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In This Issue
- Are Computers Hurting Reading Abilities?
- Kids are spending more time online. What is that doing to their reading proficiency?
- Internet Addiction Disorder
- Lots of people joke about their kids, spouses, or friends being Internet addicts, but the medical profession is officially recognizing Internet Addiction Disorder as a real problem.
- A New Version of ComputerTime is On Its Way
- More than one computer in your home that your children share? ComputerTime is about to get easier to configure with one set of limits across the network.
Are Computers Hurting Reading Abilities?
There is disagreement over a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) study that makes a case that kids are reading less and are in trouble as a result.
The NEA study ignores online reading, according to Steven Johnson in his article Dawn of the Digital Natives . He contends, "if you actually read the report, what you find are some startling omissions — omissions that ultimately lead to a heavily distorted view of the Google generation and its prospects." He points out that "The NEA makes a convincing case that both kids and adults are reading fewer books. "Non-required" reading — ie, picking up a book for the fun of it — is down 7% since 1992 for all adults, and 12% for 18-24 year olds."
But the NEA report also shows that younger children are making progress in their reading abilities. Teenager's reading scores have only dropped by about 1% in 15 years. Is that Alarming? It doesn't seem to be.
Kids as well as adults increasingly read more online, and in Johnson's estimation, they are "exercising the same cognitive muscles" whether the words are represented in ink or pixels.
The NEA hit back , saying that Steven Johnson misrepresented the report. Sunil Iyengar is the director of the Office of Research & Analysis at the NEA, and he says that they did not exclude online reading from their analysis. He says their data comes from studies "...asking people how frequently they read anything whatsoever for pleasure — a category so broad as to include text of any length in any format through any medium, from books to cereal boxes to, yes, computer screens."
Then Iyengar parades additional statistics which seem to support the NEA's claims.
But as you read both of these articles, the notion that Johnson and Iyengar are cherry picking statistics to support their arguments emerges.
Iyengar ends with some honesty that suggests we need to put this debate on hold for a while because we really don't have all the answers: "Now is the time for educators and intellectuals to produce sound empirical studies of the risks and benefits of electronic media."
Perhaps it's not the medium as much as the quality of the content that makes the true difference in kid's becoming smart.
Until a clear answer emerges, maintaining balance between online and offline reading is probably the safest path, and encouraging any sort of reading is never a bad thing.
Hat tip to Kevin Arthur for linking to the articles mentioned above. Here are additional book related links from his great blog, Question Technology:
- Books and Emotional Attachments
- Does Kids' Reading Need to be More Interactive?
- Are eBooks Better than Traditional Books?
Internet Addiction Disorder
We all know somebody that we kid about being addicted to computer games or the Internet. In some cases, maybe it's not even a joke. Some people truly get "hooked" and need to seek professional help to break them from their addiction. Aside from the unhealthy psychological aspects of spending too much time on a computer, it is a sedentary activity that brings physical health risks into play.
Soon, it might officially be recognized by the medical community as a legitimate disorder.
Dr. Helen Smith, points out that Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) is being proposed for inclusion in the DSM-V.
IAD has actually been proposed for inclusion as a psychiatric diagnosis in the next issue of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). Writing in the new issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Jerald J. Block, M.D., said that excessive internet and computer usage should be labeled a mental disease, as it has all of the components of a compulsive-impulsive disorder:
- excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives,
- withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible,
- tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use, and
- negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue
Setting reasonable limits is the best prevention, but you already know that and you're using ComputerTime, right?
A New Version of ComputerTime is On Its Way
If you have more than one computer in your house that everybody shares and is on a local network, raise your hand!
As helpful as ComputerTime has been to many of you, we've heard from a lot of parents with multiple networked computers who need one set of limits across all of the computers . With the current ComputerTime 2.0, if you've got kids that move amongst more than one computer in your house, you've had to set up different limits on each computer, and for many, that is a less-than-perfect solution.
The next version of ComputerTime is going to allow you to set up ComputerTime with one set of limits that will keep track of time regardless of which computer each person logs on to. For example if there are three computers on the network and Zoe uses 30 minutes on the computer in the family room, and 45 minutes on the one in the kitchen, and then goes onto her laptop, after 45 minutes, her two hour limit will be up and she'll be logged off by ComputerTime.
A lot of work has gone into this new networking feature. We wanted to make it as easy to configure as possible, and we know that busy parents do not have time to get a certification as a network engineer. We think we've come up with something that will be easy to use and require only a few short steps to configure.
In the next few weeks, we will enter a testing phase with some of our more technical customers to work out any final kinks that might not have shown up in our internal testing. This is usually referred to as a Beta Test . If you want to start using this feature earlier, and if you're OK with using beta software that might still have a few bugs in it, then let us know that you would like to help by sending an email to support@softwaretime.com.
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