…access, all revolutionary at the time. The most popular app in 2007, the iPhone’s first year, was a koi fish pond mini-game. Today, phones and tablets are ubiquitous and almost essential to daily life. In education, textbooks, assignments, and multimedia lessons are increasingly distributed and consumed through these devices, which have become tremendous resources for learning and information. While VR has been around for decades, the first consu…

…e get the version we want?” Photo: Amazon The past decade brought us smart phones, tablet computers, self-driving cars, chat bots, VR headsets, phone-based GPS, CRISPR (gene editing), 3d printed organs and drone delivery services. We’ve also seen the rise of social media, online networks and a huge variety of services that depend on combinations of these advances. If we’ve learned anything in the past decade or so, it’s that the rate of change is…

…nd his friends use tech, and it’s inspired her daughter to experiment with phone-free time during the day. She noted that sharing the book with her kids (as opposed to reading it and relaying the information), opened up a collaborative conversation in her family around tech use. There’s no denying it—we’re facing a lot of uncertainty right now. Things aren’t the same as they were last week, and we don’t know what next week will look like. If I cou…

…ll walks of life. When I was researching the first big wave of teen mobile phone use in Tokyo in the nineties, adults were baffled by the “nagara-zoku” (multitasking tribes). Adults were similarly concerned when social media took off among teens in the US almost a decade later. As esports overtake traditional athletics in viewership, experts have moved swiftly to categorize gaming addiction as a clinical disorder. Adults are often quick to judge y…

…h-speed connections or were trying to learn on a shared computer or mobile phone. Others reported living in households that lacked the advanced digital literacy skills necessary to access and use the many technologies necessary for learning from home. Young people who have access to digital devices and connectivity enjoy an abundance of options for watching, playing, and listening, but are often underserved in terms of quality content appropriate…

…lti-devicing, obviously, is key. You might see a kid on their computer and phone at the same time, and they might be running five different apps at the same time: homework, YouTube, chatting with friends, et cetera, all at the same time. So other ideas we’re actively thinking about [are] health and wellbeing. There’s this real need in the digital space to define health and wellbeing, and to get beyond the platitudes of screen time and how we’re op…

…of Age Ritual for Digital Life Tempok is all about the moment when a smartphone enters a child’s life for the first time. It’s a huge moment for kids and an anxiety-inducing one for caregivers. Tempok reimagines the process of gifting that first phone through the lenses of trust, growth, community, and responsibility. The grant money will be used to help fund further user research and create working prototypes.   JOTLANDIA: Collaborative Storytel…

…airly crazy happened! Apple launched the interactive touch screen with the Phone in 2007 and then, in 2011, the iPad. Competitors quickly launched their own versions, and the creative communities for kids’ interactives took off. Consumption of digital media by younger and younger children grew and the boundaries between “formal and informal” learning began to blur. Fifteen years on, and now nearly three years after COVID shocked the world, the lan…

…. And while people have confused her for a stern British lady while on the phone, she’s not nearly as old as she claims below.   I like to say that I have spanned three decades of my life at Sesame Workshop. It all started in 2010. I had just returned from living abroad for several years and was looking for a job (e.g. sending in resumes from the neighborhood Starbucks). Truthfully, I hadn’t thought about Sesame Street, or the impact it had on my…

…y revealed that kids in 2010 didn’t differentiate between telephones, smartphones, flip phones, cameras, music players, and gaming devices. At that moment, everything was just a “phone,” and a lot of kids didn’t understand that some forms of technology did “just one thing.” (How primitive, right?!) On the drive back to Manhattan, we had an incredibly interesting conversation about media convergence, kids’ media habits, family learning, and why Mex…