At the recent CoSN conference, the launch of the white paper ‘The Digital World of Young Children : Impact on Emergent Literacy’ was released by the Pearson Foundation. This paper by Jay Blanchard and Terry Moore, describes how literacy skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing are sculpted by digital media. The paper is designed to initiate discussion and further investigation of the affordances of growing up in technology rich environments. It looks at the impact of culture, accessibility and the importance of intentional and non-intentional learning. The paper raises some key research questions like ‘Will young children in developing countries have access to newer, more adaptive sources of information, perhaps supplanting the need for print media?’
This is the second white paper in the series, the first being ‘Pockets of Potential : Using mobile technology to promote children’s learning’
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The thing that I found interesting in this paper is the suggestion that digital media is impacting on children’s developmental milestones, with effects on attention, information processing speed, social collaboration, attitudes, and digital literacy. This has implications for early childhood education. In a field where there hasn’t been much change in pedagogy over the years, suddenly teachers are going to have to reassess expectations and understandings of child development.
Hi Helen,
Absolutely. I wonder if there is much research on this topic?
Garry
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