Nano kids

OK, just one more babies and iphones post and then I'll move on! If your baby really loves your iphone, then you will be thrilled to learn that you can get a range of related babywear for 'your little nano' at iPopWear. If I knew where the YouTube baby below lived, I could send him one. His parents have posted a second video showing how he can now also turn the iphone on and use the zoom feature:

iphone

Today is the launch of the iphone in the UK, a pretty exciting event for those of us who are Apple fans. I have always liked the interfaces of Apple products because they facilitate work with young children - imovie is a good example of that. Perhaps not surprisingly for those of us used to observing young children with technologies, it would seem that the use of the iphone touch screen is also rather intuitive for babies, as this YouTube post indicates:

Digital media literacy

Unfortunately, I can't make the 'Digital media literacy' summit at Channel 4 on Thursday, but it looks like it will be an interesting event. I hope someone from the Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) attends. I would have liked to have drawn participants' attention to some of the digital media literacy that is going on in schools e.g. the brilliant Web 2.0 work that Peter Winter has been doing for a few years now on blogging and podcasting at Monteney Primary School in Sheffield, or the fantastic work of Lynn Scott in the Foundation Stage at Childwall Valley Primary School in Liverpool, which she has undertaken as part of the BFI Training Scheme for Lead Practitioners on Moving Image Education. Eve Bearne and I have been evaluating that scheme and we are just completing the final evaluation, which I will post on this blog once it is complete. There has been some wonderful work undertaken in schools as part of the project, which has helped to move the media literacy agenda along in the local authorities that have taken part in it - so the DCSF do need to be involved in conversations about media literacy, or this work won't get taken forward in schools in the way that it needs to be.

First-hand experience?

There are some interesting chapters in the Educase e-book 'Educating the Net Generation.' I enjoyed the chapter 'Planning for neomillenial learning styles', despite not knowing what 'neomillenial' means and being rather sceptical about the whole notion of 'learning styles'. Although the chapter is focused on the implications for higher education, there are important issues to note in relation to early childhood education. For example, the author of the chapter, Chris Dede, suggests that 'Mediated immersion creates distributed learning communities, which have different strengths and limits than location-bound learning communities confined to classroom settings and centered on the teacher and archival materials'. Education in the early years has focused almost exclusively on the off-line bounded setting and there needs to be consideration of the potential role that mediated online environments can have. This creates an interesting tension in relation to one of the cornerstones of early years education, the value of 'first hand experience'. I was once told by an early years/ literacy consultant (who will remain nameless!) that my work with young children using laptops to create animated films was not good early years practice because it wasn't 'first-hand experience'. I would like to contest the notion that first-hand experiences in the off-line world should be privileged in early years education; this position needs re-thinking in the digital age. Of course, children often experience online what are in fact representations of the off-line world, so in that sense they are second, not first-hand, but this does not mean that those experiences are intrinsically of less value to children's social, emotional, cognitive and linguistic development, nor does it mean that they are less 'real' experiences, in my view.

Baby Einsteins

Couldn't resist linking to this photograph, from Trendhunter, which accompanies an article about how Baby Einstein videos 'make infants dumber', according to research by Zimmerman and Christakis at the University of Washington. More interesting than the study itself is the report about how Disney, owners of Baby Einstein, have asked the UoW to retract its media report, given the critique of the study's methodology (for a brief overview of those criticisms, see here). If this is true, then this raises a number of important issues about the relationship between academia and the media industries. Rather than demanding the retraction of media reports, Disney should simply provide a critique of the study in question themselves - after all, that's how things work in peer-reviewed journals. However, perhaps more significantly, this story illustrates the misplaced emphasis in much of the research on young children and media effects, which often seeks to prove causation rather than correlation between factors and is thus open to promoting sensational media headlines...it would be good if we could move on from this narrow and limiting agenda.

Famiglia e Cittadinanza

I am speaking at this conference in Padua tomorrow, in the beautiful ‘Palazzo Bo’, pictured left. For the conference participants, the link to the ‘Digital Beginnings’ project is here. I cannot fail to notice the popularity of mobile phones whilst I have been here in Italy; they appear to be even more widely used than in England, if that is possible. Interesting then, that Italy appears to be the first European country to ban the use of mobile phones in schools. I don't know if I will have time to mention research on the potential educational use that can be made of mobile technologies in my talk, but in case I don't, an interesting report can be found here.

Copyright confusion

Copyright laws are confusing for many educators and academics, as this report, 'The cost of copyright confusion for media literacy' outlines. I myself am not entirely comfortable about sharing presentations online just in case I am in some breach of copyright through my use of images from websites. I am making an exception this week for folks at the University of Birmingham (thanks for a very interesting discussion at the seminar!). I posted my slides from the presentation here for a few weeks, but have now taken them down until I can check the copyright issues.