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From Washington: A Special Conference Report 10/98

The conference had a long name - "Ensuring a Quality Children's Media Culture in the Digital Age: Setting a Research Agenda" - but some of us felt the meeting itself might've been too short! It gathered Internet industry folk and researchers from academia and think tanks in one place to look at good products "out there" in the marketplace, some of the assumptions they're based on, what research is needed, and where we need to go from here. It was a first for the meeting's hosts: the Center for Media Education (CME) in Washington and the College of Communications at University of Texas, Austin.

This fascinating snapshot of the full range of people's perceptions about kids and digital media: a child psychologist very negative about all interactive media; some professors and researchers staunchly supportive of the positive effects they've observed; some academics still withholding judgment because they've only studied conventional-media impacts on children; professionals who were also parents both excited and concerned for their children; lobbyists discouraged by policymakers' ignorance; foundation executives trying to figure out what to fund; and media industry executives excited about their work with kids and their interactive products/sites and plans.

The major themes we heard throughout the day and a half were:

The conference was packed with ideas, vision, complaints, concerns, and promise. Here's a mere sampler from speakers and panelists (with links to their work and Web sites):

Erik Strommen of Microsoft's ActiMates (interactive stuffed toys Barney, Arthur, and DW): He presented Arthur across the Internet from Seattle, after CME president Kathryn Montgomery used Arthur "live" in her keynote. Arthur's very cute, but a number of derogatory comments followed throughout the morning. A key one: He never "shuts up." One researcher and mother commented on how little ones like to take their stuffed animals become friends and they like to do everything with them, including naps. Arthur can't be a real friend because he'd keep the child awake. An amazing design flaw. [Stay tuned for our December issue on toys and the Internet!]

Tina Sharkey of Children's Television Workshop showed CTW's latest Web iteration, which includes material for parents. She spoke on the importance of what CTW calls "parallel dialogue" (kids & parents online together). "Kids are actually thanking us for teaching their parents how to download, so they don't have to! They're losing their patience."

Idit Harel of MaMaMedia: The "clickerati," she said, are looking for "hard fun" - they want to do things for the screens, not just have their computer screens do things for them; they love complexities and challenges (hard fun). Idit has two daughters, and when one was 15 and the other 4, she told us, they were playing a role-modeling game at home one time, the younger one chose to be a computer. The 4-year-old said, "I'll be the inside of the computer, and I can do a lot of things for you. I can play music for you, I can draw. Just click!" Idit said that, when she came home that night, her older daughter said, "Something is really wrong with your daughter!" Idit apparently wasn't concerned. "My older daughter's favorite technology is still the phone and the remote. She likes boom boxes, video games, the Internet. My littlest one loves it all…. Figuring things out with technology and learning is cool. High tech is not high anymore; it's really 'my tech.' My older daughter is really a consumer of media. The little one is consuming and choosing - creating new expectations as she goes." The conclusion we reached at this point in the conference: In the digital media environment, children are causative, not just reactive.

John Hollar of PBS mentioned a recent study: 18 million kids 6-18 are online in the US right now; 43% of all teens are. More than half the parents of online kids would pay for a service to monitor content for their children. PBS Kids, launched in September, is the most popular Web site PBS offers - a month after launch! Former PBS teens show "Zoom" is coming back January 4 as a completely parallel (TV/Web) production by kids, for kids. The site will be up in about 6 weeks. PBS is thinking a lot about digital TV right now. We think they're Zoom as a prototype for DTV, along with their planned DTV show for grownups: Ken Burns's "Frank Lloyd Wright" next month.

Laura Groppe of Girl Games in Austin. Forty percent of their resources are dedicated to research on girls, and they have a large contract with Procter & Gamble. They're working on a combined TV show (to air on Fox sports), Web site, and CD-ROM targeting teen-aged girls. Many of our readers probably know this, but here's what Laura's research (done with small groups of girls in slumber-party settings) shows: Girls are constantly interacting (with each other, not with the media!) across many media, both traditional and emerging. They go online and talk on the phone simultaneously. They hop from medium to medium without distinguishing among them. Their room is command central - many of them "need" two phone lines into their rooms now! Most of their interaction is with their own group at school - not with strangers somewhere "out on the 'Net." [As she was talking about the importance of chat, online and off, to this age group, it occurred to us that, for teen-aged girls, chat itself is a product! We ran that by Laura afterwards, and she was intrigued by the thought.] Our conclusion: Research in this age is about drilling down - intimate knowledge of narrow groups.

Sheri Parks, professor at the University of Maryland: The things that families are most interested in are things that help them be a family (like what Laura said: teens want products that help them be teens, be more effective/cutting edge at what they already do). On children: reading restructures their natural way of thinking (it's so linear); with computers, the learning curve is quicker, closer to the way they think.

Amy Bruckman of Georgia Tech (formerly of the MIT Media Lab) spoke about her fascinating project called MOOSE Crossing. In it, she runs and does research about multi-user communities for kids, in which they collaboratively (via the Internet) develop their own imaginary worlds by creating and acting out their own characters in these vitual places (in the process they learn creative writing and programming). It's all text-based; there's no fancy Java or Shockwave technology needed - not even the Web. A big theme for the academics at the conference was that now, until all have Internet access, we should be focusing on text because it's accessible, doesn't require broadband access. Of course, the 'Net industry has to look ahead to broadband, digital TV, etc.). There was interesting tension at the conference between "out there" industry and universal-access-now academia - at least these were assumptions the two "sides" had about each other. There were also a number of proud "luddites" (anti-technology folk), who always provide a refreshing reality check.

Justine Cassell of MIT is in the middle of a huge (and fascinating) international project called Junior Summit '98, involving 1,000 kids in 139 countries (she received applications from 8,000 kids). The project supports 5 languages, but the kids speak 22 in the Web site, and they translate their own material. 100 of them have been chosen to spend 3 weeks in Cambridge at the actual "summit." Justine said the participants were "hell-bent on having a chat room in the site." Since the rule was that nobody can be excluded, they translate and transcribe everything into e-mail for the kids who can't access the Web.

Sherry Turkle of MIT, author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet - Sherry told us, "I'm more irritated than most about this computer addiction thing. People assume the intensity and the time spent on the computer by children constitute addiction. I would like to innoculate people against the kind of research that comes out of using this phrase.... People usually approach the screen in the spirit of self-reflection. Teachers, parents, and counselors need to be ready to help kids metabolize what they're doing on screen and see it as a very productive place to work through issues. I'm having a tough time getting psychoanalysts interested in this area...." She told us emphatically that there needs to be more professors and researchers working in her field.

Ellen Wartella of University of Texas, Austin: "I fully subscribe to Sherry Turkle's proposal that we need to know how self-reflection in media shape self-identity in children, and their identification with the rest of world.... Somehow we've embraced computers in schools the way we never embraced TV. Why is that? I'm particularly concerned that we have no ongoing federally funded research into education and how the media affect it. We have nothing like that. Why is that? The commercial industry doesn't want to study media effects, and the government doesn't. We're predicating policy on emotion."

Bill Tally of the National Education Association's Center for Children & Technology: "The 'Net is a way to break down the isolation of classrooms and schools. Teachers in traditional school are functionaries with little autonomy. Networks allow them to be professionals and more autonomous. Learning happens across all the aspects of kids' lives, and a lot of projects right now are investigating the linkages between libraries, homes, and schools.

Laurie Lipper of Children's Partnership: "We spent a year with AOL and Disney on child Internet safety. We're working on trying to create a culture in which parents matter and have an important role. It'd be helpful to have research that connects kids to parents.... We need public opinion research. We need to give voice to what parents and children want.

Holly Holmberg Brooks and Lamahose Kunene (Khosi) of Highwood Online, GirlSite.org and OurSite, now in development: Holly said the purpose of GirlSite is to give young people a voice, which she proceeded to demonstrate: Their presentation was largely a poem by Khosi - a young educator raised in South Africa and many other countries - that moved all of us in the room; it spoke to the true meaning of interactivity. Here are just a few lines: "Does infinite potential scare you? Changing 'what is' to 'what should be?' You are the person I spend my days looking for. I love you. As I love air, as I love life, as I love humanity. As we move boldly into the future, accessing our infinite poential, as OurSite." (The full text of Khosi's poem is here, but text will never fill a room, as Khosi's voice did!) Since the conference, as of this writing, she's presented the poem twice more: this piece twice more - for President Clinton at a fundraiser for Sen. Barbara Boxer in Los Angeles and for a benefit for City Kids in New York City.

Tom Tate of the USDA spoke about the National 4-H Youth Tech Corps, for which kids are the board of directors. Of the 5.5 million kids "we've engaged in purposeful learning activities after school, only 12% are in rural areas; 88% are in cities." They brought 30 young people to Washington in April '97 and the kids themselves came up with the Youth Tech Corps idea. One result: Federal Resources for Educational Excellence Web site, which is a giant compendium of interesting projects for kids - culled from file cabinets and Web sites throughout the federal government. It's an excellent resource we've reported on.

Robbie Berg of Wellesley College: He was part of the LEGO MindStorms project we've reported on - what we called a "bundled toy," which includes software, motors, LEGO bricks, design challenges, and Web-based community. But there are other "programmable bricks" projects! They're now testing "Beyond Black Boxes" construction kids that let kids build their own scientific instruments. A bird feeder built by an 11-year-old girl detects when birds land and takes a picture of them when they do. It's being testing in Computer Clubhouses after-school programs.

Pat Aufderheide of American University: "When you don't have a coherent body of research to draw on, these issues are always political and when not backed by solid research they enter the political arena in an extremely volatile way." We think we're all seeing this in Washington.

We were interested to note that nobody spoke to what two of NFN's interviewees, educators Marel Rogers and Della Curtis, have said about the Web's effectiveness as a tool to teach critical evaluation (the links are to our newsletters containing interviews with Marel and Della)! We also noted the many calls for more communication and debate (that includes parents). Perhaps our subscribers have some suggestions on how to get the public discussion going at a higher pitch. Please e-mail us your thoughts!


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