Technology’s Child:
Digital Media’s Role in the Ages
and Stages of Growing Up
What happens to the little ones, the tweens, and the teenagers, when technology, ubiquitous in the world they inhabit, becomes a critical part of their lives? This timely book is a much-needed lifeline for anyone involved in caring for young people. It brings clarity to what we know about technology’s role in child development. Better yet, it provides guidance on how to use what we already know to help children of all ages make the most of their digital experiences.
From toddlers who are exploring their immediate environment to twenty-somethings who are exploring their place in society, technology inevitably and profoundly affects their development. Drawing on her expertise in developmental science and design research, Dr. Katie Davis describes what happens when child development and technology design interact, and how this interaction is complicated by children’s individual characteristics as well as social and cultural contexts.
Critically, she explains how a self-directed experience of technology—one initiated, sustained, and ended voluntarily—supports healthy child development, especially when it takes place within the context of community support, and how an experience that lacks these qualities can have the opposite effect.
Children’s experiences with technology—their “screen time” and digital social relationships—have become an inescapable aspect of growing up. For the first time, this book identifies the distinctions between different ages and stages of this engagement, and offers invaluable guidance for parents and teachers navigating the digital landscape, and for technology designers charting the way.
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Writers in the Secret Garden:
Fanfiction, Youth, and new Forms of Mentoring
Co-authored with Cecilia Aragon (2019, MIT Press).
Drawing on ethnographic and data scientific methods, the book offers an in-depth examination of the novel ways young people support and learn from each other though participation in online fanfiction communities.
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“…the book challenges easy dismissals of how time spent by teens online comes at the expense of more ‘valuable’ forms of learning and socialization.”
– Henry Jenkins, coauthor of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism
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“Work on learning outside of school has left out teaching. This crucially important book remedies that mistake with a vengeance. Aragon and Davis introduce us to a form of teaching uniquely suited to social networks: distributed mentoring.”
– James Paul Gee, Regents’ Professor, Arizona State University; author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy
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The App Generation:
How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World
Co-authored with Howard Gardner (2013, Yale University Press).
The book explores the role of networked technologies in three developmentally salient areas of young people’s lives: their sense of personal identity, their experience of intimacy, and the way they express their imaginations.
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“The App Generation deals with a crucial issue for our future, and it is a pioneering and prophetic work in its genre.”
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
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“Most discussions about youth and technology tilt toward one extreme (digital wonder-kids!) or the other (perpetual distractions!). In The App Generation, Howard Gardner and Katie Davis combine academic research with personal reflections to provide a more nuanced perspective on both the challenges and opportunities for young people as they navigate the dynamic digital currents in today’s society.”
—Mitchel Resnick, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research and head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab
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2013 Recommended Reading For Creative Leaders by Forbes (11/27/13)