To parent, educator, and graduate student Seann Dikkers, videogaming is a great parenting, teaching, and learning tool. A teacher for 10 years and school administrator for four, Dikkers is now working on his PhD in education, and he says in his site, GamingMatter.com, that the PhD part is his students' fault because they "were the first to ‘get it’ and point him toward games as a means to … [Read more...] about A parent & educator on what gaming can teach
Archives for August 2010
Videogaming: Parents can be workarounds too
It's a great headline in Kotaku.com – "Confessions of a failed gaming parent" – and what he's confessing to is that the loophole his all-too-smart son Tristan found was ... his parents! "My wife and I set up parental locks on the [Xbox] console and on Tristan's Xbox Live gold account," so Tristan found "human error" workaround. Among other measures, his parents didn't allow Tristan to play Halo … [Read more...] about Videogaming: Parents can be workarounds too
Fresh data on tweens’ media use
A whopping 90% of US 9-to-12-year-olds play online games, according to a just-released survey by M2 Research. Broken down by gender, 91% of tween boys and 93% of tween girls play games online, M2 says. The survey of 5,000 children and teens nationwide also found that Facebook is now the favorite Web site among boys 8-11 and girls 12-15 (Facebook's minimum age is 13 – see this earlier post of mine … [Read more...] about Fresh data on tweens’ media use
For perspective: Snapshot of Brazil’s social networking
Facebook's now taking off there, but Brazil has had a vibrant, more mainstream social networking scene for some time, maybe even longer than the US has – because of Google's Orkut. When danah boyd's new article about class divisions in US social networking reached Pedro Augusto of Brazil's Center for Technology & Society in Rio, he emailed her about how this works in his country; she posted … [Read more...] about For perspective: Snapshot of Brazil’s social networking
‘Net addiction’ & depression
One young person's strategy for so-called Net addiction is FreeFace.com. He commented in a New York Times blog asking students for their strategies that, as a part-time student [who] "found myself drifting sometimes, usually to news websites or Facebook," he started using this time management software that restricts access to sites and programs during time periods the user sets for him or herself. … [Read more...] about ‘Net addiction’ & depression