Hello. My name is Thom Gillespie. I write for a magazine

[G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl]

A story:

Filters at home and at school?

When my daughters were little children, the played Prince of Persia on the
computer: a labyrinth-game with boobytraps, like a Vietnam bamboo pitfall. 
My wife did not like that, I argued that it would be better to sit next to
them and comment on the games but at the end we banned this and other games.

Weeks later my wife and my eldest daughte did visit a shop and our little
girl said to here mom: "Do not buy that game, thers is too much blood in
it....

Then we went to the children movie Snowwith form Disney. In that movie the
evil queen goes to the cellar and passes a cellar with a sceleton in it. You
can see that the last act of that dead person was to reach to a bottle of
water. The queen waks by and gives a kick to the head that roles away... My
wife and I looked at each other and the next day Prince was allowed again.

Years later they played with their friends on the local network at home
network-labyrinth games: but they do not fight each other but as a team the
monsters in the caves. (Sometimes they killed by accident each other and
then it became a moment tricky..)

Very young children you should protect for the ugly world. (...like you do
for the televison programs they are looking at: Jerry Springer on children
hours?)

But I think that it is a better strategy to teach them the good and the bad
side of the real world and learn them to develop their own opinion about
that....

Filtering the word sex also filters away good educational stories about the
danger of Aids and how to prevent that. (I do not envy you when your
children get the age of 15..) 

-----Original Message-----
From: Diego Gomez Deck [mailto:DiegoGomezDeck at ConsultAr.com]
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2002 10:23 AM
To: squeakland at squeakland.org
Subject: Re: Hello. My name is Thom Gillespie. I write for a magazine


Hello...

I'm not a teacher, but a father...

My son of 4 years old use the computer more time than I like... He learned
to read/write with the computer at the age of 2 1/2... The problem I see
today is the large ammount of information he can access, the information by
itself (in large ammounts) is not so good... We need tools to clasify and
process the information... I think that one of the goal for the next years
is to "protect" childrens from the over-information (not too many years ago,
when you searched for "holocaust" in internet you found more nazy pages than
others)...

My 2 cents,

Diego Gomez Deck

>Thom,
>
>  You must not have kids of your own. Has literacy changed? No, but the
>tools have. 6 years ago my son was in elementary school creating his
>book reports on word processors, using electronic encyclopedia's and the
>web as resources for research projects. What kids have learned is that
>they can learn just about anything on their own! And to that degree, I
>believe that to keep up with them, we need to consider instructional
>methodologies that incorporate constructivist learning theory, case base
>learning, the Internet and computing as much as possible. Even my son
>"the artist" has moved to using tools such as Adobe Illustrator and
>digital cameras. Educators need to continue to tap the natural interests
>and instincts of the students. These kids are technology savvy far
>beyond most of their instructors and parents. We need to teach
>instructors and parents not to be intimidated by the technical
>competence of these students. We should encourage them to become masters
>of the information!
>
>--Barbara Jennings
>  Doctoral Student University of New Mexico
>  Organizational Learning and Instructional Technology Program