How children engage with technology at each stage of development, from toddler to twentysomething, and how they can best be supported. What happens to the little ones, the tweens, and the teenagers, when technology—ubiquitous in the world they inhabit—becomes a critical part of their lives? This timely book Technology's Child brings much-needed clarity to what we know about technology’s role in child development. Better yet, it provides guidance on how to use what we know to help children of all ages make the most of their digital experiences. From toddlers who are exploring their immediate environment to twentysomethings who are exploring their place in society, technology inevitably and profoundly affects their development. Drawing on her expertise in developmental science and design research, Katie Davis describes what happens when child development and technology design interact, and how this interaction is complicated by children’s individual characteristics and social and cultural contexts. Critically, she explains how a self-directed experience of technology—one initiated, sustained, and ended voluntarily—supports healthy child development, especially when it takes place within the context of community support. Children’s experiences with technology—their “screen time” and digital social relationships—have become an inescapable aspect of growing up. This book, for the first time, identifies the qualitative distinctions between different ages and stages of this engagement, and offers invaluable guidance for parents and teachers navigating the digital landscape, and for technology designers charting the way.

How children engage with technology at each stage of development, from toddler to twentysomething, and how they can best be supported. What happens to the little ones, the tweens, and the teenagers, when technology—ubiquitous in the world they inhabit—becomes a critical part of their lives? This timely book brings much-needed clarity to what we know about technology’s role in child development. Better yet, it provides guidance on how to use what we know to help children of all ages make the most of their digital experiences. From toddlers who are exploring their immediate environment to twentysomethings who are exploring their place in society, technology inevitably and profoundly affects their development. Drawing on her expertise in developmental science and design research, Katie Davis describes what happens when child development and technology design interact, and how this interaction is complicated by children’s individual characteristics and social and cultural contexts. Critically, she explains how a self-directed experience of technology—one initiated, sustained, and ended voluntarily—supports healthy child development, especially when it takes place within the context of community support. Children’s experiences with technology—their “screen time” and digital social relationships—have become an inescapable aspect of growing up. This book, for the first time, identifies the qualitative distinctions between different ages and stages of this engagement, and offers invaluable guidance for parents and teachers navigating the digital landscape, and for technology designers charting the way.

How, long before the advent of computers and the internet, educators used technology to help students become media-literate, future-ready, and world-minded citizens. Today, educators, technology leaders, and policy makers promote the importance of “global,” “wired,” and “multimodal” learning; efforts to teach young people to become engaged global citizens and skilled users of media often go hand in hand. But the use of technology to bring students into closer contact with the outside world did not begin with the first computer in a classroom. In this book, Katie Day Good traces the roots of the digital era's “connected learning” and “global classrooms” to the first half of the twentieth century, when educators adopted a range of media and materials—including lantern slides, bulletin boards, radios, and film projectors—as what she terms “technologies of global citizenship.” Good describes how progressive reformers in the early twentieth century made a case for deploying diverse media technologies in the classroom to promote cosmopolitanism and civic-minded learning. To “bring the world to the child,” these reformers praised not only new mechanical media—including stereoscopes, photography, and educational films—but also humbler forms of media, created by teachers and children, including scrapbooks, peace pageants, and pen pal correspondence. The goal was a “mediated cosmopolitanism,” teaching children to look outward onto a fast-changing world—and inward, at their own national greatness. Good argues that the public school system became a fraught site of global media reception, production, and exchange in American life, teaching children to engage with cultural differences while reinforcing hegemonic ideas about race, citizenship, and US-world relations.

Children experience technology in both formal and informal settings as they grow and develop. Despite research indicating the benefits of technology in early childhood education, the gap between parents, teachers, and children continues to grow as our new generation of children enters early childhood classrooms. Child Development and the Use of Technology: Perspectives, Applications and Experiences addresses major issues regarding technology for young children, providing a holistic portrait of technology and early childhood education from the views of practitioners in early childhood education, instructional design technology, special education, and mathematics and science education. Consisting of fifteen chapters developed by multidisciplinary teams, this book includes information, advice, and resources from practitioners, professionals, and university faculty engaged in early childhood education and instructional design technology.

No one has failed to notice that the current generation of youth is deeply--some would say totally--involved with digital media. Professors Howard Gardner and Katie Davis name today's young people The App Generation, and in this spellbinding book they explore what it means to be "app-dependent" versus "app-enabled" and how life for this generation differs from life before the digital era. Gardner and Davis are concerned with three vital areas of adolescent life: identity, intimacy, and imagination. Through innovative research, including interviews of young people, focus groups of those who work with them, and a unique comparison of youthful artistic productions before and after the digital revolution, the authors uncover the drawbacks of apps: they may foreclose a sense of identity, encourage superficial relations with others, and stunt creative imagination. On the other hand, the benefits of apps are equally striking: they can promote a strong sense of identity, allow deep relationships, and stimulate creativity. The challenge is to venture beyond the ways that apps are designed to be used, Gardner and Davis conclude, and they suggest how the power of apps can be a springboard to greater creativity and higher aspirations.

This book explores the role of technology in the lives of three and four-year-old children, considering children’s experiences at home and in preschool settings from the perspectives of parents, practitioners and children.

An in-depth examination of the novel ways young people support and learn from each other though participation in online fanfiction communities. Over the past twenty years, amateur fanfiction writers have published an astonishing amount of fiction in online repositories. More than 1.5 million enthusiastic fanfiction writers—primarily young people in their teens and twenties—have contributed nearly seven million stories and more than 176 million reviews to a single online site, Fanfiction.net. In this book, Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis provide an in-depth examination of fanfiction writers and fanfiction repositories, finding that these sites are not shallow agglomerations and regurgitations of pop culture but rather online spaces for sophisticated and informal learning. Through their participation in online fanfiction communities, young people find ways to support and learn from one another. Aragon and Davis term this novel system of interactive advice and instruction distributed mentoring, and describe its seven attributes, each of which is supported by an aspect of networked technologies: aggregation, accretion, acceleration, abundance, availability, asynchronicity, and affect. Employing an innovative combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses, they provide an in-depth ethnography, reporting on a nine-month study of three fanfiction sites, and offer a quantitative analysis of lexical diversity in the 61.5 billion words on the Fanfiction.net site. Going beyond fandom, Aragon and Davis consider how distributed mentoring could improve not only other online learning platforms but also formal writing instruction in schools.