Kids & Technology

For this week's reading, I came across two distinct articles that relates to 'Online Collaboration'. The first article I read was "Students discovering online collaboration" and the second article was "Online Collaboration Tools".

The reason why I say these articles are distinct is because the first article speaks of current collaboration tools that is presented to first-graders and the second article speaks of tools that were available before broadband. Nevertheless, I found them very interesting, it provided me a time-line and a vision of how far internet capabilities have come.

I think its great and a clever idea to introduce these collaborative tools to kids early. But I do share some concerns with Kristen Alloway. For example, kids using nonauthoritative sources, accessing inappropriate materials and giving out personal information online.

However, when it comes to technology and kids, I'm amazed. Its like they were programmed at birth with the manuals in their brains so when they are presented with any given technology they have no fear. For instance, my niece is 8 years old and she's asking me for help with her research paper. She was complaining that she was having difficulties finding reputable sites to reference. So I said, why not go to the library. And guess what she did...she laughed at me! Then I had my other niece from London who came to visit me last summer. She's 4 years old and claimed to be a Michael Jackson fan. So just to prove how much of a fan she was, she began singing a lot of his songs from way back. I was amazed and asked where did she learn that...she said YouTube. Now my question is 'how does a 4 years old with no older siblings know how to use the internet?'