developmental timeline on digital literacy

For the past year or so, I’ve had a secret pet project I’ve been working on in my ample (ahem) spare time: tracing the development of early digital media literacy practices and skills in my son Walt.

This past few months I’ve gotten pretty lazy about it, to be sure, but its been fun watching his digital literacy skills emerge in the same way — and sometimes tightly coupled with — is traditional print literacy skills…

Oddly, we know a lot about early childhood development of the latter (reading & writing stuff like books) but there isn’t a whole lot on the former. My general questions are things like:

• When does he grasp that the person in the moving image on screen isn’t really there? For a while, he would periodically peek behind the computer or television screen to see if they might be back there, behind the “empty box” of the screen itself.
• How does he come to understand things like the relationship between his input on the controls and the Wii avatar? Oh yes, Walt actively plays the Wii and has since he was able to walk. He very quickly understood that jumping on the Wii Balance Board would make the little person on the Wii ski slope jump. But does he know that funny blonde face in glasses (my Mii) who’s watching from the sidelines in the animation represents is his mom?
• How the hell did he figure out how to select movies using the iPhone Touch?! He was barely 18 months and figured this out on his own in the backseat of his car one day.

Yes, our kid is surrounded by media. We are two media and learning scholars, so our house is filled with screens and computers and controllers and devices and cords. By the time Walt could walk, we had him playing RockBand. Since his first birthday, he’s owned some form of iPod (now the iTouch).

Do I worry about his ’screen time’? No, actually I don’t. He walks away from a Pixar movie and picks up a book or toy as often as he walks away from the book or toy and asks for the “hippo show.” In my own opinion, media is as life enhancing (to borrow words from Jim Gee & Dewey before him) as any good book or what have you.

When I first joined Jim Gee’s research team and switched to studying games back in 2001, there was no real body of research on videogames and their effect on child development. So, I went back to the literature on television to see what the general findings were there. Of all the studies on the effects of media on children, the biggest conclusion I drew across them all was pretty simple and compelling: The conversation on the couch around the television was more important for learning than what was on the television itself. In fact, just like the old tutoring studies that found that even mediocre tutoring improved learning, it turned out that even mediocre conversation about what was on the show had impact.

So, again, do I worry about his love of movies and videogames and devices? Nope. But then, as a tech geek myself, I use those moments as an opportunity to engage in joint media participation with my favorite guy on the planet (next to Kurt, of course, but then he’s always right there too, geeking out with the rest of us).