Category Archives: Guest Posts

Today’s parents and caregivers often find themselves caught between two powerful forces: on the one side, harrowing headlines about how social media harms kids, and on the other, kids’ vigorous lobbying for social media accounts. Not surprisingly, this leaves many adults feeling that they must choose between two terrible options. Should they refuse to give their tween or teen access to social media and, in so doing strain their relationship with their child while likely harming their kid’s peer connections?…

Dubit CEO Matthew Warneford estimates that within a decade, a million people will make their living from the metaverse. Another 100 million will build in immersive spaces for their own fulfillment. Can building in virtual worlds help make a better real world? The iCan Generation A full-fledged metaverse is a long way off, but Generation Z and the first wave of Gen Alpha are deeply engaged in using its emerging individual elements for play, work, learning, socializing and communicating. They’re…

The following article was originally published on Net Family News and appears here with permission. Even though the United States is the only country on the planet that hasn’t ratified the nearly 34-year-old UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, US-based companies that serve kids and teens around the world no longer have any excuse not to uphold their rights. Why is that the case? Not “only” because young people’s lives are now “digital by default,” as psychology professor Sonia Livingstone wrote, or…

When I met Michael Levine outside a conference at UPenn in 2012, I had no idea how much that conversation would shape my career. From my earliest visits to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center office, I was struck by the infectious sense of purpose and energy there. Starting in 2013, I had the good fortune to partner with Michael, Lori Takeuchi, and the JGCC team in a multi-year research project to understand how initiatives to advance digital equity were influencing…

I started working at the Cooney Center out of college and grew to be the Research and Program Manager for the National STEM Video Game Challenge—a role that took me from Pittsburgh to the White House. As the Challenge grew, so did I. I was determined to understand how to guarantee positive outcomes from kids’ technology use. After lengthy conversations with my mentors at the Cooney Center, I pursued a dual PhD/MBA between Oxford and Yale focused on technology and…

Congratulations to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center on 15 years! This milestone is no small accomplishment and is a reflection of the Cooney Center’s heart and dedication to youth and their families. In a recent interview for a position, the interviewer asked me what my ideal work environment looked like. I told her that the first thing that came to mind was my time at the Cooney Center. In my experience, there was just so much to love and be…

I first learned about the Joan Ganz Cooney Center when I was working with Sesame Workshop’s research team as a graduate student. I was able to join Lori Takeuchi, who was the research director at the time, for fieldwork in Queens on a Cooney-Center study about young children’s perceptions of technology. The questions we asked during our interviews that day revealed that kids in 2010 didn’t differentiate between telephones, smartphones, flip phones, cameras, music players, and gaming devices. At that…

Technology can be a transformative learning tool in the classroom. According to The National Education Technology Plan (NETP), technology has the potential to “affirm and advance relationships between educators and students, reinvent our approaches to learning and collaboration, shrink long-standing equity and accessibility gaps, and adapt learning experiences to meet the needs of all learners.” While these are lofty goals, to be truly effective, educators need to have the skills and support to take full advantage of technology-rich learning environments.…

It was December 2013. I was finishing my master’s program in Media Design for Learning at NYU when one of my professors told me about a position at Sesame Workshop that, according to him, had my name all over it. Soon, three more people shared the same position with me, saying it “would be a perfect fit.” The position was for a bilingual qualitative researcher with professional experience working with young children to work on the Families and Media Initiative…

“What would Joan do” is a question children’s media professionals can ask as we explore the pedagogical possibilities of new digital tools. Early childhood researchers have long noted that children often “think like a scientist” as they explore novel materials or situations. Likewise, viewers may imitate their favorite television character, as when preschoolers try broccoli after seeing Elmo do the same. Children, youth, and individuals of all ages can learn to think and act like artists, authors, naturalists, mathematicians, philosophers,…