Parents and educators caught off-guard by technology…

For a long time it has been a cute cliche to suggest that kids are better with new technologies than their parents.  There are two problems with this cliche:

First, it is simply false:

“A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate.”

Second, this assumption prevents many parents from taking the actions necessary to stop stuff like this and this.

So what is to be done?  First, society needs to deal with the fact that kids are often as confused by technology as adults are, but nonetheless can still get into trouble with it.  Second, as a society we need to invest more in learning about how kids interact with technology.  There should be two goals of such investment:

1) figuring out how technology can be designed so that kids can understand it and make better use of it and

2) figuring out how parents and educators can exercise more oversight and control over technology so that kids don’t get into trouble with it.