoria’s family situations and cultural heritages are unique. However, most American children resemble Katie and Victoria in two regards. First, children are increasingly surrounded by, engaging with, and embracing media in both old and new forms. Katie and Victoria—like generations of little girls before them—still draw and play outside, do homework and chores, and spend time with family and friends, unmediated by screens of any sort. Rather than replacing or eliminating activities, digital media represent an additional layer of their everyday lives. Technology is part of the fabric of both homes, used by all family members for entertainment, information seeking, communication, and expression. In this way, the girls are not singled out as digital natives within a family of immigrants.

Second, any child’s particular relationship with these technologies is shaped by the people around them—parents, siblings, teachers, friends, neighbors, and so on. And these interactions are, in turn, influenced by individual maturity, family values, institutional policies, cultural norms, or a television network’s bottom line. The ecological perspectives offered by Katie’s and Victoria’s stories have made this latter point clear.

Because young children tend to engage with digital media at home, this research has focused primarily on what they are doing in this particular setting with family members. However, as Katie’s and Victoria’s stories suggest, by age 8, peers are also emerging as powerful influences—as is school, if not by providing Katie and Victoria with opportunities to learn with digital media, then through its institutional attitudes toward digital media. Other learning resources not explored in depth here—namely, books, after school and community settings, and online social networking and virtual worlds—are also important locales of interest development. Just as important is understanding how a child’s interests cross these boundaries and are strengthened and sustained over time.

According to Dr. Larry Rosen, the most recent technology trends (e.g., iPads, texting, Twitter, Facebook) are being widely adopted by consumers within a matter of years—if not months. In

comparison, the telephone, radio, and television each took decades. Because of this rapid penetration rate, children born just years apart demonstrate distinct patterns of media consumption, communication, and levels of multitasking.

Katie’s baby brother (born since my observational visits) will grow up mastering a different set of skills, habits, and dispositions around technology than his sister’s “mini-generation.” However, even as new technologies captivate young users in ever-faster cycles, the developmental capacities and predilections of children remain, for the most part, stable. By keeping their developmental characteristics in mind, adults—who are, by the logic of the mini-generation theory, the perpetual digital immigrants—should always feel empowered to know and do what is best for young children in a digital age.

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The following are excerpts from from “Kids Closer Up: Playing, Learning, and Growing with Digital Media” by Lori Takeuchi, International Journal of Learning and Media, Spring 2011, Vol. 3, No. 2, Pages 37-59. To protect the children’s identities, all names are pseudonyms, and location details have been altered.

While large-scale surveys have documented the types of media to which 5–9-year-olds are devoting increasing amounts of time, we know less about how and why they are using these media and what they might be learning as a result. This research provides rich details on the processes, relationships, and contexts that larger scale studies on children’s media use cannot by examining two 8-year-old girls’ engagement with video games, the Web, mobile devices, and other emerging technologies against the backdrop of family life.

What roles are parents and others playing in their digital media experiences? And how is their engagement with digital media related to family values, relationships with peers and siblings, and what they are doing at school? The case studies illustrate how young children’s access to and interest in technology are shaped by cultural, institutional, interpersonal, and developmental forces and, in turn, how access and interest shape individual learning.

THE MYTH OF THE DIGITAL GENERATION

In the past decade, a host of newspaper and magazine articles, TV news features, and books have attempted to characterize the digital generation and have presented a polarized view of what young people are doing online, behind closed bedroom doors. Headlines vacillate between “Violent video games linked to child aggression” and “Can video-game companies revolutionize teaching in the 21st century?”

Parents are either alarmed or excited by what the Internet, video games, and cell phones can do to—or for—their children. The telephone, radio, and television evoked similar sentiments among previous generations of parents, but some assert that today’s technologies are fundamentally transforming the way children play, think, and learn. Journalists and scholars alike say that digital media support creative expression and peer collaboration; foster technical troubleshooting and computational thinking; and inspire civic engagement, global awareness, and environmental stewardship. As a result, today’s “digital natives” and members of the “Net Generation” are, according to authors like Marc Prensky and Don Tapscott, more innovative, more enterprising, and more fluent with information technologies than the generations before them.

However, critics charge techno-enthusiasts like Prensky as being overly optimistic and basing this optimism on anecdotal rather than empirical evidence. Children are indeed being born into a digital world: consumer electronics are now accessible to populations that a decade ago could not afford them. Yet the digital divide persists. Most children in the United States now have access to computers at home and at school, but according to researchers Mark Warschauer and Tina Matuchniak:

Today the digital divide resides in differential ability to use new media to critically evaluate information, analyze, and interpret data, attack complex problems, test innovative solutions, manage multifaceted projects, collaborate with others in knowledge production, and communicate effectively to diverse audiences—in essence, to carry out the kinds of expert thinking and complex communication that are at the heart of the new economy. (p. 213)

Researchers Amanda Lenhart and Mary Madden have confirmed these disparities empirically, finding that of all U.S. 12-17-year-olds who go online, only 57% have built a blog or Web page; posted original art, photos, stories, or videos; and/or remixed online content. This figure hardly reflects an entire generation of technology-savvy individuals.

Recent ethnographic work has begun to paint a more complex picture of the digital lives of American youth. The multi-institution Digital Youth Project, the most extensive ethnographic study of youth media use in the United States to date, sought the perspectives of an economically diverse set of 12–18-year-olds on what they are playing, communicating, and creating with new media, endeavoring to understand how these practices are embedded in the broader social and cultural ecology.

What they discovered is that teens are using online media to extend real world relationships, explore interests, express identities, and expand their independence and that they are practicing new technical and social skills along the way. Contrary to the digital natives argument, however, fewer youth use new media in “interest-driven” practices to acquire information or cultivate skills beyond what is available to them at school or in their local communities. A minority of youth are “messing around”—experimenting with new tools and developing technical skills along the way. Even fewer are “geeking out” by participating in online communities to improve their craft and gain the respect of online peers.

The current work employs in-depth case studies of two 8-year-old girls to illustrate how young children’s access to and interest in technology are shaped by cultural, institutional, interpersonal, and developmental forces and, in turn, how access and interest shape individual learning. This proposition, if true, would suggest that children experience digital media differently from the get-go and that trajectories of learning with digital media diverge from a young age. Along this line of reasoning, digital natives are made, not born.

Findings from the current set of case studies build upon these and other fine-grained studies of young children’s digital media use and learning, bringing to bear the particularities of the era, locale, and culture of the two individuals I studied to refine our collective and ever-evolving portrait of the 21st-century child.

WHAT DO THEY DO ONLINE?

Katie said she plays online games about once a week, when she is at her dad’s house. She rarely plays at her mom’s house, “’Cause she’s always on the computer. She makes a lot of music. So she makes music like every day.” Since her best friend, Victoria, began alerting Katie, a year or so ago, to the fun to be found at GirlsGoGames.com, MyScene.com, and the Disney Channel Web site, Katie has taken an interest in the Internet. Katie goes online by herself about half the time. She asks for either Chad’s or Aileen’s permission, and they set her up by turning the computer on and logging her in before leaving her in the back office to pick up whatever they were doing before the request.

Katie enjoys beauty and fashion games most, which may have something to do with her mom being the manager of a beauty supply store and a newly licensed aesthetician. But Katie also states a fondness for any game that allows her to “be creative.” Katie said she can spend hours alone painting nails and designing outfits online but prefers drawing pictures on real paper using the real crayons, paints, and pens she has stashed at her dad’s house. Taking out and putting away the art supplies may be a bigger pain than just launching a Web site, but with the real pictures she makes, “I don’t have to throw it away.” Several pieces of her art are posted on the walls of her dad’s house.

For the most part, Victoria sets her own learning goals and pulls in her parents and older siblings to help her achieve these goals in a just-in-time—rather than planned-out—fashion. She is comfortable enough to figure out new tools and software on her own, but her father and especially Henry still help her get started. With Paint, for instance, “My dad and my brother had to show me how to get on there and sometimes they watched me to see that I didn’t mess anything up.” Unlike Katie, who only visits (or cares to visit) GirlsGoGames.com, MyScene.com, and the Disney Channel, Victoria surfs the Web for information about fashion design (e.g., the Project Runway site on Bravo network’s website), the breed of miniature rabbits she keeps as pets, and anything else that strikes her fancy.

Well, almost anything. For the most part, Janet and Ara trust Victoria’s judgment, but they did express concern about her online privacy and safety: “We’ve had the discussion that you only talk online with people that you know. Because anybody can say that they’re an 8-year-old boy.” This is why Janet and Ara set up the parental controls feature on the desktop so that Victoria can access her favorite Internet haunts—e.g., Webkinz, Club Penguin, YouTube, and Google—but the system blocks her from any unrecognized Web sites. Victoria has to ask either her father or Henry to type in the password if they approve of the site. With this setup, Victoria can only really surf the Web if one of them is around, and in this way the adults in the house are always aware of the Web sites she is visiting.

Janet said she feels no need to restrict her 8-year-old’s time on the computer, playing video games, or even watching TV, because Victoria’s routine and other factors—such as having to share the PC with her brother—naturally limit the frequency and duration of these sessions. When Victoria gets home from school, she has to finish her homework before she can do anything else, technology related or not. And throughout the week she has plenty of non-tech activities to keep her occupied, such as soccer and volleyball, cleaning the bunny cages, play dates with friends, and visiting relatives near and far.

Consequently, Victoria’s lifestyle is relatively balanced: “She gets her exercise. She gets her homework done. She, you know, she’s got a wide variety of interests.” Besides, Janet added, “After four kids, you kind of, you know, lessen up on restrictions, I mean, from everything.” As parents they have learned their lessons over the years, including what is worth the effort and what is not.

Being surrounded by more-capable family members may explain why Victoria said, “I’m pretty good [with computers], but I’m still learning,” even though she exhibits more ease and proficiency than most kids her age. When asked what she is hoping to learn next, technology-wise, Victoria did not just name a new DS game or computer application. She instead answered, “I would want to learn how to reset [the computer] and all the technology in it.”

While Katie may not have access to the platforms and software that Victoria’s more affluent parents can afford, she is allowed to visit and view content that Victoria cannot. Chad is philosophically opposed to censoring media and trusts Katie to make smart choices on her own.

The Sarkissians, on the other hand, are more vigilant about Victoria’s media consumption, with parent controls set on the computer and siblings around to keep an eye on what she is doing. Past research has associated higher levels of parental mediation with higher family income and parent age, findings that are consistent with what I observed in the Sarkissian (higher SES) and Yamato (younger parent) households.

Despite differing mediation styles, neither Katie’s nor Victoria’s parents believe their girls are overdosing on media. Katie and Victoria still enjoy playing outside, so their parents have not yet felt a need to peel them away from the TV or computer to get fresh air or exercise. But the case study parents may also be unaware of just how much media their daughters consume on a daily basis, because MP3 players and the Nintendo DS tend to be used in the outer reaches of the home, where parents cannot always see what their children are doing or for how long.

In the next post, Lori Takeuchi examines how the girls use digital media to develop their identities.

Flickr: Andrew Shell

Kids learn with each other while playing games on the iPad.

Most of what we read about kids and screen time revolves around whether or not it’s good for them. But one aspect of media use with kids that’s worth examining closer is how co-viewing affects their experience. Whether kids are watching TV, creating digital media, reading, searching, or playing video games with parents, siblings or friends, consuming media becomes a different kind of experience than when it’s done alone.

Though TV is still the dominant media in most homes, other forms are quickly permeating daily life: video games, apps, and exploring the Internet are woven into most families’ activities. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center calls it joint media engagement (JME), and they’ve just released one of their comprehensive reports, The New CoViewing: Designing for Learning Through Joint Media Engagement, about the phenomenon and its effects. The theory goes that the better we understand how kids use media together, the better designed the media can be, to take the most advantage of how kids work, learn, think, and make things together.

HOW PARENTS RELATE

Perhaps the activity that parents love most to do with their kids — reading — has been vastly transformed by digital media. E-books can be read on Web sites, computer software, products like LeapFrog, and of course tablets and e-readers. And depending on whom you ask, e-books (or print books) are the medium of choice for reading together. The typically tech-cautious New York Times decided that “for their children, many e-book fans insist on paper.”

But the Cooney Center’s own “quick study,” which followed 24 families with kids three- to six-years old reading both print and e-books, showed that most kids preferred reading an e-book to a print book, according to Digital Book World. And maybe just as importantly, “comprehension between the two formats were the same,” though the enhanced e-readers with all the bells and whistles were distracting to young readers.

Still, “If we can encourage kids to engage in books through an iPad, that’s a win already,” said the Cooney Center’s Carly Shuler.

Plenty of studies have shown that kids learn more when they’re consuming media alongside their parents — parents typically chime in and explain what’s going on or answer questions or share their opinions about what they’re seeing, hearing, and doing. In turn, parents can have a better understanding of what their kids are doing and learning and what they’re involved with during their kids’ media use.

And for a lot of parents, this kind of interaction is important. A recent national survey showed that two-thirds of nearly 1,000 parents of 12- to 17-year-olds said they talked regularly with their kids about their Internet use, and almost half of them participated in their kids’ use of computers. And those who did, actively set both social rules — what’s appropriate and what’s not — and filtering software that block sites.

Joan Ganz Cooney Center

Lori Takeuchi, who wrote this report for the Cooney Center along with Reed Stevens, said what parents decide to do with their kids is largely based on their own childhood experiences. Those who grew up on the Internet or were young enough when they started using it in their daily lives have less fear about dangers.

“They’re comfortable with fewer rules,” Takeuchi said about the families she studied for the Families Matter Report she wrote earlier this year. Older parents, on the other hand, tend to use parental controls more. “Younger parents are willing to confront media and the unknown with their kids, whereas older parents aren’t.”

The rule of thumb also applies to video games. Parents who grew up playing games themselves tended to play more with their kids than restrict it, according to a 2007 study. And conversely, those who had negative opinions about gaming tended to restrict time spent playing with video games.

KIDS USING MEDIA TOGETHER

Parents aren’t the only big influences in a kid’s life when it comes to media. Children watching and playing together also affects the experience. For those families who can afford it, an iPod Touch is now as common place a toy as Monopoly used to be for the previous generation. Though some worry, and rightly so, about kids withdrawing from the social lives around them as they launch birds or slash fruit on their iPod Touches, observing two kids with their own device in the same room reveals something different — at least in my experience. Kids talk each other through their challenges, helping each other master levels, offering tips, cheering each other on. It’s a form of parallel play, in a way.

The same goes for video games. A report about parents’ interest in video games shows that kids end up learning a lot from each other and become empowered through sharing. “Collaborative interactions around video game play are good learning environments [in] that ‘in-room’ interaction provides opportunities for sociality, joint projects, and empowerment through sharing one’s knowledge and seeing it used for concrete success by others,” write the authors of the study.

And when it comes to TV, kids who watch together respond to prompts (from Elmo or Dora the Explorer, for example), than those watching alone. Kids also imitate each others’ responses and coordinate their actions to respond at the same time. They elaborate on each others’ responses and talk to each other about what’s going on.

Another great example of this was found with research from the Digital Youth Project, where authors of the Macarthur Foundation study found that kids hanging out with each other, watching movies or TV, playing videos together or listening to music, were more actively participating in what they were doing. They talked about what they were watching or playing, they worked together on modifying video games, and creating digital media.

CHALLENGES AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

Ideally, of course, parents could participate in all their kids’ media use. But let’s face it, even if they had the time, for the most part, parents and kids don’t necessarily enjoy the same media. (Raise your hand if you’ve discreetly texted your friends or shopped on your mobile phone undercover while watching “Cars 2″ with your kids.)

Other challenges: Parents don’t always know what kids need to learn and how to help them find it. And if the TV or computer isn’t in a common room, parents don’t know what kids are up to.

Joan Ganz Cooney Center

The Cooney Center has an idea to solve this — at least in the home: Design a product that allows parents to monitor and participate what kids are doing from a remote location so they can still be part of the media experience.
“Wouldn’t it be great if there was a device that recorded what kids are watching on TV?” Takeuchi said. “There should be tools that help parents better know, so they can have conversations about what their kids have been up to.”

Parents can also use Web control tools not just to block what they think might be dangerous Web sites, but also to learn what their kids are doing online. “In a lot of cases, parents don’t know what their kids are doing, for better or for worse. These are kids who are doing things behind closed doors that are great,” Takeuchi said. “They’re learning how to program or build Web sites, and if parents have the control setting, they can find out what their kids are interested in, and can even help them.”

Parents can also acquiesce to letting their kids guide them through the activity they’re interested in. The learning relationship between parent and child that goes in both directions can be powerful for both.

There are lots of other great recommendations in “The New Co-Viewing Report”: Build tools and experiences that revolve around a child’s existing interests, not just prescribed topics; keep everyone engaged by offering content that suitably entertains and sufficiently challenges; provide guidance for the more capable partner in ways that don’t require a lot of prior prep or extra time, actions that can help ensure that the intended benefits of the resource are realized.

UPDATE: The Cooney Center is still in the process of collecting data for the e-book study mentioned in the article. Results reported thus far are preliminary.

S. Craig Watkins

S. Craig Watkins maintains that teaching students to use digital media is not a luxury, but a necessity.

For schools in low-income communities, the idea of investing money, time, and energy into a digital media program or mobile-learning program might seem superfluous. Administrators and teachers already have so much to contend with — safety issues in high-crime communities, chronic student truancies, debilitating health issues due to poverty, families in constant state of flux, not to mention blocked access to wide swaths of the Internet.

In those cases, the idea of investing precious dollars or the attention of already overtaxed administrators seems unlikely.

But what if some of these very issues could be solved by creative ways of using digital technology in schools? That’s the argument coming from S. Craig Watkins, author of The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future, and a professor of sociology, African American studies and radio-television-film at The University of Texas at Austin.

“My concern is that as schools are now struggling with budget cuts, digital media and digital literacy is looked as a luxury as opposed to a necessity,” Watkins says. “I understand the enormous pressure that teachers and administrators are under, especially in the public school system. But we need to build a more compelling narrative that digital literacy is no longer a luxury but a necessity.”

Watkins points to research from the recent Horizon Report, as well as the pilot study with Project K-Nect, which clearly show the benefits of engaging students (even those considered “at-risk”) through mobile phone programs and curriculum.

“They’re already seeing the potential of mobile devices in science, art, and math classes,” Watkins says. “So it’s no longer a theoretical conversation — it’s already happening, but only in ‘islands of innovation.’ The real challenge is, are those opportunities to encounter those types of learning being evenly distributed?”

Probably not, he says. So even though studies have shown that kids in communities that are considered marginalized are actively online with their mobile phones, and we’re seeing plenty of evidence showing the benefits of mobile technologies in learning, the discussion around the achievement gap gets pulled back into the “no money” conversation.

BEYOND TEXTING AND FACEBOOK

Beyond just allowing kids to use their mobile phones in schools rather than telling them to shut it off — which is already a blasphemous idea in most schools — Watkins argues in a recent article on his blog that at-risk students need to be taught how to use these important tech tools beyond just texting and posting updates on Facebook.

“The educational environments that will thrive, the ones that will be the most innovative, and the ones that have most impact will be the ones that create opportunities for kids to create digital media literacies that we all recognize as important and that have social implications, educational implications and civic implications, as well,” he says. “So we have to equip kids with skills that help them not just to consume, but to become architects of their information environment and that requires different skills in using mobile devices and using the Internet.”

Watkins witnessed the powerful impact of helping low-income kids use technology to create digital tools that are directly relevant to them: A group of high school students who were charged with designing a playable game about green technology and green architecture.

“Every single day during one of the hottest summers on record, they showed up enthusiastic, and with very little involvement from teachers, created this game,” he said. “The whole project was student-centered, totally collaborative, and it was pretty incredible to see.”

But could a short-term, summertime project result in any kind of lasting impact on these kids’ lives after the project is over?

University of Texas

S. Craig Watkins

“For some, it will ignite passion for learning that will translate to the formal learning space,” he says. “They felt like it was a powerful experience and one they could take with them into other endeavors. It gave them confidence, self-efficacy as learner. They felt like they’d developed a new skill, but more broadly, it influenced their disposition towards learning and as learners.”

All of which points to the importance of teaching students how to create content — not just consume, play with, or pass along to friends.

In continuing his work in this realm, Watkins is working on a number of initiatives.

• Knowing the depth of impact of digital literacy on low-income kids, Watkins is now focusing his efforts on figuring out how to connect these skills to what he calls “civic outcomes” — issues that have a direct bearing on disenfranchised communities. “To teach them how to become community activists, and showing them how technology can be a powerful tool in problem-solving,” he says, such as conducting original research about health challenges in their communities, such as H.I.V., diabetes, asthma — “problems they face in real and tangible ways.”

• With support from the MacArthur Foundation, Watkins and Mimi Ito, among others will be embarking on a three-year study that examines how kids from low-income communities are “craftily navigating the digital world.” “What are the learning outcomes, what are the learning potentials, what are the obstacles?” he asks. In addition to a national survey of up to 1,000 people, there will be three case studies involving 100 to 150 students in four areas: Austin, Boulder, Southern California, and London.