Category Archives: Commentary

Before the Future of Childhood: Immersive Media and Child Development salon took place in November 2018, we invited experts to share their visions about the ways VR and AR might impact childhood 10 years from now. Jeremy Bailenson, PhD, is the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and the author of Experience on Demand. Here he offers insights into some of the ways these technologies might affect basic human behaviors.   I am going to treat VR and…

I must confess, I’d never given much thought to the origin of sandboxes. I played in them, my kids play in them, and so I just assumed that children have been building crumbling castles and holes to China since time immemorial. After reading Jordan Shapiro’s The New Childhood: Raising Kids To Thrive in a Connected World, I now have a newfound appreciation for the history and social impact of the playground mainstay. Originally called sand-piles, sandboxes debuted in German public…

So many of today’s parents complain that their children spend too much time staring at “addictive screens.” According to the grownups, kids never want to do anything else and therefore, they’re losing out on the real joy of childhood. But the statistics tell a different story. On average, today’s kids get roughly the same amount of screen time as their parents did. The only difference is the kind of screen. The previous generation watched cartoons on the television. Now, kids…

Before the Future of Childhood: Immersive Media and Child Development salon took place in November 2018, we invited experts to share their visions about the ways VR and AR might impact childhood 10 years from now. Lisa Castaneda, Co-Founder and CEO of foundry10, shares an optimistic view of VR’s potential to shape learning experiences in the future.   Foundry10 is a research organization working across many domains, and we have been studying VR and students for several years. Today, students…

Just a few months after the publication of Children and Families in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2018), Alexia Raynal presented original and previously-published research from the Families and Media (FAM) Research Consortium at the 2018 American Education Research Association (AERA) annual meeting. In the following article, Alexia presents key highlights from her roundtable discussion on Equity and Learning Technologies with Dr. Vikki Katz (Rutgers University) and Dr. Yasmine El Masri (Oxford University) on May 17, 2018.     Some academic circles recognize a commonly held that children are “digital natives” who learn how…

In January 2018, Michael Levine participated in a panel conversation on young children’s media use hosted by Common Sense Media and the Brooklyn Public Library. Here, in the second of a two-part series, are some of his comments regarding the Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight report. (See the first part here.)   The data from the Zero to Eight report showed that lower-income kids are spending much more time on devices than higher-income kids. If you just…

In January 2018, Michael Levine participated in a panel conversation on young children’s media use hosted by Common Sense Media and the Brooklyn Public Library. Here, in the first of a two-part series, are some of his comments regarding the Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight report.    What does the research say about the effects of technology on kids’ development and learning? And based on this, what stood out to you in the data? We know quite…

If you were born after 1990, are the parent or grandparent of someone born after 1990, or a children’s media producer of any age, Ready To Learn (RTL) has probably touched your life. Launched in 1994, RTL is a U.S. Department of Education-funded initiative that provides about $25 million annually for the creation of educational media (TV, computer games, apps, and more) designed to promote school readiness. RTL funding has gone to the production of legacy media properties that existed…

How do we live together in a connected world? How do we cultivate “global citizens” who can relate to others—across international borders and Internet forums, or political aisles and bus aisles? These are increasingly pressing questions, and ones that are considered by two recent publications: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Digital Play for Global Citizens, by Dr. Jordan Shapiro UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP)’s “The Limits and Strengths of Using Digital Games as…

Sonia Livingstone was recently asked to write the foreword for Children and Families in the Digital Age: Learning Together in a Media Saturated Culture edited by Elisabeth Gee, Lori M. Takeuchi, and Ellen Wartella. Here’s what she had to say. Where shall we start, and where shall we focus our gaze, when making sense of the influx of digital devices that fill our homes and workplace, absorbing the attention of both children and parents, promising so much yet often proving frustrating,…