Mindfully Digital

“It is the child’s playfulness that renders an activity play. As such, playfulness is recognized as the essence or spirit of play.”

—Kelly Christian, from The construct of playfulness

I love this photo. The caption is “Football outside Jakarta.” This image of four boys with their exuberant leaps and single-pointed focus on that white ball midair communicates so vividly the spirit of play.

According to Denise Pope, Senior Lecturer at Stanford University Graduate School of Education, young people today are enrolled in school for longer periods of time. In the last 10–20 years, the length of the school day has increased and the number of kids enrolled in extracurricular activity has increased. Time for free, unstructured play and kid-directed adventures has diminished dramatically, with a tendency towards overscheduling spilling over into Summer. [Read more…] about Tracking the spirit of play

One of the many things I love about the Bay Area is that it is very dog friendly. My dog Keira is a curious creature. If she sees an open door she takes that as a personal invitation. So a few days ago, on an evening walk, Keira led me into my local bookstore. Since children’s books have a magnetic pull for me, and this store has a great buyer, I made my way to the Young Adult shelves where my eyes went right to a colorful spine with the title In Real Life by Doctorow (that’s writer Cory Doctorow) and Wang (that’s cartoonist, writer, and illustrator Jen Wang). I left the store with book in hand, and read the whole thing the same night. [Read more…] about Online life is real life…

Crows, by Charles Harvey

 

The mountains take their pencil to my spirit as I sleep, sketching in lines of memory and long canyons waiting to draw me in upon rising. —David Lukas

 

The new Pew Internet survey, Teens, Social Media, and Technology 2018, released May 31, 2018, reports that 95% of teens have access to a smartphone and 45% say they are online “almost constantly.” The REI Report, The Path Ahead, shares an astonishing result of their research: “The average American spends 95 percent of their life indoors. As a result, we are becoming an indoor species, which comes with consequences.” (I’ve written about The Path Ahead in other posts—here and here.) [Read more…] about A Reckoning of Crows

River stone supported by hazel sticks
collapsed several times
the last four or five stone being the most awkward
made across a path at the entrance to a glade
Swindale Beck Wood, Cumbria
13 September 1982

 

In the past three weeks, I’ve had significant group conversations about technology with parents of teenagers, parents of children newborn to five, and a group of 8th grade students. Here’s a glimpse of what I’ve learned. [Read more…] about Developing our digital craft—slowly over time, with patience, trial and error

I attended an all-day MediaX conference at Stanford University this week with speakers at the leading edge of research into AI, social bots, human-computer interactions, fake news. Presenters and panelists included Mariana Lin—writer behind the voice of Siri, Sam Wineburg—founder and Executive Director of the Stanford History Education Group, Shelby Coffey—vice chair of the Newseum, Esther Wojcicki—founder of the largest high school journalism program in the U.S. and Vice Chair of the Board of Creative Commons, and Byron Reeves—Professor of Communication at Stanford.

The underlying theme across all the talks was about trust and transparency. [Read more…] about Thinking like a fact checker…