Introducing us

Hi I'm Jonathan and I am 7.
And I am Sonja, his mother!
and Sonja is my mum and she is funny.

I started this blog as a place to try out some ideas about young children, computers, the net and other digital technologies. As a parent of five children aged 24, 22, 18, 16 and 7 with a commitment to encouraging them to be lifelong learners I find Marc Prensky's work about digital immigrants and a digital natives makes a lot of sense.

All my children have been exposed to computers from their earliest years. My eldest son and daughter first got to try out simple draw programming in the early 1980's with my father's Sinclair! We had our own computer from 1986 - an early Amstrad. Once that was obsolete there was a bit of a gap for a while where we tended to use my dh's or my work laptops before we got a Pentuim desktop in 1998. From then we rapidly moved to being a multi-computer family with 4 computers by the end of 1999, 5 in 2001 and then some major upgrading in the last couple of years. We run a combined ethernet/wireless home network using a high speed connection.

One of the reasons for the gap in the 90's was my reluctance to engage with computers as entertainment. One of the fairly rigid rules in our family is that violent, first person shooter games are not acceptable and most of our software titles are simulations, logic puzzles, and strategy games. Having just watched my 16 year old fighting a battle in Civilisation 4 simulations being "better" is probably a little niave but it works for us.

This blog starts with a sentence from my 7 year old who came in as I was setting it up, and wanted to write in the space. He already e-mails his grandparents, older brother and sister and friends, occassionally his teacher. And it is his experience of technology that fascinates me.

Prensky talks about immigrants and natives - I live with the son of an immigrant (a native New Zealander with Dutch parents) and as a first generation native he can cross between both worlds. In my house we have some first generation natives but for want of a better description Jonathan is a second generation native.

For him use of the internet, e-mail, digital imaging, digital sound has been part of his life since birth. My strongest ongoing parenting support network is an online community of women who are mothers of children born in the same month as him. He has a bulletin board of photos of his birthday "buddies" which is updated every year around their birthdays. He e-mails some of them and has even met several of them and their families.

Yet very little of this is recognised at all within his school environment he spends so much of his time in. Last week he spent several hours "playing" on a website that supports basic spelling, grammer, and maths fact acquistion. He probably did over a hundred "basic facts" in the course of a game but is likely to be expected to do the 10 basic facts on the homework sheet he missed getting.

I get really tired of the debates about what he isn't doing by spending time on a computer, but that is a topic for another post.

Sonja