kids – JUEGOS DE REALIDAD ALTERNATIVA

Again, I’m discussing a 12-year-old kids questionnaire at IES Ribera del Duero. So what does this study tell us about children’s Internet participation? What do they appreciate in an application / web page to participate in it?

We gave the interviewed kids the following options to be answered with a value from 1 to 10:

The amount of people using it. What’s the attractiveness factor when there are lots of people in a social network?
My friends or people I know are registered. The same, but restricted to close people.
Freedom of expression. Is it important for them to feel that they can write what they like without restrictions?
Interface design, UX… app/site general aspect. The app interface should be ‘a la mode’.
Ease of use. Usability issues.
“It has a clear functionality”. This could be an odd question, but not so with a little explanation of what it means. Would you use it merely to procrastinate or with a clear use in mind? Or verbalized in a PhD researcher’s way: how much do you ponder how functionally clean an app is?

Well, let’s see how well you do now kids! Do not look at the graphic, and try to find out which axis is more important for them to decide to use an app or to participate in a social network. [tick-tock] Ok. You can watch now!

And now, let’s interpret that. They are not so interested in who is using the tool, whether they feel comfortable using it, whether the functionality is clear and if it is visually attractive.

Those two fields at the end.

As you are very attentive you would right now be wondering about the last two fields used to allow kids to freely add any other factor. Yes, those are expected to remain wide open.

But it is here where you start to feel there is something you didn’t know. Wide open? Not so!

One of the kids add ‘insults’ as a factor, labeling that with a ‘1’ value, which could be understood that if he/she sees insults, she/he “changes channel”.
Another one liked apps/webpages with resources to download. That’s ok.

And among the others, 7 out of each 10 wrote: ‘privacy’. Wow! And with an average importance valuation of 9.44 over 10 too. Who expected that? Mmm. Hurray. Hurray for these kids that surprise us each time we devote a bit of our time to trying to understand them!

Facebook? What’s Facebook?

It may be the most populated social network, but that doesn’t seem to be the case among these kids. In addition to WhatsApp (almost 80%), the following most used networks are Instagram and YouTube. Only one of the answers declares that he/she is using Facebook!

That’s true? :O

And now, what could I do to watch – I would call that spying on – what my son/daughter is doing on the Internet? (Real question) A-ha! This seems to be one of the main reasons for kids emigrating to other networks: their parents are on Facebook.

A humility treatment.

And what about the last question: What do you like the most and the least about the talk? (Because this questionnaire was at the end of a talk). I will cover that in another post, but I will leave a little bit of fresh flesh for the sharks here:

For those 5 minutes you were talking, I was a little bit bored.

Wow. Of course! Kids need to participate, not just listen.

Raúl Antón Cuadrado

Questionnaire (Spanish) Last winter, I took part in media literacy actions to encourage creative participation on the Internet. One of these sessions was in IES Ribera del Duero, where I left something my friend Tomas gave me just a few days before. It was an answered questionnaires stack about what pre-adolescents (12 years old) think is important when they are going to participate in a webpage or cellphone app. To understand the results, remember to take into account that they were even free to anonymously choose which part of the questionnaire to answer or not.

Kids use the Internet. A lot.

2/3 kids concede that they use the Internet for more than an hour a day, and more than 40% use it for over two hours a day. Not bad! This has huge educational potential… that can be used or neglected. Formal education? I’m not sure. But is there anyone who could think that two attentively dedicated hours a day for a 12-year-old kid could be neglected? I assume we all understand that the key resource here is not time, but attention.
So, formal education is looking elsewhere while kids are using the Internet, instead of integrating it into the knowledge-building process. Does forbidding it in educational centers seems a magnificent idea to anyone?

What is the future like?

86% of kids in this study stated that they took part in creative activities, but only 15% of these were Internet-based. Oh yes! I am hearing a seneschal chorus over-pondering the gregariousness component of Internet usage and asking to eradicate the Internet from educational centers except in well-controlled, formal activities. With these questionnaire answers, and tons of other studies, it is clear that the Internet does not stimulate creativity.
Well, this is not so! Seneschals forbid what they cannot understand and/or not allow them to control the access to information fragments they authorize (Bourdieu dixit).

The Internet or a crayon box are not creative. A 12-year-old kid IS creative (until the educational system finishes the inexorable homogenization process). And if they are not capable of implementing their creativity over the most powerful tool at their disposal, it should be because they don’t know how to use it, the tool needs to be adapted or they have access restrictions. Three options, in any case, that are not compatible with Internet usage interdiction.

If the Internet does not remedy that, we will have been cloned by educational system crowds. Yes, that’s mainly the same as ever. But for the first time ever we have the opportunity to evade that. Do we really want to? If so, instead of forbidding Internet in educational centers, we need to understand how to instigate a kid’s participation in the new arena.

And then, we need to do it.

Raúl Antón Cuadrado