CNN.com РToo young for technology? РJul 23, 2004 is an interesting story sent to me by St̩fan Sinclair about starting kids on computers. I confess I was a keen computer dad when my kids were babies. I wrote little HyperCard stacks that triggered sounds and visual effects no matter what the kids did with the mouse. I suspect they made no difference either way.
Now, of course, I’m the one who needs to be helped. My son kindly helped me play an online game against a friend of his (for research purposes) – he asked the friend repeatedly to take it easy on me. Despite telling the friend I was going to whip his *** I lost miserably. My son now tells me that his friends MSN nickname now is something like “IbeatRockosDad”. This raises another interesting phenomenon – my kids tell me that they all change their MSN names regularly – they don’t think of their names as stable identities, instead they think of them as little boasts, taunts, or jokes that change as part of their communication.