Speakers & Moderators
    October 23, 2000

 
Daniel R. Anderson, PhD

Professor, Department of Psychology
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Dan Anderson’s research concerns the cognitive aspects of children’s television use and the effects of television on development. Recent research concerns the long-term impact of preschool television viewing on adolescent achievement, behavior, and attitudes and, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, brain activation in relation to the comprehension of film montage. He is an advisor to the Media and the Developing Mind Section of Annenberg Public Policy Center, the Children’s Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, and Nickelodeon.
 

Managing Director, Interactive Media for Children
The Markle Foundation

Emerging communcations media and information technology create unprecedented opportunity to improve people’s lives. The Markle Foundation works to realize this potential and to promote the development of communications that address public needs.
 

Professor, Department of Psychology
Georgetown University

Sandra Calvert studies the cognitive and social impact of media on children’s development. Her recent book, Children’s Journeys through the Information Age (McGraw Hill, 1999) and her co-edited special issue with Amy B. Jordan about Children in the Digital Age (Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, in press) critically examine how the changing media landscape impacts children. As Director of the Children and Media Project, she is using the Internet to collect data on what children learn from television programs, a social policy direction that examines the impact of the Children’s Television Act of 1990.
 

Reader in Psychology, Department of Human Sciences
Loughborough University

Charles Crook has a special interest in educational practice and socio-cultural theories of cognitive development. His recent publications have concerned computers as a context for collaboration in educational contexts and, also, the home as a social setting for using information technology.
 

Professor, Department of Psychology, Occidental College
Senior Scientist, American Psychological Association

Nancy Dess conducts research with humans and other species on a range of topics, such as emotion, eating, and individual differences. A recurrent theme is the evolutionary roots of animal behavior and their interactions with contemporary ecology in which, for humans, culture figure prominently. At APA, she has helped to organize several events, including Digital Childhood, that seek to bring together scholars with others to increase the role of understanding human nature in policies and practices related to peacemaking, education and technology.
 

Professor and Dean, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies
University of California at Los Angeles

Aimée Dorr focuses on the roles of electronic media in children’s informal and formal education. She works with those who create educational materials for home and school, including materials designed to promote early literacy and positive racial attitudes. She is currently working with Media Workshop New York on formative and summative evaluation, designed to assist New York City public school teachers in integrating new technology intelligently into their classrooms.
 

Aon Professor of Learning Sciences & Associate Professor of Computer Science
Northwestern University

Louis M. Gomez is co-director of the NSF-sponsored Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools, dedicated to collaborative research and development with urban schools that will bring the current state-of-the-art in computing and networking technologies into pervasive use in schools so that they will integrally support science and other curriculum. In this and other roles, he investigates techniques that improve human use of information retrieval systems and that aid the acquisition of complex computer-based skills.
 

Dale Kunkel, PhD

Department of Communication
University of California, Santa Barbara

Dale Kunkel studies children and media issues from several diverse perspectives, including television effects research and assessments of media industry content and practices. He has testified before the US Senate and House of Representatives and the Federal Communications Commission. He has headed the National Television Violence Study of the risks associated with different types of violent portrayals on television, and studies V-chip program ratings and the nature of sexual messages across the television landscape.
 

Professor, Department of Psychology
University of California at Los Angeles

Patricia Greenfield studies the relationship between culture and human development; she considers electronic media as a key component of modern culture with a profound role in socialization and development. She has received the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Behavioral Science Research and teaching awards from UCLA and the American Psychological Association. She has two books on children and digital media: Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Computers, which has been translated into nine languages, and Interacting with Video (co-edited with R. R. Cocking).
 

Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Virginia
Executive Director for Science, American Psychological Association

The Science Directorate works with APA divisions and with federal agencies and policy makers on issues related to the topics that will be discussed at the Digital Childhood conference. We approach these issues from multiple perspectives: enhancing funding opportunities for researchers, sharing research results with policy makers and bringing the work of researchers to the attention of the public through our web site and publications.
 

Legislative and Federal Affairs Officer
American Psychological Association

Jeff McIntyre is a member of the White House Task Force on Navigating the New Media, an advisor to the Federal Communication Commission's V-Chip Task Force, has testified before Congress, and continues to be involved with a multitude of media and society issues.
 

President and Co-Founder
Center for Media Education

Kathryn Montgomery is an authoritative and influential voice for creating a quality media culture for children, their families and the community. She directs CME’s Research and Public Education Initiative on New Media, Children and Youth. The Initiative is designed to stimulate research on new media, children and youth and serve as a clearinghouse on research and policy developments for academics, industry, the public and policymakers.
 

Barbara J. O'Keefe, PhD

Professor and Dean, School of Speech and Communication Studies
Northwestern University

Barbara O'Keefe has studied both the development of communication skills in middle childhood, adolescence, and adulthood and the design and diffusion of digital technologies for learning and collaboration. In collaboration with Ellen Wartella and Rhonda Scantlin of the University of Texas, she has just completed a comprehensive review of the research literature on children and interactive media.
 

Research Scientist & Co-director, Family Research and Consultation Center
Yale University

Dorothy Singer is involved in writing and developing teacher training materials for day care centers and for parents. Currently, she is involved in a Parent Training Project to teach parents to play with their preschoolers as a means of enhancing cognitive and social skills. Another facet of her work deals with media literacy and educating children to be critical users of television. In addition, she consults with parent groups, television industry executives, and government agencies concerning television and education. She has authored over 150 publications, and written twelve books, her latest of which with Jerome L. Singer are: Handbook of Children and the Media and Make Believe: Games and Activities to Foster Imaginative Play in Children.
 

Professor of the Sociology of Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Sherry Turkle is a scholar and a licensed clinical psychologist. Her research examines the sociology of science, especially the sciences of the mind, and the subjective side of people’s relationships with technology, especially computers and the internet as they impact on questions of identity and definitions of self. Her most recent book is The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (2nd ed. 1998).
 

Ellen Ann Wartella, PhD

Dean and Walter Cronkite Regents Chair
College of Communication, University of Texas at Austin

Ellen Wartella serves on editorial boards of seven journals is co-author or editor of nine books and dozens of book chapters and articles on children and television. She recently conducted a review of research on children and interactive media through a Markle Foundation grant. 

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The Child Left Behind

Amy Aidman, PhD
Research Director; Center for Media Education

The Angry Child

Craig Anderson, PhD
Professor of Psychology; Iowa State University

The Social Child

Steven Breckler, PhD
Program Director, Social Psychology; National Science Foundation

The Bright Child

Rodney Cocking, PhD
Program Director, Child Learning & Development; National Science Foundation

The Healthy Child

Lauren Fasig, PhD, JD
Director of Policy & Communications; Society for Research in Child Development

The Playful Child

Frank Wilson, MD
Neurologist, author of “The Hand”; University of California, San Francisco

 

View the working group summaries