Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 06:10:55 +0100
From: "Price, Dan" <dprice@tui.edu>
Subject: Children and the Internet
Regarding children and learning by the book and\or the Internet.
As I was reading I was struck by variety of images for "children." Willard,
obviously you were appealing to personal experiences of reading to very
young children. When I started to read the message about the debate, I was
thinking first of children, well, of middle school age, then of primary
school, and I was aware of how the argument was shifting in my mind in going
from those of one age group to another. Then your personal example brought
the age down another couple of notches. Is this a matter of it all depends
on what one means by "children?"
Can we push the imagination still further? What of the reaction of the
tribal story teller to the advent of new fangled thing called a book and
daring to use it in raising children? Might he say something like "What a
mechanical intrusion on such traditional and even sacred activity? How
crass the use of a material object for the telling of a tale!"
In other words, to what extent do our perceptions and consequent valuations
depend on personal past experiences? Is this a case simply that it takes
some time for new inventions (such as the book and the Internet) to take
their places within our accustomed habits?
Remember, too that widespread use of the Internet is new, very very new. It
really only took off with the advent of Windows and browsers to read Windows
and that was in '93. That's only 7 years ago!!! Not much time to become a
part of our raising of children.
--dan
Sincerely,
Dan Price, Ph.D.
Professor, Center for Distance Learning
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