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."

Comments

I've got to get my glasses fixed. I read...

[starglider29a]

Online Gambling

Re:I've got to get my glasses fixed. I read...

[gnick]

Hey, it would teach them statistics pretty quickly, right?

Re:I've got to get my glasses fixed. I read...

[Ethanol-fueled]

If by "statistics" you mean lies and damn lies, then yes, since they comprise 90% of online interaction.

I'd much rather have my kids participate in meatspace team-building starting with after-school programs and then moving on to the football team or the academic decathalon or robotics team before I let them glue themselves to a damn raster and throw their life away.

My parents dragged my kicking and screaming into daycare, then later pulled me off of my precious NES which caused me to get on my bike and jump dirt hills with friends, then again they dragged me into the football team against my wishes. I fought tooth and nail each time, then I discovered that I actually found those activities preferable to wasting away in front of a TV or monitor.

Re:I've got to get my glasses fixed. I read...

[UttBuggly]

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.

Sounds About Right

[osfancy]

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.

Re:Sounds About Right

[CRCulver]

This reminds me of Cliff Stoll's infamous book Silicon Snake Oil . Published in 1996, the book doesn't insist that growing up with heavy computing will turn us all into heartless, antisocial robots. But it does strongly assert that computers don't make an efficient contribution to education as you think. It's a book all Slashdotters will get a laugh from because of its way off vision of the future. And Stoll, who claimed e-commerce would never take off, himself now sells klein bottles over the net.

Re:Sounds About Right

[osfancy]

A good example to illustrate my point. I imagine that the only real world social interaction that you experience is rubbing up against people in line waiting to buy a new role playing game.

Re:Sounds About Right

[0racle]

I can certainly see how online gaming or social networking might help these kids develop a better understanding of technology

I disagree. I play a MMO and have played this MMO for a few years now. The vast majority of players never learn a thing about the magic white box or the magical internet that brings them the game and their porn. The few that do, do so outside the game because they wanted to and so went out and learned. Simply using something doesn't teach any understanding of it.

As for social interaction? The little assholes who act like assholes coming in, act like assholes going out. They didn't learn anything their either.

Re:Quick!

[genner]

Yes but it reduces the amount of abductions in parks.

Think positively ;)

[Moraelin]

Well, think positively: if someone abducts your child in an online game and takes them into the depths of some dungeon, chances are your kid will only need to use his hearthstone to teleport back to the inn ;)

Plus, if it's a raid dungeon, they'll probably argue about loot and split up sooner or later anyway ;)

Telling you what you want to hear

[bradgoodman]

Who sponsored this study, Blizzard?!

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...

Re:Telling you what you want to hear

[PainKilleR-CE]

The study's not telling people to let their children sit in front of the computer or the TV for several hours a day, it's simply stating that some kids derive a benefit from online interactions, such as social networking sites and online games. This is one of those things that only requires a study because the media is so focused on the downside, when people spend most of their life online and lose perspective.

Kids that become interested in the customization open to them on MySpace or WoW will learn some important skills, if they learn to apply them outside those environments. Certainly CSS and lua, along with general markup and scripting, are valuable outside of simple time-wasters.

Hell, this time of year I never see the light of day because I go to work at dawn and go home at dusk, and I don't even work long shifts.

Additional Social Benefits...

[TheNecromancer]

1. Better/more productive interaction with trolls and orcs
2. Able to dual wield weapons years earlier than other kids
3. Greater self-esteem when leveling

and most importantly...

4. Able to talk to virtual characters of the female (elf, dwarf, whatever) persuasion!!

Re:Additional Social Benefits...

[D Ninja]

4. Able to talk to virtual characters of the female (elf, dwarf, whatever) persuasion!!

A Female Dwarf? A FEMALE DWARF?! Have you SEEN what they look like?!

Dude...I was with you on that list until you said this. Then you just blew all your credibility.

Classic Slashdot

[Rary]

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.

Seriously? (Oh, wait..."srsly omfg!!!")

[ErichTheRed]

I admit it, I'm an old geezer at 34. I write in complete sentences and check my spelling before sending out important communications. Most of my peers do not. I have seen many e-mails and other casual messages going out to our customers with tons of Web 2.0 speak in them.

I understand the fact that the world is moving on and communication is getting less formal. After all, most people don't send out formal business memos anymore; they write e-mail and use IM software. However, I still think people need to be able to spell and write clearly. Exposing kids to more of the Web 2.0 stuff before teaching them how to write formally is just going to make things worse IMO. Feel free to disagree, but how many times have you gotten an e-mail from a co-worker with one or more of the following:

• No upper-case characters
• Incorrect or nonexistent punctuation
• Misspellings, even of basic words
• IM/text messaging shortened-spelling words

I'm really just curious how much of my concern is due to the fact that I'm "between generations," and how much of it is the geriatric fool stuck in the 1980s/90s talking...

And no, I'm not a grammar Nazi. Readable is just fine for me -- grammatically perfect is less of a concern.

Re:Seriously? (Oh, wait..."srsly omfg!!!")

[pandrijeczko]

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.

Everything in moderation

[Millennium]

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.

I don't buy it.

[MaWeiTao]

I don't believe this at all. Having played a number of online games dabbled in social networking somewhat I fail to see where the real benefit is, as described in this article. There still exists that barrier of anonymity and there is no real interaction with another human being. There's no eye contact, reading body language or a general need for considering the other persons thoughts and feelings.

Want to teach children communications skills. Hold big family gatherings where adults and children are all interacting with each other. Well, one problem I've encountered with many American families is that at gatherings children are usually segregated off to their own corner, relegated to the children's table.

I've observed this with friends and within my own family, kids are interact with real people on a regular basis tend to be more outgoing and mature. The kids and teenagers I know who are into gaming and networking either seem to always be in their own worlds at these gatherings. They either run off to the bedroom and sit in front of the computer, or they're sitting in some corner tapping away on a phone.

On a side note, I've noticed this tendency where whenever research demonstrates something positive about gaming it's embraced wholeheartedly. Whenever it shows something negative it's strongly dismissed as nonsense; the tag correlationnotcausation seems to be quite popular for those stories.

My own account that seem to deny the findings

[Merc248]

I had a computer ever since I was five or six, and I played tons of old DOS games while figuring out, with my dad, how to make autoexec.bat + config.sys boot disks in order to play certain games. It came to a point where I would much rather stay in my room and play video games rather than playing tag football or anything else outside with kids around my neighborhood.

Fast forward a few years, and I find myself struggling like crazy trying to relate to anyone on a personal level, up until my second or third year of college. Since much of college, at least in my experience, had to do with interaction with other people, I ended up losing a lot of confidence and went through the shitter for a while. I finally realized after a while that I had to force myself to interact with people: I started going to a coffee shop after I transferred schools and interacted with as many people as I could, while being hooped up on Zoloft in order to get rid of my social anxiety. Then eventually, I overcame my fear and am now fairly comfortable around people.

Now, of course this is all anecdotal evidence that could also possibly point to the benefits of FIRST being a socially inept geek, THEN learning how to socialize and having the best of both worlds. However, I also had the benefit of having parents encouraging me to socialize as much as possible while being somewhat understanding of me wanting to just stay at home, and I also had the benefit of growing up with computers back when they were starting to become popular (so it wasn't totally infeasible for someone else in the block to have a computer), but also back when you had to have motivation to get things to work properly.

Nowadays, Web 2.0 hands people the power to publish blogs, websites, etc. with almost no effort, and any drive to learn HTML / CSS / etc. is limited by the mere fact that most functionality is already implemented MUCH BETTER than what an average person can probably do. That, and most kids nowadays probably don't know any DOS games (and even if they did, they probably played it through DOSBox, which makes things infinitely easier than before.)