The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
I've finally broken free of Microsoft. With two Apple laptops already in my house, I've been dealing with a dying desktop computer for the last month or so. A twitchy video card has made playing games nearly impossible, and a hard drive that thought long and hard before it ultimately decided to save what you wanted it to save was making this computer dicey to use. I thought about buying a cheap Dell, as this machine is mostly used by my young kids who mainly use it to play games online. But then I thought about it a bit more. My kids are the main users of this machine, but I've been changing the way I use my computer lately. I've been getting much more interested in making videos and editing some of the still pictures I've been shooting. This takes a lot of computing power. Next, I thought about my kids. While they are eight and six now, they will need a computer in a few years that has more power. A cheap machine won't be enough. So I broke loose of Windows. I bought a 20-inch iMac with a 256 mb. video card and a 250 gb hard drive. This is the biggest monitor I've used regularly and I quickly fell in love with it (mind you, it's still puny compared to my mother-in-law's 27-inch monster!). The machine is fast, responsive, and has a lot of neat extra features such as a remote control to run the DVD player, iPhoto and iTunes. My eight-year-old took all of about 10 minutes to learn to use the remote to search through the 1,000-plus songs we keep on our machine, find the one he wants, and then return to whatever he was doing before, but now with music playing in the background. Which brings me to item number two today. Time magazine last week ran a feature article well worth reading. It was about the media consumption habits of kids. From music to video, to all of their gadgets, kids spend about 6.5 hours each day consuming media, but overall on average, they manage to cram in 8.5 hours a day as they listen to music while they surf the net or talk on MSN while they are watching TV (and doing their homework, and talking on the phone, etc., etc.). But of course all of this comes at a price. The attention span of kids has positively shrunk over the last five years or so. Kids use computers constantly, but with a powerful set of limited skills. They often know how to download music and can run an MSN session with five to six windows open, but they have great difficulty locating information, evaluating it for truthfulness, and deciding how to use it. The Internet is a place of incredible potential and vast swathes of information, but it is useless if it cannot be used effectively. Many of the kids in our middle school system today have always had satellite or cable TV, they have always had a computer at their home, and they have always had a gaming console of some kind. These kids have grown up with electronics, surrounded by virtual worlds. They are comfortable experimenting with games, and learning in ways that are new and very different from anything that was possible in the past. They consume media constantly and are almost terrified by silence. As parents of kids growing up in this world, we need to be very careful to keep tabs on what they are doing, teach them to be safe online, teach them to use this massive information source effectively, and most importantly, we must place limits on their media usage. Surveys show that only 17 per cent of homes place restrictions on the TV, computer, and game time that kids have. As parents, we need to make sure that our kids know where the outside world is as well. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
