Peter Lyman, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says: “In the US, we are seeing a real change in the scope of kids’ social networks, including both the web and mobile phones. For example, initially, small groups of kids would read each other’s blogs but now hundreds and even thousands might read a single person’s blog.

“The good thing about this is that kids no longer have the sense of being limited by  their family’s or local community’s values. They can find children who share their interests – not only all over the US but around the world. So, a kid’s circle of friends is potentially much larger now than it used to be.”

Lyman is in charge of the Digital Youth project, a research project investigating children’s use of digital media. So far, its findings are very encouraging. Rather than painting a picture of doom and gloom, Lyman and his research teams across the country have discovered that children are taking technology, such as computer games and instant messaging (IM and SMS), and transforming it into something positive for themselves and the world around them.

A good example of this is the research team’s study of a cyber café environment where children play war games. “The children saw those games as a form of sport, like baseball and soccer,” he says. “For them it had to do with competition, teamwork and reputation – not about taking pleasure in violence. That is not to say that kids don’t have an emotional response to violent imagery, but they know the difference between fiction and reality.”

Lyman says that instead of being damaging, computer games can provide children with a range of skills that can benefit them later in life. He tells a story about his daughter to illustrate this. “When my daughter was in the fifth grade, we were driving through Pasadena, California, and she commented that if she had designed the city, she wouldn’t have built the electrical factory right in the middle of the suburbs,” Lyman says. “What I didn’t know was that she had been re-designing Pasadena using SimCity (a simulation and city-building computer and video game). She obviously learnt something from the game because she went on to achieve a graduate degree in city design and is now a city planner in California.

“You might say it is just play, but kids have always learnt important skills through their hobbies and collections. What has changed is that instead of collecting stamps, they will, as in the case of my daughter, try and build something using a computer game.”

Programming is another skill children are learning from digital media. “Many games allow kids to extend the characteristics of the software by writing their own extensions,” Lyman says. “So there are many kids learning programming online and much earlier than you’d expect. They are also learning how to write for an audience. What they produce on the web is a lot like journalism and I think that is a very unusual experience to have outside school.”

The Digital Youth project is sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, which, as Lyman puts it, “is very interested in informal learning outside of schools.” Lyman says that by sponsoring the project the foundation hopes to change America’s attitude towards use of digital media in education.

“For example, in the UK, there is a strong emphasis on visual literacy and digital media in education and building those things into the curriculum,” Lyman says. “Unfortunately, there are no such initiatives in the US, so one of the Foundation’s goals is to start a discussion about how technology can be used in schools. The second goal is to try to get better software to improve education.

“Many companies in Silicon Valley are interested in education but the software tends to emphasize breakthroughs that involve high technology without paying enough attention to education and learning. What we want to do is to advise those companies on how to design technology for informal learning for kids aged from 10 to 20 years old.”

It will be some time before Lyman and his research teams get that far but they are making progress. They recently received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation for USD 3.5 million for their research, and Lyman is trying to encourage software developers to start thinking about designing applications for children by observing how innovations are used by kids.

“The way kids describe things is often very original and interesting, and most of the time we cannot anticipate the way they think about technology,” Lyman says. “For instance, in Norway children were given mobile phones by their parents to stay safe. But they soon discovered instant messaging as a way of exchanging ideas with their friends. So, what we grown-ups thought would become a device for voice became so much more for children.”

Torunn Hansen-Tangen