Study Recommends Online Gaming, Social Networking For Kids 189
Blue's News pointed out a report about a study sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation which found that online gaming and social networking are beneficial to children, teaching them basic technical skills and how to communicate in the Information Age. The study was conducted over a period of three years, with researchers interviewing hundreds of children and monitoring thousands of hours of online time. The full white paper (PDF) is also available.
"For a minority of children, the casual use of social media served as a springboard to them gaining technological expertise — labeled in the study as 'geeking out,' the researchers said. By asking friends or getting help from people met through online groups, some children learned to adjust the software code underpinning some of the video games they played, edit videos and fix computer hardware. Given that the use of social media serves as inspiration to learning, schools should abandon their hostility and support children when they want to learn some skills more sophisticated than simply designing their Facebook page, the study said."
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I've got to get my glasses fixed. I read... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd much rather have my kids participate in meatspace team-building starting with after-school programs and then moving on to the football team or the academic decathalon or robotics team before I let them glue themselves to a damn raster and throw their life away.
My parents dragged my kicking and screaming into daycare, then later pulled me off of my precious NES which caused me to get on my bike and jump dirt hills with friends, then again they dragged me into the football team against my wishes. I fought tooth and nail each time, then I discovered that I actually found those activities preferable to wasting away in front of a TV or monitor.
Seriously? (Oh, wait..."srsly omfg!!!") (Score:5, Interesting)
I admit it, I'm an old geezer at 34. I write in complete sentences and check my spelling before sending out important communications. Most of my peers do not. I have seen many e-mails and other casual messages going out to our customers with tons of Web 2.0 speak in them.
I understand the fact that the world is moving on and communication is getting less formal. After all, most people don't send out formal business memos anymore; they write e-mail and use IM software. However, I still think people need to be able to spell and write clearly. Exposing kids to more of the Web 2.0 stuff before teaching them how to write formally is just going to make things worse IMO. Feel free to disagree, but how many times have you gotten an e-mail from a co-worker with one or more of the following:
I'm really just curious how much of my concern is due to the fact that I'm "between generations," and how much of it is the geriatric fool stuck in the 1980s/90s talking...
And no, I'm not a grammar Nazi. Readable is just fine for me -- grammatically perfect is less of a concern.
Adjusting the software code (Score:1, Interesting)
Learning typing from cheat codes (Score:2, Interesting)
Eating candy healthier than drinking poison! (Score:3, Interesting)
Even the study mentions obsessive, addicted individuals with a smile and a wink thinking it's cute that:
two dating 17-year olds ... wake up and immediately instant message each other, then switch to mobile phones while on route to campus, then send text messages during class. After spending time together doing homework, they talk on the phone or send text messages
Yes, videogames and social networking can be good things for kids -- in restricted moderation, but they have to be just a supplement to physical and cognitive-developmental activities -- not the overarching structure of their entire lives. It's sickening to see people spend all their time on sites doing absolutely nothing, wondering why everyone's getting fat, lonely, depressed, and socially anxious. Moderation needs to be brought to people's lives, and not through oversaturation (I can only spend x number of minutes doing this, because I have to do x number of other things today!) but through self discipline (I'm spending x number of minutes doing this, because there are better things I could be doing with my time.... but I deserve this break.)
I don't buy it. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't believe this at all. Having played a number of online games dabbled in social networking somewhat I fail to see where the real benefit is, as described in this article. There still exists that barrier of anonymity and there is no real interaction with another human being. There's no eye contact, reading body language or a general need for considering the other persons thoughts and feelings.
Want to teach children communications skills. Hold big family gatherings where adults and children are all interacting with each other. Well, one problem I've encountered with many American families is that at gatherings children are usually segregated off to their own corner, relegated to the children's table.
I've observed this with friends and within my own family, kids are interact with real people on a regular basis tend to be more outgoing and mature. The kids and teenagers I know who are into gaming and networking either seem to always be in their own worlds at these gatherings. They either run off to the bedroom and sit in front of the computer, or they're sitting in some corner tapping away on a phone.
On a side note, I've noticed this tendency where whenever research demonstrates something positive about gaming it's embraced wholeheartedly. Whenever it shows something negative it's strongly dismissed as nonsense; the tag correlationnotcausation seems to be quite popular for those stories.
Argh (Score:2, Interesting)
Hello no! I have already seen the detrimental effects of MMORPGS and other online games into adult's personalities, I don't even want to know what can happen to a kid.
Was the one in charge of this study a level 90 Paladin?
My own account that seem to deny the findings (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a computer ever since I was five or six, and I played tons of old DOS games while figuring out, with my dad, how to make autoexec.bat + config.sys boot disks in order to play certain games. It came to a point where I would much rather stay in my room and play video games rather than playing tag football or anything else outside with kids around my neighborhood.
Fast forward a few years, and I find myself struggling like crazy trying to relate to anyone on a personal level, up until my second or third year of college. Since much of college, at least in my experience, had to do with interaction with other people, I ended up losing a lot of confidence and went through the shitter for a while. I finally realized after a while that I had to force myself to interact with people: I started going to a coffee shop after I transferred schools and interacted with as many people as I could, while being hooped up on Zoloft in order to get rid of my social anxiety. Then eventually, I overcame my fear and am now fairly comfortable around people.
Now, of course this is all anecdotal evidence that could also possibly point to the benefits of FIRST being a socially inept geek, THEN learning how to socialize and having the best of both worlds. However, I also had the benefit of having parents encouraging me to socialize as much as possible while being somewhat understanding of me wanting to just stay at home, and I also had the benefit of growing up with computers back when they were starting to become popular (so it wasn't totally infeasible for someone else in the block to have a computer), but also back when you had to have motivation to get things to work properly.
Nowadays, Web 2.0 hands people the power to publish blogs, websites, etc. with almost no effort, and any drive to learn HTML / CSS / etc. is limited by the mere fact that most functionality is already implemented MUCH BETTER than what an average person can probably do. That, and most kids nowadays probably don't know any DOS games (and even if they did, they probably played it through DOSBox, which makes things infinitely easier than before.)