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Study Recommends Online Gaming, Social Networking For Kids
Blue's News pointed out a report about a study sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation which found that online gaming and social networking are beneficial to children, teaching them basic technical skills and how to communicate in the Information Age. The study was conducted over a period of three years, with researchers interviewing hundreds of children and monitoring thousands of hours of online time. The full white paper (PDF) is also available.
"For a minority of children, the casual use of social media served as a springboard to them gaining technological expertise — labeled in the study as 'geeking out,' the researchers said. By asking friends or getting help from people met through online groups, some children learned to adjust the software code underpinning some of the video games they played, edit videos and fix computer hardware. Given that the use of social media serves as inspiration to learning, schools should abandon their hostility and support children when they want to learn some skills more sophisticated than simply designing their Facebook page, the study said."
I can certainly see how online gaming or social networking might help these kids develop a better understanding of technology. However, we probably don't want them to become obsessed with these kinds of interactions and become completely inadequate in conventional social situations.
As a parent, techy and gamer - I hope no one is swallowing this load of tripe...
If you want to teach your kids to socialize - have them go out and socialize, or socialize with them!!
This is the kind of study that tells people what they want to hear.
Hey! You parents that are sticking your kids on an XBox for 6 hours a day to shut them up: You're all doing a great job! Keep up the good work!!
And for all you guys who live your lives gaming and never see the light of day - no, you're really the outgoing, social ones!
I'm going to teach my kids to smoke - to help them build up their immunity to pollution...
The only thing this white paper really says is that kids who use technology are good at interacting with others who use the same technology.
What follows is not a comment on the story, but a meta-comment. Feel free to mod as you wish.
This is classic Slashdot. The story is tagged "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense". If the exact same study had come to the opposite conclusion (ie. online gaming and social networking is bad for kids), it would be tagged "correlationisnotcausation", and everyone would be trashing the methodology.
Slashdot is funny. This is part of why I keep coming back here.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Moderation is key. Online gaming and social networks have a nasty habit of eating people (metaphorically, of course). That needs to be prevented. But as long as they're in moderation, carefully balanced with other activities (and more to the point, activity) and monitored for safety, then these things can indeed be great learning tools for children.
As someone at least 10 years your senior, I can tell you now that the crux of the matter when it comes to badly written communications is down to lack of patience and lack of attention span.
If someone writes you a letter or sends you an email that is well-punctuated and (nearly) grammatically correct, then the chances are that you will take that communication more seriously than one that isn't, simply because somebody who has taken the trouble to capitalise and punctuate has probably given a lot of thought to what they want to say and how to say it before they even started to write it. Likewise, they've probably used the "Backspace" key a lot while writing it...
For whatever reason, we're witnessing a disturbing trend in specifically the younger generation where many of its members seem to be far too busy to take the time to think about their actions or give the correct amount of time to doing something correctly. Here in the UK, this explains why there is so much more knife crime at the moment - not because the youngsters are necessarily intrinsically more violent but because they have neither the time nor inclination to exercise some self-control and think about the consequences of their actions before drawing that knife from their boot.
That's the reason for badly written communications - there's no attempt to even *try* to get it grammatically correct because there's far too much else to be getting on with.
As a 46 year old man with a mobile phone, I rarely text anyone because it takes me too damn long to do it! I'd rather call someone and speak to them directly rather than mess about on a phone keypad putting commas, capitals and full stops in the right places - and I refuse to use abbreviations and slang because, to me, it lessens the importance of what I am saying in it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm most emphatically not one of the "think of the children!" asshats, but all I can think, is that amidst a growing problem with childhood obesity and general disconnectedness from reality, we want to encourage kids to sit in front of a computer more than they already do? Instead of, say, something completely radical and outlandish, like, say, going outside, doing something physical, and maybe interacting with live, real children their own age??!? Quick, somebody do the research, find out which (or how many) of the game companies these people were paid by to do this so-called "study".
I don't feel it's an "either-or" situation. Certainly not in my own experience. My son, now 24, had PC and Mac access from age 3. We used WordPerfect to help reinforce language learning for him.
BUT, we also did soccer, martial arts, and he was on his high school's weightlifting team. As well as a "geek team" that wrote video games.
I think it's a balancing act that requires some thinking and planning on the part of the parents.
Today, my son shares a house with a Karate friend and fellow geek he grew up with. (they both work IT jobs) They play WoW, CounterStrike, etc. with a group of friends, cousins, etc. that are both old and "new"...people they've met at work or in the neighborhood. Both are in good physical shape and hardly the stereotype of a typical geek.
I think the possibility of my son ending up like the WoW player in the classic South Park episode was there, but we always found things that DIDN'T involve staying glued to a CRT to offset that.
My son is an only child and was quite shy when he was young. Learning to socialize online AND in person has made him an outgoing, funny young man. He can be the life-of-the-party, but doesn't NEED to be.
I truly believe trying many things, including online gaming (he was a capper on MY Tribes team, btw), helped make him a fairly well-rounded kid.
The problem I see today, all too frequently, is parents letting the HDTV, Xbox, PC, etc. become a silicon babysitter and teacher and that's just plain STUPID and LAZY.
I am my own gestalt.
As long as it's balanced with real life "social networking" online interaction is beneficial. But if the next generation of young people enter the real world knowing nothing but how to text each other, run a successful WoW raid and manage friends on Facebook, we're looking at an epidemic of cognitive dissonance.
Social networking can be just as dysfunctional offline as online. Once again I see demonstrated a prejudice to the online world. I've found "real life" and the "real world" concepts that have epidemic cognitive dissonance associated with them. Variety is often nice and sometimes useful however. I've generally found the online world to be more intelligent and safer. One can at least turn off a computer, ignore or ban a Troll or bully; it's much more difficult in "real" life. At least when I was a kid parents or teachers (or the law for that matter) did very little about this; these days (it seems) like the law and society are over-reacting. Intelligence is often hard to find, but the Internet makes it easier.