HOMEInternational Symposium 1998 TOPLearning to Learn
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In the US, almost all kids have access to and use computers at home or in school. Technology has become a basic part of their everyday life. For many of today's kids, technology and learning is almost as basic as food or sleep. I like to use the metaphor that technology is rapidly becoming a "fifth food group." And, as we move forward into the next millennium, technology will become even more tightly integrated into children's lives. We see a lot of statistics about computer use these days. Most of them point to a continuing boom in young kids on line. A really exciting statistic is that 60 percent of US households with kids under age seven already own a multimedia-ready PC. With the growth of the sub-$1,000 computer market, that number is certain to grow. It is also important to note that many families are now buying new PCs specifically to access the Internet. Our industry still has yet to feel the impact of the 1997 holiday buying season. In 1997, about 25 percent of these wired families were going online. Again, this number will change as online technologies become even more pervasive, and as families become more confident in using their existing gear. Less than a week after Christmas, WebTV needed to implement a massive system-wide upgrade to handle the large number of new users. For kids who have grown up with technology, lack of confidence about the Internet is not a problem. Kids take to computers and the Internet like fish take to water, because they haven't yet learned to fear them, as their parents have. These "multimedia-ready" kids are part of a new phenomenon: the growing trend in two- and three- computer households. In the near future we will see more and more kids coming online with their own gear. When I say that kids will have their own gear, I do not want you to imagine them sitting in a dark room in front of a desktop computer. More and more, kids will be walking around with laptops in their backpacks, or surfing the net with set-top Internet appliances, or communicating with networked watches and other "wearables," or playing with wired toys and beads and eating wired foods and reading wired books. You will be surprised how fast most of this is going to happen. Many of these changes will take place in the next two to four years. Hopefully, many of us here today are going to make it happen. If we design new product lines integrating technology into kids' everyday lives, a lot more of these kids and a lot more of these households will come online. We have to make it feel natural. And by knowing these kids really well, we can. |
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