Tag Archives: cooney center

Welcome 2017!  For the Joan Ganz Cooney Center team, this is a very special year.  In December, we will celebrate our tenth year as an organization dedicated to advancing learning for children in the digital age. For those who follow our work closely, you will recall our first report—an analysis of the rapidly evolving digital landscape of educational toys, software and games called D is for Digital which found that the marketplace was full of products that may have had…

In celebration of Children’s Book Week and the power of storytelling throughout generations, we asked Cooney Center staff members to reflect on their favorite children’s books, along with the new stories they’re excited to share with their own children. We hope you’ll share your favorites, new and old, in the comments. Executive Director Michael Levine loved books that captured his imagination as a child, from Where the Wild Things Are to Goodnight Moon. “Two other favorites were Stone Soup and Brother Eagle, Sister Sky—I loved…

Forty five years ago today, the first episode of Sesame Street aired on PBS. As we celebrate the many ways that our friends Grover, Big Bird, and the rest of the gang have changed the landscape of children’s media for so many generations, all of us at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center would like to salute our founder, the woman whose dedication and determination has made such a tremendous impact on the lives of children all over the world. From…

The Digital Media and Learning Conference is an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the UC Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine. The conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialog and linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice. The fourth annual conference – DML2013 – is organized around the theme…

This interview with Michael Levine originally appeared in Literacy 2.0 in August, 2011. It appears here with the permission of the author, Robert L. Lindstrom.   In 2007, the year the iPhone was introduced, the venerable children’s TV programmer Children’s Television Workshop (now named Sesame Workshop) spun off a nonprofit research and production institute intended to do for digital media what Sesame Street did for television, namely make the medium both educational and entertaining at the same time. The center…

Just over a week ago, I had the pleasure of assisting members of the Cooney Center staff in a two-day research study at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) in Queens, NY. The study, conducted in corroboration with NYSCI, focused on the interaction between children (ages 3-5) and their caregivers when reading two different science books: one regular book and one on the iPad. Would the iPad serve as a distraction to children or would it actually promote as…

This piece originally appeared in the Huffington Post.   On Tuesday, June 7, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop will present a report at the E 3 Expo in Los Angeles that may surprise media designers and cause policymakers to step back from their current concerns about kids’ digital multitasking addiction, cyber-bullying, violent videogames, and mobile disruptions in school. While much of the public discussion about digital media is concentrated on how little influence parents have in shaping…

While managing the @cooneycenter Twitter feed and live blog during this week’s Learning From Hollywood Forum, my mental gears were continuously whirring.  Rich threads of conversation spun back and forth online and in face-to-face conversation, through the #cooneyforum hashtag and the generous physical space provided by the USC School of Cinematic Arts (even the terrific film soundstages where lunch was held!) During the coming weeks, I’ll be working with the Michael Levine and Rebecca Herr-Stephensen from the Joan Ganz Cooney…

Today, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop are releasing a new report entitled Always Connected. The report is a synthesis of data from seven studies and presents a comprehensive look at young children’s media use over the past five years. As someone who is interested in research methodology, and as one of the authors, the report has encouraged me to think more carefully about the way we define and measure media use. Measurement of media use taps into…

If you are in New Haven on Friday, February 11, we invite you to attend the Zigler Center’s weekly social policy lecture series. Michael Levine will present a preview of Always Connected, a collaboration with the Sesame Workshop that will be published this spring, and The Impacts of Media Multitasking on Children’s Learning and Development. He will discuss the results of some recent studies about the constant flow of media that kids are consuming — often simultaneously — and the…