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I've got two Mics going around maybe you can
pass it around. Hi, thanks, that was a great talk.
Thank you. How much is
too much? I just think how much Minecraft, how much of all this is too much?
how many other skills are important
for these kids now
for their future life? So I think
I'm being very general about this but
everything in moderation, I think it seems to be a general mantra that works
In our case basically typically speaking they do
my son...so my son and daughter are very different, my daughter actually doesn't
really care about the computer much,
so she doesn't do much activity there, but my son, he really likes it,
but I've made it very clear as to sort of how much time he can spend.
And while I do have to remind him, he has now gotten into the habit to
basically know that "okay
I get to play this time every time when I do my stuff" and then basically
if I say stop, he'll stop. It's relative to
your own child's needs, but essentially I don't think, for instance, that an hour is
necessarily too much,
at least for my child. Because I do feel
that afterwards he feels he's happier, and that is so much easier to get him to
brush his teeth and do all the other stuff you need him to do.
So whereas if you interrupt him, because he only got 10 minutes of it,
he's frustrated, then getting him to do an activity afterwards is like
"Err... you know... why?", and then essentially he's rebelling against
you.
So I feel that actually that has helped
but it's a very relative question because children are very
individual.
But is that an hour of just like
gaming or are you sort of...
like I have a 13-year-old and a 7-year-old... So in this case,
he does some Scratch and then he recently
is very much into Kingdom Rush which is basically a defense game,
and he plays that a fair bit before he was doing
Lord of the Rings, so he doesn't necessary play one game all the time, but he
plays basically
several games. And actually one thing
what might be worth sharing: his most favorite activity is actually
play games together with me
when we play multiplayer games. So that's a treat for him.
I think one interesting perhaps
thing to consider is that twenty or thirty years ago we considered
going out to play soccer as the thing that dads and
boys do and they should do that, but now there's a computer as well,
and there's an activity like that were we bond in the way
we can't when we are kicking balls at each other.
I don't know Minecraft
but it was explained to me that with
children playing computer games that there was a distinction between
those games that had chapters
and those games that kept going like the old fashioned SimCity,
and it was... if you thought that your children are getting sucked into
the game too much,
it was better to buy them games with chapters because there'd be
end points. Would you agree with that? I don't.
But the reason I don't agree with that is because
that's a bit like saying Lego has an end-point too,
and is that good or not? I don't know, I think
for some reason I guess we grow up with the creative mindset
that building new things out of Lego is
better than following the instructions. Then when it comes to
games,
following instruction seems to be better. I think that
it comes with a misunderstanding as to you know
what is Minecraft or what are these games? In terms of Minecraft is a
never ending game,
similar to SimCity, so you can keep playing and keep playing and keep playing it.
And so that's why kids spend hours and hours and hours of time, but what
fascinates them is not only the ability to play by themselves, but play through
a community.
That is frankly though the part that as parents we do need to look out for,
that's why we need to be part of it, so we can control what goes on in terms of
perhaps who they're meeting or
who they're playing with, that is the risk aspect, but if you know how to do that
it's fine. On the other hand, Minecraft is a creative process because you can
share
what you've made, no different than when you go and share your Lego with your
friends when you build something new.
And that is a real appeal. That's the reason why Minecraft is so
popular.
It's essentially taking SimCity, but essentially making it collaborative
in a virtual sense. Now the chapter-based storytelling to me
is generally passe in the industry, because it's
from a business standpoint not very profitable because you have to
keep making new chapters.
But from a pure design standpoint,
today's Generation Y gamer
wants to have endless play. They want to explore, so
if you look at all the new type of games, everyone's talking about free-form,
very few people are talking about boxing it in. The only industry where
people are still very story-driven, I mean there's story but still based on
chapter-driven is the Japanese industry.
Everyone else basically is moved on to free play and sort of open
play environments which is generally seen to be more creative.
There's this thing about addiction,
and I think the point on that one is that so far the research seems to indicate that
if someone has an addictive personality,
because of a certain thing in the brain, then basically
you just have to watch out in general. There's a higher
propensity for people to be alcoholics as well,
or higher propensity for people to do certain things that is something that
needs to be trained,
but it's not because of Minecraft, Minecraft will maybe
just bring it out more if they already have that propensity and that's again an
individual thing
that we as parents must manage, and the only way we can manage it is if we do it
with them.
Yes. Do you turn your Wireless off when you go to bed?
No, I don't. I do not turn off my Wireless.
The only thing I have concern... I have
no problem about kids playing online or anything,
it's what they do with their eyes, is it really bad for their eyes?
So that is a classic
Generation X comment
that comes because you were raised by Baby Boomers or earlier.
Because we grew up to Tube TV.
From a technical standpoint, basically it has to do with the refresh rate.
So if you are familiar with the old
terms of NTSC and PAL, you grew up to VHS tapes and so on,
that's because essentially the TV 50-60 frequency hertz
meant the number of times the screen refreshed, and the tiredness comes from
the fact that
you're looking at the screen and you can't really see it but your eyes can detect it.
Similar to how you can maybe hear certain pitches,
and the tiredness of the eyes comes because you're watching on the screen the
whole time,
basically it's turning and turning and turning.
Today, with basically modern technology and the frequencies they're running
it's undetectable to that, so that level of tiredness doesn't exist. That said,
looking at something with light glaring at you of course all the time isn't
the best thing either to do at 24/7.
So it does need to be managed, but you know you can go online and research, there's
a lot of topics about that.
But the level of damage that was assumed that we would get from watching Tube TV
is exponentially smaller than that watching basically
you know LED LCD type monitors today.
What is your personal view... Will Facebook survive where will Facebook
be in 20 years? And are you thinking
that there are any benefits
of Facebook for the children?
I don't think there is much difference between Facebook or
a message board, or any other kind of social community.
The only difference for Facebook is technically if you are under the age of
13,
you're not allowed to use Facebook but there is a very large
I think something like 15 percent of Facebook's audience
is actually under the age of 13. They just lie about their age.
And you can already tell because of the products that they like,
and the likes seem to happen on the website,
and the images and photos they post, because kids actually just know how to do that.
And giving the right age is not really an issue, it's more like "oh, ya, sure, just a way
to get in."
The reason they join Facebook is because their friends are on Facebook.
So it's the whole social thing and
it is essentially as I said before the equivalent of the virtual living room,
and you know in Korea, it used to be Cyworld, you know it used to be different
platforms.
But they've all migrated from one to the other, Facebook is
maybe the platform today, it may not be the platform tomorrow because they've
moved around before.
In fact for Gen Xs who were earlier in technology,
we used to go on IRC chatrooms, for those of you who know what that is,
or bulletin board systems perhaps, right? That's where we used to hang out and
and geek out I suppose.
Anyway they're gonna find places to hang out with their friends,
and I think whether it's Facebook or whether it's a message board or whether it's Weibo
or whether it's WeChat,
I look at it as, as long as you...
I wouldn't say educate, but as long as you're doing it with them
and you're teaching them the values of how to use it, I think it's fine.
Because at the end of the day the way I reflect on it is my parents
didn't teach me anything about how to use the Internet or the technology industry I'm in
at all.
But they did teach me about values, they teach me about right or wrong,
and I use that same principles essentially
to guide my life. And I think the same is true for all parents.
Could you say the legal age of Faceboook? 13. 13. 13 is the legal age.
Agree. Yes.
I mean she was just validating what I was concerned about which is that
even today basically an 18-year-old
university student is finding that
she's not being trained for the jobs that are in the future and
that is the biggest hurdle in modern education today.
I mean if you research it, every university is struggling with that very
question
because over the pace...Yup...
Thank you.
Hi. Just back to your thought about the whole idea of
the knowledge in the Cloud and the Khan Academy and
Coursera and that kind of thing, I watched a TED talk
recently, Sugata Mitra. I just wanna...
Yeah, I wanna know your thoughts on that because he obviously takes an extremist view
of...
we put the computer in the wall, and the children will teach themselves, and they
will figure it out.
And it in some ways negates the
act, the importance of a teacher in the classroom and how that can be...
that personal interaction is actually,
at least in my opinion, is just as important. So just your thoughts on that
and that whole combination of technology plus the learning environment.
I'm a big fan of Sugata Mitra's work, which is basically
self-learning centers and essentially
the rough summary is that
you put a computer there, you give them big questions like really challenging
questions that nobody...
that you wouldn't think they'd be able to do, and essentially let children have at
it and they will just be creative.
And the granny cloud is basically
a way to get the grandmother method of
motivating children to basically keep trying
by basically giving them simple encouragement, so you know if a kid will try something
on the computer,
they don't have to know what's going on they just have a look at it and say "oh, wow, this is great,
I couldn't do this before".
And essentially keep motivating them in that method,
and it seems to work very well. Now my thoughts on this one
is that computers today have already that ability.
If you look at... have that ability to essentially
do the searching and the querying and once you know
children are very inventive actually. When you give them something, they'll play
around with it,
and they can get a result quickly which before you couldn't do,
because a book was either not physically available
or the library wasn't available or whichever, physical limitations were
holding us back.
With a computer, physical limitations are essentially gone with Internet,
because you're able to download any information you want.
While I don't think that it is...
I don't think Mitra is saying that teachers are obsolete,
he is saying that knowledge is obsolete, which is basically that
we don't need to really learn anymore or memorize anything,
we just basically need to start applying the knowledge that we can readily get
from Google or anywhere else around the world, which I agree with.
But the role of the teacher is
no longer going to be to essentially
spoon-feed you data but essentially is simply to motivate you to keep
learning yourself and, in his words, let the magic happen by itself.
And I do see it when I give my son
Scratch and tell him do something.
He may not do exactly what I ask him to do, but something comes out that is creative
and unexpected.
And I think that's really what this is all about. I'd like to invite
Dr. Porter to come on stage now. We've got time for perhaps 3 or 4 more
questions
on children's learning styles in the 21st Century.
And then I'll invite the sponsors to come up and present some
gifts to the speakers today. Any other questions for
Yat Siu or Dr. Louise Porter.
I'd be interested in some conversation between
both of our speakers on what happens to children social skills
when they spend more time in technology
which is not always but often an individual activity.
The mathematics on that is they have less time to socialize.
So what's the research on development of social skills,
and the impact on our social community?
And so many parents that come to us say "they've always got their face in that
computer,
they don't know how to talk to their friends, they haven't got any friends at
school".
So I'd be interested in a conversation around that.
Sure. Okay, so maybe I'll start off quickly with...
First I think it's a very individual question,
because every child or every human is different.
And I think one thing that we,
at least in my observation and some of the research would indicate
that we're looking at is essentially the perspective from an extrovert,
which is to say that he must be social, he must have friends.
If he doesn't have friends, there's something wrong with him. But then how many people
actually have
a lot of friends? How many people are really top of the class and super social?
In fact most of the world seems to be run by a lot of introverts
who have probably a few very good friends. And I see that trait
in my household with my daughter and my son. My son is
an introvert, he has only one or two really good friends,
and he's fine. And so one of the comment you know we were concerned,
you know we were like "oh my goodness you know, he can't make friends, he's awkward,
he's social reject". And we had
counseling and we're trying to figure out what's going on.
There were some things that we needed to sort out, but basically
one comment that struck was teacher
saying "while he's sitting there by himself but he doesn't feel lonely,
he doesn't seem lonely". So what's wrong with being alone?
And so I think, whereas my daughter, she fuels off it. And essentially what the
research seems to indicate is
the extroverts get energy from social activity,
from friends, from recognition. Whereas for introverts,
it actually does the opposite. It tires them, it basically drains them.
And it's a difference between those who wanna go to social parties and between those
who say "social party, err...
you know, I'll go say hello, be polite because it's social courtesy,
and after 10 minutes I'm out of there".
I would sort of maybe answer it along those lines in terms of I think it
depends on the child,
because I don't think that technology is necessarily the trigger for it,
it just maybe reinforce a behavior that is already natural
to that child.
That's exactly the difference between the extroverts and introverts,
but what certainly watching some of the children in the last ten years
the introverted children are able to gatekeep better
with their social contact because they don't have to do it in person,
and so in some senses their circles can widen.
I'm also reminded of the fact that childhood has changed
through the centuries. It's never been the same as it is today
and it's different in Calcutta from it is in Arnherland in the middle of Australia,
and it's different from London, different from Hong Kong.
Childhood is different everywhere, so what we're mourning
is this loss of childhood.
This nostalgic view we have of those
good old days, and remember in 25 years these will be the good old days.
that we get sentimental about childhood but it's
always changed, so yes even if their social skills become slightly differently
structured,
they're not going to lose the ability to say hello and greet people and shake
hands.
But it might be different, we don't know yet I think.
But childhood's always changed,
I think it's kind of getting better in many respects at least we're not
sending them as chimney sweeps and
down the mines at six years of age, so
there's been some improvement.
Could you recommend any resources or websites that give you age-appropriate games?
So the question is are there any web sites for age-appropriate
games for kids?
There are a few but I would generally...
the first, any game that you touch, I would suggest that
you play it yourself first. And I think
no matter what website I give you, because if you let them go there unchecked
you'll have the same problem.
that you will then say "oh my goodness. He's addicted, I can't control him".
It is not the same as a TV. And I think that is a
common error because it's like "okay, he's watching TV,
I leave him alone". Actually the computer isn't quite the same, you can't leave him
alone when you know what environment he's in,
but you do need to manage it. But there's a bunch.
I can give you...
I'll take your card and I'll send it to you afterwards.
Do you think programming code will become more visual to bridge the...
It is visual today. It is.
And the question was will programming code become more visual.
Ya, the answer is yes. I mean they don't call it visual basic for
no reason.
It is basic because there is also a difference.
If you go into software engineering and programming, the circles do define the
difference between essentially
what I guess derogatorily is defined as a code monkey,
it's someone who just codes, right, versus an architect
or an engineer. And those who are architect and engineer don't necessarily
have to be
the best who can code fastest, but they're the most creative.
And the most let's say famous
software coders in the world describe their coding the same way
that authors describe writing, so the same thing really.
So it's visual, it's a skill, and it's only
I think scary because we don't understand it, the same way that we look
at Chinese or maybe a Chinese looks at French, and
says what's this gibberish. But it is very easy to understand, in fact
probably easier than a language because it is logical
unlike most languages.
What would you say is the specific skill for this discipline in the 21st Century?
I will leave it with this. Basically the ability to unlearn
and to relearn because we can't
really predict a specific skill. They have to be able to essentially
be very plastic with their brain.
And keeping in mind that 25 percent of children who are five years old or
younger today,
so 25 percent of five-year-olds are going to see the 22nd Century.
And so we don't know what issues they're going to face in the latter half of this
century.
I'm assuming there'll be some novel issues that the world will face with
nine billion people on the planet.
So literally,
I agree wholeheartedly that they need to learn, they need to be creative,
and it's one of the pushes for those of you who were talking this afternoon
of why we don't in fact want to teach them to sit down, and be quiet,
and be passive in classrooms, because they're going to need the skills to learn
and relearn
as the technology changes but as the world around them changes.
I'm a bit miffed I'm not gonna see the 22nd Century.
I'm cross about that. Okay, would you like to
come up and close off the session?
Let's do one more question.
Short answer, I think
everything in moderation, but I do think we are hindering them because
it's the environment they grow up in, and
the other thing is that they see their parents do it all the time.
And I frankly think it's a little hypocritical when
parents can do it basically at will and then the children cannot.
I don't know if that's a healthy relationship, so I think that there is a
measure,
you have to control it but I don't think it's sensible in my view
that young children shouldn't see it, because I do feel that at least
with my
youngest, his interaction with tablets
is natural to him and is engaging.
Mine too. Have you seen that charming
video on YouTube where the one-year-old is
trying to work the magazine. And she's pinching,
and she's swiping, and she realizes that this is broken,
so she goes and gets the tablet. She can't walk yet,
crawls over to the tablet, picks it up, swipes, it works, she's happy.
And the message on the screen is Steve Jobs has reprogrammed my child's
brain to think that a magazine is an iPad that doesn't work.
It's their lives.
It would be the equivalent of a generation or two ago saying "I'm not
giving this child books,
I'm not giving this child any screen time or television".
And it's interactive, it's so much better than television because
television is a passive activity, and children sometimes need to veg out too,
just as we do, because they're parking information while they're chilling.
But absolutely the information they can
access on the tablet is just... it's so motivating.
So that's what they're doing in class parking their knowledge.
Yup, we hope so. But it's actually what they're doing while they're asleep.
And the reason that we dream and why we find the dreams illogical is during
sleep the prefrontal lobes check out
while we're dreaming, so we can have these ridiculously illogical
dreams, can't we?
And we're also accessing the emotion centers in the brain, so these
ridiculously emotional dreams that make no sense whatsoever if we happen to wake
up in the middle of them to remember them.
But meanwhile while they're sleeping, the information is parking and I think
that's why those sleep patterns that
you showed was so active is they're actually packing the information that they've
learned during the day.
And that's why they do need downtime, otherwise
their data just keeps coming in and getting lost because they've got no time
to make sense of it. The way that you and I, before the age of five we have very
little memory because
everything we experienced we stored, but we stored
as if we were throwing it into the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.
It wasn't organized. It's still there, but it's gonna be awfully hard to find.
Whereas as we organize our memory
in some kind of structure, it's now easier to locate a memory.
And that's what's happening during sleep, they're parking the information
in a logical section of the brain where they can find it again,
as opposed to it's just being thrown in the bottom drawer where
yes it will remain, but it's going to be awfully hard to refind.
So I'm sure that we're about due to close...
Yes. Yes. So it's exactly 12 noon, so thank you for
finishing on time.