Recent posts for David Williamson Shaffer
Subject: Fwd: Re: FW: CREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPY
Or,
When social networking tools aren’t enough
Readers of this blog already know that we think that simply being a “digital native” is not enough.
It is certainly true that children today are more comfortable with technology than many adults–and certainly than most adults today were when we were kids ourselves.
But it doesn’t follow that therefore adults have nothing to teach kids, to offer kids, or to do to influence how kids use digital media.
I offer as an example an email my young nephew recently sent me, with the subject line:
Fwd: Re: FW: CREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPY
Two great tastes that taste great together
I don’t usually blog about very techie research stuff, but this little tool has basically transformed my life as a scientist. (For those if you interested in downloading it, you want the RAndFriends package, which is free.)
In a nutshell, this package of Excel utilities makes it possible to run code from the statistical package R from within Excel. (Excel is, of course, not free.)
Those of you who are wondering what a “statistical package” is can spare yourself the rest of this post, of course.
Regarding Hedgie
My younger daughter’s 2nd grade class has a pet bearded dragon, Hedgie, who is getting very old. Last week, the teacher wrote a note to the class parents to let us know that Hedgie was very sick, and would pass away soon. She brought Hedgie in to class at the end of the week so the kids could say goodbye.
The lessons of a PIM fail
I had an interesting–and terrible–experience this past week. My email/calendar/addressbook/to-do list system had a catastrophic crash. For basically a week it just stopped working. Or, almost worse, it worked sporadically and unreliably.
I was suddenly caught without my external memory field, without reliable communications, and without any way to reliably deal with the information that was coming into my life. I had come to depend on this technology, and then it failed.
A lot of things fell through the cracks: phone calls, doctor’s appointments, email exchanges.
[For those of you wondering, I did manage to recover the data. But if you sent me email last week and didn't hear back, it might be a good idea to resend it!]
The result, though, was an opportunity to ponder, first hand, one of the darker sides of technology…
Reflections on the Barracuda: Doing what you don’t necessarily love
A lot of parents I know don’t play computer games with their children for the very obvious reason that they (meaning, the parents) don’t like to play computer games themselves. And that makes a certain amount of sense, until you think about all the other things that you do as a parent with and for your kids that you don’t like doing yourself.
I was reminded of this is a very concrete way last week when I took my daughter and one of her friends to a synchronized swimming meet for their team, which is the first synchro meet I had ever been to. I did it because this is something that my daughter cares about. Something that she wants to spend time on. An interest that I want to share with her, even if I don’t hold it as an interest of my own.
Now, please don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against synchro as a sport. But driving an hour and a half and sitting for over two hours to…
Oh, well, rather than trying to explain, I’ll just copy my liveblog of the event below, which I imagine is not that different from how many parents experience watching their first videogame. It was really confusing, and a lot of it seemed pretty trivial to me as an outsider. But it was fun for my daughter, and in the end brings us closer together and lets me help shape her experience of that part of her life.
For those who don’t want to read below the jump, the point is: as a parent we do all kinds of things that our kids love but we don’t. And just like the decision to go see the latest Disney movie, whether you as a parent like to play computer games is not the last word on whether your could or should play them with your kids.
