Digital momentum

Haven't had time to blog recently as have been teaching on weekend schools throughout October. (And here is the link to the paper for students on the EdD early childhood route.) So this is a quick post to signal some recent useful digital-related stuff on the web which has made me feel quite optimistic about change - for today at least! First, David Puttnam's talk at the Handheld Learning conference raised some interesting points about the need for education to transform itself in order to keep up with developments in the digital age. Nothing new here for those of us immersed in the field, but good that someone in his position is saying these things. Second, a new Pew Internet report on networked families has been published, which indicates how much more connected many families are due to mobile technologies and the internet and confirms that members of families have shared screen time. Finally, I was recently introduced to the work of the Joan Cooney Ganz Center and found a number of interesting reports on their website, including The Power of Pow! Wham!: Children, Digital Media and our Nation's Future. For those of us who have been working in the field of education for many years on the issue of the importance of building on children's out-of-school popular cultural experiences, the explosion of interest in this area is very exciting and there is certainly momentum for change building up. Things can only get better!

Parents as scaffolders

A couple of years ago now, I contacted this blogger, Beth, as I was very interested in what she had to say about scaffolding her child's understanding about blogs and wanted her permission to include her practice as an example in a chapter I was writing about young children and digital literacy. It seemed to me that Beth was supporting her child's understanding about blogging as a social practice in a similar manner to the way in which many other parents support their children's understanding of print-based literacy practices. Since then I have kept in touch with Beth's blog and noted that she has recorded other instances of family digital literacy practices. I do recommend a visit to Beth's blog for those of you interested in early childhood and technologies (click on the category 'Ed tech and early childhood' in the LH column). I am very interested in the phenomenon of 'tech-savvy' parents blogging about their technological practices with their children, as this, I think, gives us an insight into what other parents might be doing more generally with their children in five or six year's time, but I have not come across any other blogs like Beth's - let me know if you do!