家にたまっている Communications of the ACM から、親らしく Portable Device Fears Show Power of Social Development という記事を読んだ。
記事では、テレビは子供に悪いといわれているけど
When those studies on behavior were done, technology just meant television. There is nothing that’s formally in the literature linking those outcomes to portable digital media.
はたしてタブレットなどで消費するデジタルメディアはどうなのか、という点について何人かの研究者の声を紹介している。
テレビが悪いってそこまでわかってるんだっけ、と Google してみると、記事の中にも出てくる Dr. Dimitri Christakis が
He and his colleagues in the Christakis Lab have made a number of landmark findings, including discovering that young children who watch TV are more likely to develop attention problems and other health and behavioral issues.
という研究をしていて、一般向けの “The Elephant in the Living Room: Make Television Work for Your Kids” という本も書いているのを知った。氏は TEDx でも話しているみたいなので、まずはそれを見てみるのも良いかもしれない。本は読み切れるか少し不安。
“What we are finding in our lab is that these devices command attention much better than other things. It can make it more difficult for parents to interact with their children,” Christakis adds. “I tend to think of the effects being mediated through two different pathways. One is the direct pathway, which is the actual content. Interactive media could lead to the same kind of overstimulation as fast-paced TV, although being interactive, it means the child can control the pacing in a way that isn’t possible with television.
“There is also the indirect pathway, which works through displacement. This is about what could they be doing that they aren’t, whether it’s singing, reading, or going outside to play. Even if someone developed the perfect app that was perfectly paced and shown to be beneficial, if children used that app eight hours a day, we would recognize that behavior as being a problem,” Christakis adds.
他にも、時間制限を子供に決めさせる話や、スクリーン上での学びを現実に適用することは子供には実は難しいこと、デバイスを2人で共有させたほうが専有するよりもテストで良い結果が出たという話など、興味深いものが多かった。