week 5 – EDUC 342: Child Development & New Technologies

Week 6 – Writing Socially

nhardson — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 04:33:51 +0000

I found the Curwood-Magnifico-Lammer’s article to be incredibly interesting. Particularly because my middle school years were full of online writing. I utilized a cite called “Worthy of Publishing” that provided a platform for aspiring writers to post their chapters and have others comment on them. It truly demonstrated to me the power of having an audience. I wrote because people wanted to know about my story. I got feedback and was able to read imperfect writing in order to understand what good writing looks like. It was an incredibly formative time for me as a writer.

Additionally, I found it interesting the idea of implementing this type of format in a classroom. When I was in middle school two other girls and me were all working on our own “novels.” We formed a mini community by emailing each other our work and giving feedback. We motivated each other and created our own small social network to motivate our writing. I can’t help but think utilizing peers in motivating young writers is critical and I honestly believe using a social network in order to do that is brilliant. I think that affinity groups form that type of platform naturally but I wonder if there is a way to create a platform, like “Worthy of Publishing,” targeted at youth, where completely original work could be created.

Week 5

sandhini — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 19:13:16 +0000

The reading that was most surprising to me this week was the one by Isabella Granic. I have always viewed playing video games to be an unproductive activity. It was interesting to see video-games can actually develop important skills of cognitive, social, emotional and motivation. The fMri studies that they cited such as the one that showed that people who played video games had a less active attention control allocation center while doing tasks that required activity, made me view video games in a completely new light.
Most of the study seemed to be studying the effects of video games on children and how they helped develop children. However, as the William et. al reading pointed out, majority of those who play these games are adults (58.97 per cent). How do we view video-games in this context? Are they helping adults learn and develop too? We don’t play other games that helped us develop in our childhood such as games of make-believe when we become older. What prompts people to continue/start playing video games?

Week 5

myupa — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 07:56:13 +0000

In The Benefits of Playing Video Games by Granic et al., I found the information about cognitive benefits intriguing and especially in the context of gender. Going back to our readings and classroom conversations last week about gendered toys and girls being more open and creative with toys that they viewed as being feminine, this reading left me wondering how much shooter games appeal to girls. Shooter games in particular were shown to create “faster and more accurate attention allocation, higher spatial resolution in visual processing, and enhanced mental rotation abilities.” Spatial skills in turn are a large predictor for “achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.” Thus, are these shooter games, or the gamer culture built around them, appealing enough to girls so that they can also reap the cognitive and creative benefits? Extending these thoughts to other minority groups, as brought up by Williams et al, can an increase in representation across video game characters have increased increased cognitive, emotional, or social benefits?