Facilitators: I: Rodney Cocking; II:  Sandra Calvert

Members:
I: Dan Anderson, Justine Cassell, Cynthia Char, Sholly Fisch, Catherine Lyon, Heidy Maldonado, Linda Hahner

II: William Rukeyser, Carol Beal, Cheryl Gotthelf, Helene Hembrooke, Richard Chase, Phil Rubin, Virginia Mathie, Patricia Greenfield

What are the most compelling needs and opportunities in the area of technology and cognitive development?

• The development of tools to enhance literacy (verbal and nonverbal), and the evaluation and testing of those tools
• Implications of visual literacy and verbal literacy: Visual literacy may be as important as verbal literacy. Different media are particularly good at presenting different content. Implications for curriculum development (e.g., make visual literacy a developed area of the curriculum)
• An understanding of engagement with information technology to help make the tools more effective (including the role of gender)
• Not just content, form: Production value; age appropriate forms; utilizing and cultivating different cognitive skills via forms.
• Attention to the role of social context

Keys to Project Development:

• I: "Basic" research must have governmental support
• I: Influence policy: Contact Norman Bradburn (NSF) about digital childhood area and the need for research in this area.
• I, II: Create industry/academic partnerships for development of tools and research on them
• I: Encourage government agencies to form partnerships in funding research (e.g., FCC/NSF)
• II: Write up a short synopsis of research project 1-2 pages
• II: Talk to others who share similar interests
• II: Talk to or write people from multiple foundations about their interest in funding a project
• II: Each project member will do these steps by the end of the year 2000

The Social Child

Facilitator: Steven Breckler

Members: Dale Kunkel, Patti Miller, Richard McCarty, Susan Newcomer, Lauri Linton, Charles Crook, Pat Tobin, Melva Goffnet

What are the most compelling needs and opportunities in the area of technology and social development?

• Consumer socialization
• Identity development
• Targeted funding
• Cross-disciplinary collaboration (industry, parents, academe, advocates)

Keys to Project Development:

The Healthy Child

Facilitator: Lauren Fasig

Members: Nancy Schwartz, Jen Audley, Edward Gonzalez, Todd Oppenheimer, Kelly Schmitt, Jordana Hutchital, Jeanne Funk, Colleen Cordes, Hubert Jessup

What are the most compelling needs and opportunities in the area of technology and children’s physical and mental health?

• Identifying conditions for healthy child development and the positive and negative impacts of technology across the spectrum of development, beginning with an immediate focus on the preschool years
• Identifying features and conditions of technology that contribute to positive and negative health outcomes and the prevention of negative outcomes

Keys to Project Development:

• Form a working group of experts on healthy child development and experts on technology to apply what we know about mental and physical health and the role of technology. Key objective: To develop specific research agenda to address the questions developed by the working group
• Create a task force of experts to form an "objective board." Software developers (and others developing interactive media) will be invited to submit their materials (including evaluation studies) for critique regarding the beneficial features, etc. Key obejctive: To identify those features and conditions of technology that support or detract from healthy child development

The Child in Family Context

Facilitator: Joe Turow

Members: Alladi Venkatesh, Rachelle Hollander, Amy Jordan, Geri Gay, Kathy Krendl, Mark Aakhus, Alison Alexander, Elizabeth Vandewater

What are the most compelling needs and opportunities in the area of technology and family functioning?

• How does "the family" (with its goals and its communicative processes) shape – and how is it shaped by – the multi-media environment that now characterizes the life of the family?
• What are the social, cultural, economic and regulatory forces that impact the child/media relationship at the nexus of these nested communities?

Keys to Project Development:

Research Question: What is the relationship between family, technology, and children’s experience with homework?

• Provides an illuminating example of the reciprocal forces that shape family’s relationship with media
• Crosses multiple experiences and agents in the child’s life
• Reflects the variables that shape resources available
• Presents the various slices of social and physical space the family occupies

Approach: Research/data review and historical frame; ethnographic study of families and media in their various contexts; annual national survey

Stakeholders: General public, parents, children, teachers, textbook publishers, policy makers, advocates, industry

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The Child Left Behind

Facilitator: Amy Aidman

Members: Laurie Lipper, Andy Corvin, Fernando Bohorquez, Idit Harel, Anthony Salandy, Raymie McKerrow, Nancy Jennings, Eileen Collins, Carol Shadelbauer, Margie Shields, Pat Aufderheide, Louis Gomez, David Johnson, Cheryl Gotthelf

What are the most compelling needs and opportunities in the area of technology and children’s access to interactive technologies?

• How do industry products meet the needs of some and neglect those of others?
• Children as creators
• Many kinds of children are left behind for many different reasons. The research needs to be respectful of diversity both of people and contexts.

Keys to Project Development:

The research should be carried out in the context of a public/private partnership that includes stakeholders from all sectors. Industry alone will go for what sells. Takes teachers, researchers, media, government, private foundations. Would concentrate on questions of universal beneficial use. The implication is that each sector is different and the research would begin with the understanding that one size will not fit all. We expect many answers to the question, "How do we leave no one behind?"

The Angry Child

Facilitator: Craig Anderson

Members: Valeria Lovelace, Doug Gentile, Aimee Dorr, Adam Pertman, Bob Greenleaf, Lynne Haverkos, Linda Billings, Ronda Scantlin, Joanne Cantor, Jim Potter

What are the most compelling needs and opportunities in the area of technology and children’s aggressiveness?

• Public education: parents, kids, industry, policy makers
• New research on new media: informed by past work, look at new features

The Playful Child

Facilitator: Frank Wilson

Members: Dorothy Singer, Carol Stohecker, Tina Waganer, Katie Bazor, Steve Jones, James Robertson, Toby Levin, Mary Campbell, Sharon Strover, Rebecca Randall, Debra Lieberman

What are the most compelling needs and opportunities in the area of technology, play, and child development?

Understanding the child:

• How the child uses play to construct learning
• How relationships affect play and learning – learning is social
• This information should be shared with content developers of games, smart toys, interactive dolls

The child in mediated relationships:

• Maintaining contacts over distances
• Playing with new persona or mask
• Relationships with smart toys

How producers/designers can find out what works:

• In-company research (product, market research)
• Input from children and parents
• Social science researchers as consultants and advisors

Keys to Project Development:

• How can technology facilitate play? Consider various settings (home, school, child care center, library)
• How can we help parents learn how to play with their child?
• How to build on the inherent appeal of games? (intrinsic motivation to learn and to experiment and invent)
• Develop clearer definition of interactivity, its appeal, its value (takes into account all previous actions and messages to form next message)
• Allow child to create content, even with interactive dolls

Summary and Synthesis: Digital Kids

Barbara J. O’Keefe, Northwestern University

This meeting summary provides an overview and synthesis of the reports from the Digital Kids working groups (the Healthy Child, the Social Child, the Angry Child, the Bright Child I and II, the Playful Child, the Child Left Behind, and the Child in Family Context). Each group was asked to address two issues: first, defining the most critical research and development problems for the designated area; and second, identifying concrete methods of attack on those problems. Three major themes emerged from the reports of the working groups. They were: (1) basic research needs and plans; (2) technology development; and (3) public education and policy initiatives.

Virtually every group reported that there is a critical need to build a basic research infrastructure in their area of concern. This involves building a foundation for advanced research, developing sources of funding, and cultivating a research community.

Building a foundation for advanced research. The study of children and interactive media—especially media used outside of school--is still a very young and dispersed enterprise. There are as yet no major centers for work in this area. Over the last two years a series of meetings have been held to bring researchers together, which has contributed to the development of improved awareness and stronger networks between researchers, technology developers, and policy makers. As communication and collaboration have improved, a set of critical priorities for basic research initiatives has emerged as a community consensus.

First, across the entire area, there is a pressing need for research synthesis. The research in this area has been done in a wide range of fields—engineering and computer science, graphics and visualization, artificial intelligence, education, various subfields within psychology, education, communication studies, media studies, sociology, and anthropology, among others. As researchers interested in this area have begun to connect, we have come to appreciate the fact that we know more than we think, and there are a variety of useful frameworks that might be employed to understand children’s development and the social and communicative contexts in which they grow.

So one important conclusion to be drawn is that we need to promote research synthesis in all the areas covered by the working groups. We need first, to collate the relevant research, identifying the many disparate streams of relevant research being conducted across the disciplines. Second, we need to create useful syntheses of this research that can point the way for new research initiatives. Finally, we need to encourage more translational research, research reviews that make bodies of relevant research accessible to diverse publics, including journalists, policy makers, educators, content creators and media producers, parents, and community leaders.

Second, we need to develop theoretical frameworks that help us to understand the complex interrelationships among individual development, features of media and media content, and the sociocultural context in which children live their lives. Some special problems are: developing rich models of the various cognitive, emotional, and communication skills that children acquire, and particularly their acquisition of skill in processing nonverbal materials; developing analyses of the features of media that connect with models of communicative expression and understanding, and particularly analyses of interactivity and its connection to participation and engagement; developing methods for analysis of media content that recognize the increasing mobility of content and its dissemination through multiple media outlets; and development of ways of understanding the contexts of communication as "territories of the self," in which the boundaries between domains of activity—the boundaries of the self—are increasingly challenged by time- and place-independent means of communication.

Third, we need to carry out systematic observation of actual user practices, including both systematic surveys and ethnographies of community practices. In this we need to be more inclusive in our attention to diverse types of children and communities, recognizing that gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and age can and do influence patterns of technology adoption and use. A special need is for ongoing longitudinal work and work that focuses on changes in technology. Many researchers lack an accurate picture of the state-of-the-art, including an appropriately differentiated conception of the evolving media ecology. Our need for such ongoing data collection might be met, in part, by persuading those who conduct institutionalized surveys such as the PSID to include variables indexing media use and practice.

Developing sources of funding. We need to identify or develop sources of funding to support the kinds of ambitious, basic research programs we want to carry out. Major Federal funders such as NSF, NIH, NIMH, NICHD, and the Department of Education must make a commitment to fund research in this area. The deeply cross-disciplinary character of this research topic cries out for support from cross-cutting initiatives within agencies and cross-agency initiatives, but these will require special leadership and commitment from program officers.

Cultivating a research community. Finally, we need to continue to strengthen bonds within our community of interest. New journals are emerging along with online resources such as listservs and collaboratories, but we also need to create a stable roster of annual meetings at which we can gather and professional organizations that provide us with a collective voice. As we build this community, our goal should be to embrace and support collaboration among diverse interests, including academic and institutional research, policy, public education and advocacy, and media production.

There is a hopeful fact about our emerging interest in connecting research on children’s development with design of interactive media and media policy: interactive media are still in their infancy, and so there is a relatively open horizon for those who wish to shape the evolution of our media ecology. In the case of television, researchers and critics came relatively late to the realization that children’s capabilities, lives, and needs were being influenced by TV and that someone should begin shaping programming in ways that served healthy development. We are in a much better position to help shape the future of interactive media than we were with television.

Recognizing this, it is a matter of extreme urgency to foster partnerships between research communities and media producers. This is an objective that is easy to proclaim and very difficult to achieve. The gulf between the typical research community and the design or production community is generally very wide and takes time and commitment to bridge. We should make every effort to learn from successful past academy-industry and other public-private partnerships.

We should not underestimate the value of foundation- and government-funded initiatives in midwifing such partnerships. Particularly with an area of national need as critical as this one, such investments are well justified. We should also be sure to exploit emerging relationships between universities and their corporate partners. Many universities have already invested in research incubators that are meant to foster exactly this kind of collaboration, which offers the opportunity to leverage existing investments in cross-disciplinary and cross-sector relationships.

Everyone at this meeting expressed concern about the lack of connection between bodies of fact about kids and interactive media and public discussion/policy debates in this topic area. Everyone agrees that there is a huge need for public education and advocacy, a need that we must meet aggressively with translational research and with active participation in public debates.

As with calls for grounding media design in developmental research, having good translational research is easier said than done. A critical foundation for successful translation is knowing the audience, and the best way to know the audience is to maintain an ongoing dialogue. However, the organization of specialist communities virtually guarantees isolation of researchers from the publics they need to address. We need to find realistic ways to foster dialogue, the kind of dialogue in which the needs and interests of the broader community are made visible and pressing to researchers. We have few good models of this process in existing practice.

A related need is for timely, policy-related research. Sometimes there are existing bodies of research that are relevant to a new policy issues, and in these cases we need to be able to find and abstract that research in ways that make it easy to feed policy debate. But often we need to conduct new, policy driven research, and to do so in an appropriate time frame.

One mechanism that might connect researchers more directly with the communities they want to serve is a clearinghouse for inquiries from journalists, concerned citizens, and policy agencies. This would permit various publics to express and negotiate their needs with a dedicated research community.