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Sean McHugh

The Touch-Screen Generation - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • he hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence
  • In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy on very young children and media. In 1999, the group had discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, citing research on brain development that showed this age group’s critical need for “direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers.” The updated report began by acknowledging that things had changed significantly since then.
  • To date, no body of research has definitively proved that the iPad will make your preschooler smarter or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rust her neural circuitry—the device has been out for only three years, not much more than the time it takes some academics to find funding and gather research subjects. So what’s a parent to do?
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  • Previously, young children had to be shown by their parents how to use a mouse or a remote, and the connection between what they were doing with their hand and what was happening on the screen took some time to grasp. But with the iPad, the connection is obvious, even to toddlers. Touch technology follows the same logic as shaking a rattle or knocking down a pile of blocks: the child swipes, and something immediately happens.
  • A more accurate point of comparison for a TV viewer’s physiological state would be that of someone deep in a book, says Kirkorian, because during both activities we are still, undistracted, and mentally active.
  • even very young children can be discriminating viewers—that they are not in fact brain-dead, but rather work hard to make sense of what they see and turn it into a coherent narrative that reflects what they already know of the world.
  • Children’s lives are filled with media at younger and younger ages, and we need to take advantage of what these technologies have to offer
  • More important, she made the video demonstration explicitly interactive.
  • That exchange was enough to nearly erase the video deficit.
  • That kind of contingent interaction (I do something, you respond) is what captivates a toddler and can be a significant source of learning for even very young children—learning that researchers hope the children can carry into the real world. It’s not exactly the ideal social partner the American Academy of Pediatrics craves. It’s certainly not a parent or caregiver. But it’s as good an approximation as we’ve ever come up with on a screen, and it’s why children’s-media researchers are so excited about the iPad’s potential.
  • something about tapping the screen, about getting feedback and being corrected in real time, is itself instructive, and enables the toddlers to absorb information accurately, regardless of its source
  • A TV is static and lacks one of the most important things to toddlers, which is a “two-way exchange of information
  • The statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics assumes a zero-sum game: an hour spent watching TV is an hour not spent with a parent. But parents know this is not how life works. There are enough hours in a day to go to school, play a game, and spend time with a parent, and generally these are different hours. Some people can get so drawn into screens that they want to do nothing else but play games. Experts say excessive video gaming is a real problem, but they debate whether it can be called an addiction and, if so, whether the term can be used for anything but a small portion of the population.
  • We live in a screen age, and to say to a kid, ‘I’d love for you to look at a book but I hate it when you look at the screen’ is just bizarre. It reflects our own prejudices and comfort zone. It’s nothing but fear of change, of being left out.”
  • a useful framework—what she calls the three C’s—for thinking about media consumption: content, context, and your child. She poses a series of questions—Do you think the content is appropriate? Is screen time a “relatively small part of your child’s interaction with you and the real world?”—and suggests tailoring your rules to the answers, child by child.
Sean McHugh

The Art of Staying Focused in a Distracting World - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • continuous partial attention to describe the modern predicament of being constantly attuned to everything without fully concentrating on anythin
  • Continuous partial attention is neither good nor bad. We need different attention strategies in different contexts
  • The important thing for us as humans is to have the capacity to tap the attention strategy that will best serve us in any given momen
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  • We may think that kids have a natural fascination with phones. Really, children have a fascination with whatever Mom and Dad find fascinating. If they are fascinated by the flowers coming up in the yard, that’s what the children are going to find fascinating. And if Mom and Dad can’t put down the device with the screen, the child is going to think, That’s where it’s all at, that’s where I need to be! I interviewed kids between the ages of 7 and 12 about this. They said things like “My mom should make eye contact with me when she talks to me” and “I used to watch TV with my dad, but now he has his iPad, and I watch by myself.”
  • What we’re doing now is modeling a primary relationship with screens, and a lack of eye contact with people. It ultimately can feed the development of a kind of sociopathy and psychopathy.
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    We may think that kids have a natural fascination with phones. Really, children have a fascination with whatever Mom and Dad find fascinating. If they are fascinated by the flowers coming up in the yard, that's what the children are going to find fascinating. And if Mom and Dad can't put down the device with the screen, the child is going to think, That's where it's all at, that's where I need to be! I interviewed kids between the ages of 7 and 12 about this. They said things like "My mom should make eye contact with me when she talks to me" and "I used to watch TV with my dad, but now he has his iPad, and I watch by myself."
Sean McHugh

My First Year of One to One: A Reflection - 0 views

  • One of my fears when I was able to put a device into the hands of every student was that the students might focus on the screen, the way many children do with a television or a computer. Those children become absorbed by the device, ignoring all that is going on around them. Happily, this has not at all proved to be the case for us. The students did not want to just use the iPads; they wanted to share them.  The hum of voices excitedly talking to their peers about what they were doing was just the same as it had always been. They just had different things to share.
  • One of the things I have come to value most highly is choice.  I have offered my students as much choice in how they learn and in how they demonstrate their learning as I can. The iPads have given my students so many more opportunities for choice.
  • the iPads have given us a rich variety of options that were just not available before
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  • My children were not using their iPads in every spare moment—they still liked other classroom tools such as Lego, dominos and drawing paper—but the iPads were a popular choice
  • I didn’t get around to figuring out how to use it, but my students did. They taught themselves and then taught me as well.
  • Some students preferred digital and some preferred non-digital, but most moved seamlessly back and forth between the two.
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    "One of my fears when I was able to put a device into the hands of every student was that the students might focus on the screen, the way many children do with a television or a computer. Those children become absorbed by the device, ignoring all that is going on around them. Happily, this has not at all proved to be the case for us. The students did not want to just use the iPads; they wanted to share them.  The hum of voices excitedly talking to their peers about what they were doing was just the same as it had always been. They just had different things to share."
Sean McHugh

Screen Time? How about Creativity Time? - Mitchel Resnick - Medium - 0 views

  • Too often, designers of educational materials and activities simply add a thin layer of technology and gaming over antiquated curriculum and pedagogy
    • Sean McHugh
       
      I think because the designers of these apps are not educators and are therefore assuming that they often traditional education they experienced is the norm or at the very least is still a desirable outcome for the kids that they are designing their Apps for.
  • But I’m also sure that some students found it very discouraging and disempowering. And the activity put an emphasis on questions that can be answered quickly with right and wrong answers — certainly not the type of questions that I would prioritize in a classroom.
  • In many cases, the skeptics apply very different standards to new technologies than to “old” technologies. They worry about the antisocial impact of a child spending hours working on a computer, while they don’t have any concerns about a child spending the same time reading a book. They worry that children interacting with computers don’t spend enough time outside, but they don’t voice similar concerns about children playing musical instruments. I’m not suggesting that there are no reasons for concern. I’m just asking for more consistency.
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  • For kids growing up today, laptops and mobile phones aren’t high-tech tools — they’re everyday tools, just like crayons and watercolors.
  • Of course there’s a problem if children spend all their time interacting with screens — just as there would be a problem if they spent all their time playing the violin or reading books or playing sports. Spending all your time on any one thing is problematic. But the most important issue with screen time is not quantity but quality. There are many ways of interacting with screens; it doesn’t make sense to treat them all the same
  • Rather than trying to minimize screen time, I think parents and teachers should try to maximize creative time. The focus shouldn’t be on which technologies children are using, but rather what children are doing with them
Sean McHugh

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/07/us/video-games-child-sex-abuse.html - 0 views

  • Sexual predators and other bad actors have found an easy access point into the lives of young people: They are meeting them online through multiplayer video games and chat apps
  • Games are a common target, but predators are also finding many victims on social platforms like Instagram
  • Six years ago, a little over 50 reports of the crimes, commonly known as “sextortion,” were referred to the federally designated clearinghouse in suburban Washington that tracks online child sexual abuse. Last year, the center received over 1,500
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Most likely migrating from other haunts like playgrounds and shopping malls.
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  • Almost every single teenage boy in America — 97 percent — plays video games, while about 83 percent of girls do
    • Sean McHugh
       
      And you can bet those percentages are equal or favouring girls when it comes to chat.
  • promote “healthy gaming habits” and develop students’ science and technology skills
  • Parents aren’t telling their kids at 6 years old, ‘Keep your clothes on online
  • It had nothing to do with gameplay
  • Parents aren’t telling their kids at 6 years old, ‘Keep your clothes on online,’” Mr. Halpert said. “But they need to.
  • Minecraft, said it planned to release software early next year that could recognize some forms of grooming and sextortion. The company said it would offer the software to other tech businesses free of charge
  • a 26-year-old Ohio man was charged with sexual exploitation after claiming to be 13 on Yubo and luring a 12-year-old girl, the authorities said
    • Sean McHugh
       
      I guess most systems are focused on the opposite, kids pretending they are adults...
  • But the solution many game developers and online safety experts return to is that parents need to know what their children are playing, and that children need to know what tools are available to them. Sometimes that means blocking users and shutting off chat functions, and sometimes it means monitoring the games as they are being played. “‘Literacy’ is the word I say a billion times a day
  • parents should react carefully when their children report encounters with online predators. Punishing the children — no more video games or social media, for example — could backfire by pushing them into even more dangerous places for their online activity.
Sean McHugh

What every parent needs to know about video games: a crash course | Technology | thegua... - 0 views

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    What every parent needs to know about video games: a crash course Children of all ages are spending hours every day playing videos games, yet many parents struggle to understand why. Here's our essential guide
Sean McHugh

expert reaction to study on screen use and white brain matter in children | Science Med... - 0 views

  • the study has a number of features that reduce confidence in the robustness of the findings.
  • The review of prior literature is unbalanced to emphasise adverse effects of screen time and ignore conflicting studies
  • too small to give reliable estimates of effects of screen time
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  • the scale does not distinguish between TV and other types of screen use
  • no child had a vocabulary score in the impaired range
  • misleading
  • The study was not pre-registered, making it hard to know how many analyses were conducted but not reported
  • nothing is said about predicted associations between the brain measures and the language measures
    • Sean McHugh
       
      This highlights the difference between neuroscience and cognitive science, specifically indicators about changes in brain tissue mean nothing unless they are accompanied by behavioural indicators that support these observations. In the case of this study the children were found to have language development that was more advanced than would be expected for their age regardless of the brain scans.
  • The study does not provide credible evidence of an adverse effect of screen time on child development, but could serve to stoke anxiety in parents who may worry that they have damaged their child’s brain by allowing access to TV, phones or tablets
  • an association between screen time and brain wiring says nothing about causation: you can speculate that an apparent delay in brain development might be caused by high screen time but it is equally possible that lower brain developmental status increases screen time
Sean McHugh

Tynker - 0 views

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    "Tynker is a new computing platform designed specifically to teach children computational thinking and programming skills in a fun and imaginative way. The cloud hosted system is now available to teachers, schools and districts."
Sean McHugh

The Game Finder | Find the perfect video games for your family on Everybody Plays - 0 views

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    "Finding the right games for children can be a bit of a challenge - but our Game Finder makes it easy. We give games an age rating based on their difficulty, and a separate rating for their content. Simply drag the slider to set your child's age, choose a maximum level of content you'd be happy with, and click the button to find a list of games your kids will love! Check the "What does this mean" box for more!"
Sean McHugh

Social And Emotional Benefits Of Video Games: Metacognition and Relationships | MindShift - 1 views

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    For years, most people thought that video games were like candy: mostly bad, tempting to children, but okay in moderation. Now we understand that they can have more "nutritional" value than our parents ever imagined.
Sean McHugh

Screen-time does not disrupt children's sleep, new study finds | University of Oxford - 0 views

  • new research findings from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, has shown that screen time has very little practical effect on children’s sleep.
  • while the correlation between screen time and sleep in children exists, it might be too small to make a significant difference to a child’s sleep
  • Focusing on bedtime routines and regular patterns of sleep, such as consistent wake-up times, are much more effective strategies for helping young people sleep than thinking screens themselves play a significant role
Sean McHugh

Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking - Quillette - 0 views

  • critical thinking is not a skill that can be improved through practice—like a golf swing—nor is it a “general” capability. Instead, it is an abstract description of what humans can do as a result amassing a wealth of underpinning knowledge and skills relevant to the particular context in which thinking is to be deployed
  • young children are capable of thinking critically about subjects they know a great deal about, whereas trained scientists can fail to think critically in areas where they are less knowledgeable
  • not all knowledge is created equal. We need to differentiate between knowledge and information. Much of the information stored on the Internet is pictures of kittens or videos of people singing sea shanties. This can keep increasing exponentially without any need for school children to become acquainted with it
Sean McHugh

Why the debate on reading print versus digital books needs to change - Parenting for a ... - 0 views

  • There is a concern in some quarters that children’s activities with screens will replace their reading of books. There is a concern that the habit of skimming digital texts will carry over to reading on paper. These are valid concerns but they are not substantiated by research and they omit the important role of context and individual readers in driving change.
  • There could be a difference because of the way gains were measured (methodological reasons) and/or because of how gains were defined (theoretical reasons).
  • The calibration process is not dependent on the digital medium but on the readers’ preference
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  • The readers’ awareness of how they read on screen (and the calibration process they engage in when reading on screen), might be the sources of the print-versus-screen difference
  • The chain of influences is an essential piece of understanding for the debates on reading on and off-screen. It is a continuation of a long argument in media studies where one camp of researchers focuses on metacognition and another camp of researchers on the inherent characteristics of the medium.
  • The screen introduced hyperlinks, large collections of e-books, automatic possibility for translation, multimedia representations of meaning
  • Recent research by the National Literacy Trust in the UK shows that it is not the reading medium but readers’ motivation that explains their reading habits: skilled readers read a lot and well both on paper and screen.
  • children are less aware of the disconnect between a digital and non-digital reading medium than any generation of children before them. It follows that they have different preferences, different resources for calibration, different lived examples of reading around them
  • The ‘home sweet home’ for reading in the digital age is the provision of, and the practice in the use, of high-quality texts on and off screen
Sean McHugh

Our new research shows that reading both in print and on screens benefits children's li... - 0 views

  • Our new research into digital reading has found that young people who are the most engaged with reading are more likely to read both on paper and on screen than their peers who have low engagement with reading
  • Pupils eligible for free school meals and boys with the lowest levels of reading engagement are two of the groups most likely to benefit from using digital formats
  • young people who read above the level expected for their age read fiction both in print and on screen
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  • Digital reading is becoming an increasingly important part of children’s literacy lives. It gives children new and exciting ways to access a wide range of reading materials and is particularly effective at getting disengaged groups of children excited about reading
Sean McHugh

We Were Wrong About Limiting Children's Screen Time - 0 views

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    Screen time
Sean McHugh

Seven reasons why grown ups should play more video games | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

  • the last five years has seen a huge renaissance in video game design
  • a lot of the technologies that are going to affect our lives in the next decade are being tested and developed in the video game sphere.
  • A lot of the people now making, producing and funding television and movies grew up playing video games – and that influence is becoming ever more obvious and important.
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  • how you cooperate on video game tasks is a pretty good indicator on how you will cope with real-life challenges
  • Games will break out of two-dimensional screens and into rooms, either through VR or AR, or through new combinations of TV and tablets. It’s possible that in twenty years, the idea of sitting down and just watching a narrative drama will seem outdated and anachronistic
  • video games remain astoundingly good value. A big mainstream release like Witcher 3 or Fifa 2017 will cost around £50 on console and less on PC, but they can provide hundreds of hours of entertainment
  • Video games have become important testbeds for artificial intelligence research
  • it’s a way of meeting with your children in a domain they enjoy and feel comfortable. It lets them take the lead; it lets them show you stuff
  • Games are fun. They provide fascinating worlds to explore and take part in, they let us do incredible, sometimes terrible things without recourse. They test out intelligence and reaction; they posit weird futures and possibilities; they let us take control of lives and bodies that we could never own or experience. They are made by artists and visionaries, they provide moments of utter transfixing beauty and resonance. The glowing sunset over the city of Los Santos in GTA V, the swoop of a dragon over the plains of Skyrim; the desperate struggle to survive in the snowy wastelands of The Long Dark; the heart-wrenching power of friendship in Life is Strange – these are valid forms of escape and experience; they tell us things.
  • it is time to see video games alongside – and equal to – books, television and cinema as a popular imaginative medium. It is OK to play.
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