Danielsaurus

The Benefits of Virtual Worlds for Kids

Audrey Watters:

It’s this connection to community — again, on- and offline — that may be most one of the greatest benefits of virtual worlds. Despite fears about predators, virtual worlds do offer kids a place to experiment and expand socially. Virtual worlds give children an opportunity to participate in a large social environment, with people from all over the world, often unsupervised by their parents. That may sound scary to parents, but for kids, it can be very liberating.

How the iPad Wants to Be Used

Last autumn, at the start of a new academic year, a small school in Scotland gave up classroom computers almost entirely – knowingly doing away with the aging notion of the ‘school IT lab’.

Instead, each child in the school was given an iPad – and since then, the technological shift has transformed the ways the students and teachers within the school integrate technology and the digital realm into classroom learning. Fraser Speirs, the IT director and technology teacher at the school who was the driving force behind the change, did the world an excellent deed by documenting the entire process: from the small, quirky technical decisions they faced implementing the change, to the giant shift in ideology and ways of thinking about technology that the adults at the school experienced. (Of course needless to say the kids themselves didn’t have any problem at all adapting to the change.)

Speirs’ blog post series, ‘The iPad Project,’ is a great read: honest, self-reflective, and a perfect invitation to begin to understand the potential for well-designed technology within education while recognizing the nuance and challenge of “doing it right.”

Talking About Toys

This year’s TED (Technology, Education, Design) Conference is over and past right now, but the folks behind TED were nice enough to put together a playlist of past TED Talks all centered around the topic of toys.

Today’s playlist is about toys that inspire learning, innovation — and of course fun! These are the toys of the technological age: they are alive, they think, they perform magic. What were your favorite toys as a kid (or an adult), and what did they inspire in you?

Henry Jenkins on ‘The Future of Teenagers’

It’s easy to forget that the small differences between generations are just that: small, especially when compared to the overwhelming commonalities across the ages. We all struggle to process the world, in much the same sorts of ways – even if the particularities of our quests differ.

That’s a good reminder from Henry Jenkins, especially when thinking about and discussing the youth of today:

First, the continuities across generations are much greater than the differences. Young people today listen to different bands and often acquire music through different platforms than teens a decade ago, yet one’s taste in music is still a key indicator of one’s personal and social identity for teens. Young people play different games on different game platforms yet young people acquire and display mastery through competitive play. Young people use different social networking platforms and communicate with their friends through text-messaging, yet forging a place for oneself within the social system of their schools remains a central goal of adolescence.

The rest of Jenkins’ (excellent) piece examines how adolescents are now growing up in a technology- and information-rich culture, and the incredible impact that has on empowering youth. It’s a great read, and one which leaves me thinking more and more that Jenkins’ work should be required reading before anyone is allowed to make a comment on “kids these days.”

Technology and Nature, Sitting in a Tree

Well-timed to serve as a coincidental but completely appropriate follow-up to the piece I wrote earlier today (wherein I rant about how much other people rant about children), Richard Louv shares the right way to think about the topic of children, technology and nature:

Many people believe that technology is the antithesis of nature. Here’s an alternate view. A fishing rod is technology. So is that fancy backpack. Or a compass. Or a tent. When boomers my age ran through the woods with play guns (as distasteful as that might be to some people), they were using technology as an entry tool to nature.

Today, the family that together goes geo-caching or wildlife photographing with their digital cameras, or collecting pond samples, is doing something as legitimate as going fishing; both involve gadgets that offer an excuse to get outside. Young citizen naturalists are bound to have a different attitude about technology from many older people — and that could be an advantage.

Louv, as you may know, is a renowned environmentalist and a prolific writer – perhaps best recognized for his tremendous book Last Child in the Woods. Needless to say, it’s nice to hear words like these coming from someone like him, who is regarded as the perennial expert on the subject of children and nature.

Declaring War on PowerPoint

As they say, the Enemy lurks between the bullet points.

Encouraging Children’s Reading Habits

What does it take to get kids to read?

Publishing expert Michael Norris, editor of the Book Publishing Report, is now releasing the findings from a full year’s worth of surveys he conducted about the children’s publishing industry – and the answer his research led him to regarding that question might come as a surprise to many.

The Guardian shares more about Norris’s conclusions:

[D]espite the best intentions, it is well-meaning mothers and fathers who often stop their sons and daughters from picking up the reading habit. “Parents have too much of a role in deciding which books their child is going to read,” said Norris. “It is turning children off. They should let them choose.”

Norris’s research found that it is parental attitudes and pressure – not the allure of technology – that keeps children from reading more. (Whoops. There goes that scapegoat.) He also found, unsurprisingly, that children buy and read books only based on personal suitability and taste. As he summarizes, in a line which good librarians and booksellers are sure to enjoy:

“It should all be about patience and believing that books are sold to one person, one at a time,” said Norris.

It’s an interesting overview of children’s reading habits and the children’s book industry as a whole, from a well-placed, authoritative perspective. Norris also later shares some truly useful tips within the article about how to encourage children’s love of reading – to which I can only add, for reference, Daniel Pennac’s The Rules of the Reader. It’s all well worth a look.

UPDATE: Publisher Kate Wilson kindly points out in a comment on the piece that, while of course children’s own reading independence is an admirable and desirable pursuit, there is also a real joy in the shared act of parents and children reading together. It’s a fair point – and I think it’s worth saying that, naturally, one form of reading doesn’t have to necessarily come at the expense of the other. All of this also goes to show, though, that parents who themselves enjoy reading – and create a pleasurable culture around reading, whether it is as an individual or shared activity – will likely also have kids who enjoy reading. It really is a cultural thing.

Jason Kottke: On The Extinction of Paper Children’s Books

Sure, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ on iPad was a neat example of the possibility of the new form for storytelling – if still more slanted toward the adult reader and fashioned as something of a novelty experience. But does that mean printed children’s books will go away anytime soon? (And this really is a ridiculous proposition; no, they won’t. But hypothetically, we’ll honor the question.)

Quite simply and obviously, no. As Jason Kottke says:

I’d like to assure the childless [blogger and Digg-cofounder Kevin] Rose that if paper books ever go extinct (they won’t), paper children’s books will be the last to go, particularly among the pre-K crowd. E-books are “broken” in several ways that are important to kids, not the least of which is that paper books are super useful as floors in really tall block buildings.

‘The More Things Change…’

Children’s publisher Stephen Roxburgh recounts the experience of test-driving a new iPad with his five-year-old daughter:

For those who can’t imagine sitting down with a child in their lap reading on a screen, listen to this. The last book we looked at was Winnie-the-Pooh, which ports beautifully over to the iPad screen. In the horizontal mode the book is laid out in spreads and the full-color Sheppard illustrations are as gorgeous as ever. I read Belle a few pages and then asked her what she wanted to do next. She said, simply, “Read.”

An iPad App Helps an Autistic Teenager Communicate

It appears readers with dyslexia aren’t the only ones with social difficulties finding benefit in the iPad. Here’s one success story about a dad who decided to create an iPad app to help his autistic teenage son better communicate:

Autism often includes physical limitations, such as motor- control difficulty, that make actions like speech or typing impossible. Some autistic people communicate using a card with a large alphabet on it, which they point to with a pencil to spell out words. This process often includes active participation by a facilitator who encourages the user and says the words as they are being spelled.

iMean presents a similar letterboard on the entire face of the iPad. The user points with a finger, and the app collects the words on its text display as they’re spelled out. iMean offers word suggestions to complete partly-spelled words, speeding up the conversation. The facilitator can participate, but iMean encourages greater communication independence.

“Dan was using it well within minutes,” recounts Bergmann. “He used it to tell me that his favorite feature of the app is word- prediction, because it makes him read more.”

This is admittedly straight from a press release, and what the app itself does is nothing remarkably new – Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices have been around a long time and taken many forms. What is new, though, is the admirably low pricetag: $4.99 for the app, which is a steal compared to similar single-function devices - which have in the past started well-into the hundreds of dollars.

The iPad Meets the Children’s Book

A great, comprehensive look from industry trade journal Publishers Weekly at just what’s going on in the children’s publishing world to get stories onto the iPad. Well worth reading, even if you don’t have an iPad. You can almost see how the industry is looking ahead to their future, and what it might mean for our children’s everyday reading experiences.

How the iPhone Is Helping Dyslexic Readers

Writing in the Guardian, Howard Hill gives one powerful testimonial in support of the iPhone – sharing how much easier the phone has made reading books for him, as someone with dyslexia. Where text once appeared in a jumbled disarray, and books presented a monumental struggle – with Hill often losing his place or quitting out of fear – something about reading on the iPhone made it easier, both for him and many others, he notes.

The first title I selected was The Count of Monte Cristo. I raced through this on my iPhone in just over a week, my wife asking why I was continually playing with my iPhone. When I’d finished I enjoyed the story so much that I went to buy a copy for a friend. In the bookshop I was amazed. It was more than 1,000 pages! Had I been presented with the book in this form I would never have read it. It would have been too much like climbing a mountain.

So why I had found it easier to read from my iPhone? First, an ordinary page of text is split into about four pages. The spacing seems generous and because of this I don’t get lost on the page. Second, the handset’s brightness makes it easier to take in words. “Many dyslexics have problems with ‘crowding’, where they’re distracted by the words surrounding the word they’re trying to read,” says John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University and chair of the Dyslexia Research Trust. “When reading text on a small phone, you’re reducing the crowding effect.”

Indeed, it makes quite a bit of sense: having an extra degree of control over presentation – which ebooks and readers like the iPad and iPhone can provide – can make all the difference to those with reading difficulties, allowing them to separate the text from the (often dauntingly difficult) page layout and control how they take in what they’re reading. I wouldn’t be surprised to see future research studies confirm these anecdotal stories soon.

A Final Word on Buying an iPad This Weekend…

(… and why buying one is no death-knell to the future of our children.)

Andre Torrez:

Be wary of closed systems: yes. Accept that future generations will only have gray paint and DRM’d pencils to choose from? Come on. You and I grew up (probably) punching Hayes AT codes into modems when others were out running around on the playground. And generations before us were soldering capacitors and breathing lead infused smoke. And generations before that were relaying bawdy jokes by tapping magnets that would send an electrical charge across town.

Our kids’ creativity is not at risk just because the iPad has come around. If anything, its simplicity and functionality may do more to inspire creativity, by clearing the technical out of the way and laying down a blank canvas to create and play on. And as far as the ability to tinker behind-the-scenes goes, there’s nothing to keep you from firing up Xcode on your Mac (let’s face it, at this point the iPad is not equipped or intended to be your sole computing device) and launching away at writing and executing code or programming apps for your tethered iPad.

That is, after all, what the pros do. And who’s to say that kids can’t do the same thing?

Alice Stumbles onto the iPad

An early yet promising look at the potential experience the iPad can offer children’s stories.

The Kids Are Alright With iPads

In a piece commenting on the supposedly “closed” nature of Apple’s iPad, John Gruber has (somewhat inadvertently) written a stirring defense in testament to the capacity and ingenuity of children.

The criticism around Apple’s new device centers around it’s “closed, consumption-oriented nature” and what this means for the future of computing – not only for adults, but for children, where they might supposedly no longer allowed to hack, program, and tinker their time away with only an iPad at their disposal. Cory Doctorow, of Boing Boing, sees the iPad as perhaps too “perfect” – too complete, too closed off to exploration. And here’s what Mark Pilgrim wrote about it, in a piece entitled “Tinkerer’s Sunset”:

Once upon a time, Apple made the machines that made me who I am. I became who I am by tinkering. Now it seems they’re doing everything in their power to stop my kids from finding that sense of wonder. Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world.

It’s a fair criticism – but as Gruber argues, it’s not quite the full picture. Not only is the iPad just one device among several that we use, but here’s the important bit: Kids will always find a way to make things work for them. We just have to show a little trust. As if to illustrate the point, Gruber shares the story of 13-year-old Sam, who recently wrote him to introduce an iPad app that the boy wrote himself. Gruber:

He’s 13 years old and he has created and is selling an iPad app in the same store where companies like EA, Google, and even Apple itself distribute iPad apps. His app is ready to go on the first day the product is available. Not a fake app. Not a junior app. A real honest-to-god iPad app. Imagine a 13-year-old in 1978 who could produce and sell his own Atari 2600 cartridges.

Somehow I don’t think young Mr. Kaplan sees the iPad as hurting his sense of wonder or entrepreneurism.

13-year-old iPad programmers? Absolutely. And Sam’s not the only one out there – not at all.

Yes, as it turns out the kids are, indeed, alright.

Text Alerts for Baby Care

Interesting.

‘One iPad Per Child’

John Biggs at CrunchGear:

Remember textbooks? Yeah. Forget about textbooks. Students at Seton Hill University are all getting iPads and access to all their textbooks on the iBook store. I’d say it’s one of the biggest changes in pedagogy since the move from the one-room schoolhouse.

It’s now required: First-years at Seton will receive a 13” MacBook and an iPad, in a clear move to unify campus technology and do away with traditional textbooks.

From an economic standpoint, at least, it’s probably a great decision. I still hurt from paying for those textbooks in undergrad, and unfortunately most weren’t even necessary in print form. Cutting out those print production costs and instead providing textbook materials in digital format would undoubtedly save bundles for students. From a pedagogical standpoint, I can’t say enough good things about trying to incorporate a more democratic, multimedia form of information into higher education settings.

(Via Barking Robot.)

‘Games Have Crept Out and They’re Going Everywhere’

Carnegie Mellon University professor Jesse Schell’s excellent presentation about how many new products and marketing efforts are being designed as games or in otherwise playful ways – i.e., a great example being geocaching: “Because it’s cooler to go for a walk in the woods when there’s a treasure chest at the end.”

See the full presentation here.

A great talk, and I’m actually excited to see how much the idea of play has filtered into the commercial world we live in. (Unfortunately this same thought also seems to be scaring the dickens out of some people, too. Go figure.)