A Child’s Curiosity, the Wonders and Possibilities

When a seven-year-old asks you out of the blue if Santa Claus really exists, what do you say? I think I managed to answer that question by saying that to some people he exists and to some people he doesn’t.  My seven-year-old niece apparently wasn’t satisfied with that answer.  Little did I know that while she was playing with my phone when she asked me about Santa Claus, she googled an answer.  She never said a word but did her own research and found a satisfactory answer to the question that a lot of children have.  This week in Strategic Communication 6630 we are looking at children, technology and learning.  It is a fascinating topic and considering that I spend time with many young children personally and professionally, much of the information I’ve learned this week has proven to be significantly important to me in several capacities. Technology increasingly creates learning possibilities for children all over the world, but there are risks involved. We as strategic communications professionals and caregivers must remain vigilant about developing strategies that will help our children to grow with technology and be harmed less by it.   

Days later when I was searching for some information on my phone, I saw that my niece had typed in the question “Is Santa Claus real?” At first I laughed and then I was amazed at her resourcefulness.  Unlike her, I wasn’t raised with technology, but I have worked with it for a long time.  Yet there are times when I have a question or need information and forget that I have a world of information in the palm of my hand.  It blew me away that a seven-year-old intuitively googled the question that I didn’t answer to her satisfaction.  This is just one example of the amazing ways that children adapt to and utilize technology today in a good way.  I think that even though she is only seven, technology is teaching her to be creative when she is using it to color, listen to songs, watch certain content, learn school subjects, and, oh, yes, research Santa Claus and other topics that adults can’t seem to adequately help her with.  On the other hand there are harmful effects.  Our reading and video features this week gave us important information on the positive and negative aspects of children’s increasing use of technology.

Experiments by educational researcher Sugata Mitra throughout India proved that no matter what language they spoke, when children were presented with technology they adapted and learned to use it easily even if its instructions were not in their native language.  Children learn so intuitively to use computers that they learned to use them to translate its instructions in order to understand how to better use the devices.  It was fascinating to see how technology touched children’s curiosity and also helped them to learn even when they had no formal teachers and no instructions in their native language.  It was also amazing to see the children come together to teach each other.  Mitra’s TED Talks video entitled “Kids Can Teach Themselves” detailed the promising possibilities of using technology to help teach underserved populations throughout the world.

Daily I see children solve tasks and easily learn to use devices that take me forever to learn.  Therefore, technology is an excellent tool to help children learn and this is tremendously beneficial to children everywhere.  Over the past few years, the schools here in this rural area where I live have invested in more learning technology such as tablets, smartboards, personal computers and distance education equipment for the classrooms.  Just this week, I visited a classroom where the teacher had just received a huge 72-inch touchscreen interactive smartboard.  She said that it was amazing how she could use the technology to interface with different educational sites and the Internet.  She added that the devices hold the attention of her technology-raised students and that when she can’t figure out things about operating the smartboard that her students can figure out solutions much easier than she can.  With technology advancing so quickly and children’s ability to learn so easily, educating children in the future is filled with amazing possibilities.   

 Yet as with most things, there is the good and bad when it comes to children and technology.  Two studies by Sonia Livingstone about social media literacy in children that we read this week pointed out that social media technology provides different tools to children at different stages of life. Younger children are inquisitive and explore information through social media technology like my niece does. Teenagers seek relationships and acceptance online and help to find their identity through social media. Children have different motivations for social media at different ages but all ages seek to communicate, find out about the world and themselves, and express themselves increasingly more through social media technology.  Yet the risks involved with increased social media usage include bullying, stalking, and harassment that have in some publicized cases lead to suicide. 

Some say that heavy technology use harms a child’s development.  This is true according to pediatric occupational therapist Cris Rowan. On May 29, 2013 Rowan wrote in a Huffpost blog entitled “The Impact of Technology on the Developing Child” that technology has caused children to drastically reduce physical play time that is important to creativity, imagination, and mental and physical development. Children are inside and sedentary so much using technology that sensory, motor and attachment skills are becoming underdeveloped.  She also said that obesity, diabetes, coordination, and other physical and psychological disorders have increased. We are seeing children becoming less social outside of online activities and more unhealthy.  These are discouraging consequences of tools that are so encouraging to a child’s learning capabilities. 

There are solutions. Technology when used, managed and monitored properly is a useful tool that helps children to learn, communicate and develop.  Careful management by parents and caregivers can also help to shelter children from pitfalls such as bullying, harassment and cyber-crimes.  We can also limit children’s technology usage and require physical interaction and activities in order for them to have a balance in life that will help them to still enjoy the benefits of technology and develop healthfully.  As with most things in life, it takes time, effort and planning.  The children in my family still enjoy technology but they also like the outdoors.  We require that they spend time outdoors playing and engaging with others daily.  They love their technology and they also love physical and social activities.  I guess this is why my niece continues to be a healthy, social, inquisitive, smart and progressive seven-year-old.  There is a balance in her life between the technology that she craves and needs and the physical and social activities that she also craves and needs in order to develop healthfully.  I think that the positive aspects and the risks of the saturation of technology upon our youth can be managed because it adds so much to a child’s learning. I can only imagine how different my life would have been if I’d had the backup of a computer to research things like Santa Claus and facts of life questions when I was a little girl when my parents’ answers, or non-answers, left me scratching my head.