Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. What you see in front of you is not the future, but the present. This is a world full of digital technology and children are finding their place in it through the latest gizmos and gadgets.
I can't say it's a total surprise, but it isn't what I anticipated. Hanna Rosin's article "The Touch Screen Generation" takes the topic and goes into more detail.
More and more babies and toddlers know how to use electronics- and enjoy using it. In California on a warm summer day, Rosin attends Dust or Magic, a conference where developers for children's apps get a chance to see how their "customers" (small children, accompanied by their parents) will enjoy them. As support of this, many developers mainly followed Maria Montessori's line of thought, claiming that "hands are the instruments of man's intelligence."
Rosin polls several parents on what she calls "screen time," or time with electronic devices. Some don't provide any- a boundary, for her, seems a little harsh. Others set limits to only on airplanes or long car trips, and others about 30 minutes each day. Through even more research, she finds both positive and negative consequences of children spending time with them.
Eventually, she concludes that like almost everything, those involved with the "touch screen generation" (from the development of the games to the parents of the gamers) have good intentions. When excess enters the equation, that's when things don't add up to four.
I'm seeing Rosin's point- and I wholeheartedly agree. Whether or not a child is permitted to use electronics is entirely up to the parents of that child.
But what does this mean for education? Should we change classes to be more interactive, or as one researcher put it, "less isolated [from the other students and the teacher]?" Should we make school less like an opera aria?
Food for thought.
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