On-ramp to the Information Super-highway (in the clouds)

[Note this post is not about my career change. So I am mixing up blogs. But this parenting issue has considerable overlap with what educators are thinking or need to think about.]

Last night I was asked a question about children using the new and myriad ways of communicating, and realized that I had never organized these thoughts in my head before. So this blog is my way of thinking very aloud on this subject.

Of course, this is something that every parent and educator thinks off a lot. And the answers depend completely on the anxiety of the parent combined with the child's prior experience and ability to handle themselves in 'public' places. So there can be no generalized answers for this sort of thing. That said, here's where my thinking is at the moment.

The other caveat is that each 'technology' I mention has its own levels of sophistication of use, from the very basic, to the highly expert. So it is not as if you graduate from one to the other. But rather that you get introduced to each one, and become an increasingly sophisticated/discerning and independent user, while learning new technologies, and finding out which works best for what.

You, dear reader, have probably had different experiences, and will know of many technologies I have never heard of, so your comments are very very welcome. I'd love to find new ways to communicate (both generally, and specifically).

So here goes.... below is the on-ramp that I consider viable at present.

Telephone. Even a 3-yr old can use this in a one-way manner. You call her. Of course, eventually she is calling everyone from her cellphone! But that's what happens once the firehouse is fully open.

Skype. This actually works better for younger children. They find it easier to talk to a real person in a physical setting, rather than a plastic thing with buttons on it. The only reason I put it after telephone is that at the moment you have less control over your 'phone number' but that will change, especially once you start paying for it.

IM. The child needs to be able to type. But the parent can have fairly tight control over who is allowed in. I have not looked recently, but I am guessing that text-IM can be skipped and one can go straight to audio- or video-IM (a.k.a. Skype)

IM could lead to portal like Club Penguin. I have not been on it ever since Disney bought it. But they paid a heck of a lot of money for it, so I am expecting they will try and get their investment back. There must be other companies trying to emulate Club Penguin too. The draw of Club Penguin is that you get the absolute rudimentary Face-book like page (you can decorate your igloo, give yourself a stage-name, and you can text-chat with others), but under extremely tightly filtered/controlled conditions that will not permit personal details to go public. So as a parent you do not need to specify who your child's friends can be. But you hopefully worry less about what bad things are going to happen out there.

As an aside, the main problem I found with Club Penguin, is that conversations tend to be between children of the same developmental/typing age. This is a significant problem, because one learns the norms of conversation (in any medium) by being a part of inter-age/ability conversations. Assuming of course, that the 'olders' are sensitive to the needs of the youngers, which is not a fair assumption on the internet. This is why the internet cannot be used in an unqualified way as a classroom or learning environment.

Which is a good segue to family portals like Geni. [I put Geni after Club Penguin, because it is less fun.] Parents generally trust their children with extended family and fellow-villagers. Specifically because they believe that there is a shared idea and concern for the development of the next generation. Geni-like portals will probably become more sophisticated, and you can always let friends in that are as close as family. So you get a very wide geographic and age spread in the online community, but you can still limit it to people you have fairly good reason to trust. [These portals are going to resolve privacy issues as people make mistakes, so expect some bumps in the road.]



IM (in all its forms) can lead to e-mail. Longer sentences, more evolved thinking and expression of ideas, but still very tight control possible on who your child is talking to.

E-mail leads to blogs - still more sophistication in expression of ideas, and more public than email. I put blogs before Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook for two reasons. The first is that everyone you are worried about is not hanging out there. The second is that I feel it is more limiting than the other 3 (and their cousins) about what you say about yourself. That is a loaded thing to say, because you can say and show anything about yourself on a blog. My point is that the nature of a blog makes you quite aware of the public persona you are crafting for yourself. And the comment mechanism is extremely limiting on how other people react to this public persona. Thus blogs let a older child or younger adult confront, think about, and make mistakes on the issues of "Who am I?" and "How do I portray Me?" in a slightly more forgiving/safe space than on the other more rapid-fire 'technologies.'

After blogs they are on their own (not entirely, but you are no longer the one making the decision).

For my own children I am hoping they can be at this stage by 13 or 14, because after that they really, really have to be able to use their personal judgement of the situations they get into and be sufficiently savvy to get out of the more simple mess-ups.

An analogy to an older technology may work for what I am trying to say here. At what age can your child catch the bus to a cross-town soccer game? There's all sorts of things that can happen here that are a lot more complicated than just crossing a busy street - the bus is late, the bus is cancelled, she loses her money, the game is cancelled, or the location has been moved, her friends want her to go with them after the game, etc. How well she deals with any of these will determine whether you let her. But, at the same time, she won't be able to deal with any of these unless she has already tried and messed-up at some of them.

[Further qualification: My children's school has a police officer who specializes in internet issues come and give a talk each year about online safety. I have not yet gone for this talk. No doubt, going to one would make me considerably more anxious. But it may also change my opinion on everything I have said above. See very first caveat at top.]

Comments really welcome.