Kids and Kom-pu-ters

I was with family on Sunday, my little nephew (aged 9) went into his bedroom came back out with his laptop. Not just any old laptop my I add, a state of the art Dell Inspiron. 

As he was loading up Roxio photo software to show me a slideshow of their holiday (which he compiled and edited) he continued to tell me the spec including; clock speed, hard drive capacity and other particulars.

Coming from a big family all my nieces and nephews from the age of 9+ seem to be on Facebook and they all have fast computers and broadband at home. 

Noticing all of this was quite a fortunate coincidence as I had to recently cook up some research ideas for a project centered around children. 

Naturally the project would require understanding digital natives and carrying out qualitative and quantitative research. However, without doing a single piece of work I learned a lot from just watching the kids play with their gadgetry at our family get together. 

I sound like my Dad but when I was their age I used to word process my homework on a hand me down IBM DOS based machine, using Wordstar and a dot matrix printer, which was basically a typewriter with a printer cable. 

I got my first all singing and dancing “multimedia” PC in year 9 of upper school, oh how things have changed!