Seiter, Ellen. (2005). The Internet Playground: Children’s Access, Entertainment, and Mis-Education. Reviewed by Michael Delahunt, Arizona State University

Seiter, Ellen. (2005). The Internet Playground: Children’s Access, Entertainment, and Mis-Education. NewYork: Peter Lang Publishing Inc. Pp. xii + 121 $22.95   ISBN 0-8204-71240 Reviewed by Michael Delahunt Arizona State University March 17, 2006 This book is one in the publisher’s series, “Popular Culture and Everyday Life.” The Internet Playground is Ellen Seiter’s report on four years teaching journalism with computers to children 8-12 years old at two public elementary schools in San Diego. One school was well funded in an affluent area. The other was a “struggling, technology poor” school. In each school children volunteered to enroll in after-school classes conducted by Seiter and some of her university students. In five chapters, Seiter describes and analyzes these children’s lives at work and play in their computer labs. The author is a media scholar, a professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego. Her two previous books focused on children and older media: Television and New Media Audiences (2001) and Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture (1993). Her subject here is children’s uses of computers, and especially the Internet as an environment for their learning. Her analysis contributes welcome insights into the Internet as an environment for children’s play, and as a teaching tool. As a way of introducing Ellen Seiter’s findings concerning children’s uses of the Internet, here is a sampling of what she sees as the pros and cons to their uses. Advantages: There is more information on the Web than can be found in any school’s library. Indeed, “The ability to combine search words was felt to be a significant advance over the school library’s card catalog. (p. 37)” Children as a group get a great deal of enjoyment out of using computers. It is highly motivating compared to other kinds of school activities. (p. 10) Access to Internet use presents tremendous potential for pursuing personal and socially meaningful goals. (p. 16) Disadvantages: It is difficult for children to gauge the reliability of the information they find. Much of the Web is commercialized, and it is difficult for children to appreciate the profit motives of some sites. Seiter’s metaphor for the Web: not a library, but a shopping mall. She makes it a point to ask children the meaning of the term dot-com, and not a single child has known the answer. Information overload is one of the biggest problems for younger students. The Web offers much more information about popular subjects than it does to some topics that may be of importance to students researching any number of topics of academic interest. Seiter’s students found it easy to research fads that came and went. By contrast, students had difficulty investigating a school budget crisis. It is easy for students to wander off topic to entertainment sites. Kids can often be exposed to advertisements for gambling sites, and other undesirable content. It can be difficult for teachers to monitor Web browsing, and the ease of students’ wandering off is but one of many reasons why adult supervision is important. The first chapter, entitled “Children’s use of computers at home and at school,” serves as an introduction to the book. Seiter begins with a palpable yet disconcerting description of the technology gap, also called the “digital divide” — a disparity across class lines that prevents poorer children from accessing skills, social networks, and intellectual resources. She says her two schools’ computer facilities could look very similar at first glance, but they differ greatly in how up to date they are. Children at each school are eager to use the computers. They are fearless in their willingness to try new things with digital technology. Connectivity is just one of the issues at the poorer school that make using the computers problematic however. Most of these students have no access to a computer at home, and no support system there that would keep a computer functioning reliably. Seiter tells us about a range of means by which corporations target children in order to profit from their uses of the Internet. Among these is a drill-and-practice software package called “SuccessMaker,” just one of the many software products marketed to educators and to children’s families. Every student in Seiter’s upscale school is encouraged to use SuccessMaker. Each student-user is linked to a username and password, so the work of each child is monitored. Every achievement is rewarded with automated praise, every wrong answer greeted with a cheery “Try again!” SuccessMaker is produced by the Computer Curriculum Corporation. Founded in 1967 by a group of Stanford university professors, CCC was bought in 1990 for $75 million by Simon and Schuster, for Paramount Communications, and later by Britain’s Pearson Publishing Group. Citing her sources, Seiter tells us that by 2002, more than 4.5 million students had used SuccessMaker. We cheer her on in her unsparing disdain for the rigidity of this teaching tool. She is “shocked by the unimaginative and deeply traditional methods of learning SuccessMaker promoted. The program seemed to have achieved a nearly exact replication of the boring and conservative content, artwork, and questions found in the routine worksheets distributed for decades to U.S. students. (p. 5)” Its programmed educational activities involve no development of desirable higher-level thinking skills, yet they furnish administrators and parents easily generated statistics. (Remind you of standardized testing? It gets worse.) These scores help to facilitate accountability by monitoring student activities, linking to attendance records and family information, and mobilizing the validation of all sorts of conclusions, from educational ones to those of driving real estate prices upward. Seiter argues that the promotion of computer-based classroom instruction by profit-making organizations imperils the education of our children and threatens the future of our democracy. Seiter observes instances of a generational divide: in the case of computers, there is what Margaret Meade called “reverse heritage” — children encountering and familiarizing themselves with innovations before their parents do — a reversal of the usual hierarchical roles of parent and child. This divide is amplified among students at Seiter’s working-class school. Chapter Two is entitled, “Children, Politics, and the Internet: Stories from the Journalism Classroom.” When Seiter first approached her study of elementary students’ uses of the Internet, the “Information Superhighway” was promising “to cure a host of social evils. (p. 19)” and along with an array of other digital media, Seiter developed a plan to “develop students’ skills as communicators representing their own communities. The Internet and computer software would be made more relevant to students by using them to report on the students’ immediate community and their creative decisions representing their own lives and their own neighborhood. The newspaper class was designed to integrate Internet research more fully into student writing and to link the computers to more intellectually challenging work than is possible in more routine language arts curricula….(p. 20)” As we learn about how comparable journalism content was taught at the two schools, we see two very different patterns to computer use emerge. The pressure on students to achieve on standardized tests is one of the principle causes of this disparity. The lower-end school treats its out-of-date and hard-to-keep-working computers as distractions from the business of focusing on strengthening basic skills the standardized tests can measure. Nevertheless, the publication of students’ writing empowers them as it enhances their reading and writing skills. Seiter reveals that she designed her project on activist principles advocated by educational theories developed by Paolo Freire (1994), Michael Apple (1996), and Jim Cummins and Dennis Sayers (1997). The curriculum emphasizes equality and dialogue between teachers and students, recognizing diverse forms of knowledge, using news writing and photojournalism as a forum for discussing public issues, and the Internet as a means of voicing students’ nascent critical consciousness. Seiter offers us three examples of the ways children in her classes generated and discarded story ideas of political relevance, and discusses ways in which their use of the Internet challenged her to reexamine the project’s goals and the possibilities for children to use the Internet to voice their political views. She discovered that, “The visual world, rather than verbal discussion, often provided the most successful basis for generating [story] topics,” and so students received instruction in taking photographs. By leading into new stories through digital photography, the children could see how much they already knew, and found immediate gratification, making their writing activities much easier to approach. Photographs led students to stories about local stores and musicians, parents who work late shifts, police actions against skateboarders, and graffiti associated with gangs. Once students started to use the Internet to research their stories, complications arose concerning biased and inaccurate information, marketing schemes, and dead-ends of various kinds. When students attempted to elicit expert information via email, they were greatly discouraged because their messages were often rejected or ignored. Although Seiter voices understandable dismay at the various pitfalls online researchers are apt to encounter, she fails to suggest alternative means that provide a greater likelihood of success. She complains that advanced critical thinking skills are necessary to sort out good and bad advice. Here’s a truly “teachable moment.” There’s no time like the present for starting to use critical thinking skills. She complains that “reading skills involved in deciphering the small print characteristic of most browsers is daunting,” though fortunately every browser offers a way to enlarge the size of type on Web pages. When students attempted to research and write articles critical of school cafeteria menus and district administrative decisions, the usual roadblocks arose, including interviewees who refused to go on record. Chapter Three is entitled, “Gender and Computer Affinity: Typing versus Gaming.” Gender is a component of the digital divide, as are social class, ethnicity, and language. The gender gap may have its roots in any of several notions, among them: boys’ greater interest in and frequency of play with digital games, the idea that more girls are technophobic, and the fact that far more software designers are male. Seiter notes that although earlier research has described the gender gap as pervasive, she found that computer usage was fairly equal, especially at the working class school, where girls expressed greater comfort with typing, and were more academically focused in general, while boys were more eager to use computers for gaming and visiting celebrity fan sites, were resistant to academic activities, and lacked the advantage of having been raised around as much technology as middle class boys. Girls are generally more comfortable with typing, but the draw of e-mail, chat rooms and instant messaging is universal, stimulating a growing proportion of boys to develop keyboarding skills. Boys may have had an advantage stemming from their more frequent gaming, but there are more and more games geared to appeal to girls (Bugdom was a game Seiter found attractive to girls). Girls’ advantages also increase when they abide by classroom rules and pursue assignments while boys resist participating in academic activities. What made Seiter’s intervention to get girls interested in the computers successful was her careful monitoring of equal access to the computers, and in framing the class as one in journalism. Empowering the girls’ interest in interviewing and in using cameras boosted their enrollment and continuing attendance. The atmosphere in the computer lab was lively and sociable. Nevertheless the likelihood of males to be recognized and lauded as “tech-gods” was a strong tendency. Seiter admirably calls for renewed efforts to even out the advantage boys enjoy, at the same time that we recognize writing and other skills, especially those that will prove meaningful to working-class boys of color. Chapter Four is entitled, “Wrestling with the Web: Latino Fans and Symbolic Violence.” Students in Seiter’s computer/journalism classes often spent much of their time online exploring their own personal interests. Of the subjects in which they immersed themselves, including Pokemon, Sponge Bob, Neopets, etc., children at the working-class school were by far most interested in professional wrestling. This was especially true of Latino boys. They could see Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment matches on television at home, and found the fan sites kept them up-to-date on the complex soap opera narratives of the wrestlers’ conflicts with various heroes and villains in the wrestling world. They could download photos to display on walls, binders, etc., and share their enthusiasms with relatives at home. Although she says the deeper implications of the boys’ attachment to wrestling eluded her at first, Seiter later sensed that this devotion to wrestling shored up these students’ identity and created a space in which they could feel powerful. Using a language parallel to sports discourse, the boys use the announcers’ terms for the various moves, and list the bizarre weapons each uses to battle opponents. Conversations between Seiter’s college students and Latino boys reveal opposing views of what is real and fake: college students favor the reality of amateur sports, the children embrace the business of WWE wrestling as “mostly real.” Seiter describes the prevalence of wrestling in contemporary proletarian culture, and mainstream businesses co-opting it. She observes the symbolic meanings fans find in the conflicts between Latino and Anglo wrestlers — paralleling the unfair treatment of Latinos by Anglos in educational and other hostile social settings. She concludes that although wrestling may not be an ideal forum for children’s feelings of powerlessness, it is a form of popular culture that is charged with questions about race and ethnicity, and can be is as good as many other topics as a platform for learning to read, write, and use myriad thinking skills. In my own experiences as an art educator, while I sympathize with the community’s need to eliminate violence, and express these in the classroom partly through bans on student production of images of fighting — gang symbols, weapons and injuries are taboo elements, yet I sometimes sense tension between this pursuit of peace / justice and students’ needs to process approaches to hostility, to express in their art confronting danger, powerlessness, and desperation. In a similar vein, Seiter voices awareness of conservative critics’ objections to WWE content and its targeting of the young for vulgarity, sex, and excessive violence, but she objects to closing off discussion of race and class tensions. “Teachers and researchers must make the extra effort to listen carefully to Latino children, while looking critically at those institutions of mass media and public school that do much to silence them. (p. 82)” Chapter Five is entitled: “Virtual Pets: Devouring the Children’s Market.” Here Seiter explores a succession of other recent fads, most of which originated in Japan (or respond to Japanese precedents), and many of them function across several media. She tells us how these came to the market, how children have embraced them, how these fads have dimmed or linger in popularity as younger children grow interested. Many of these popular phenomena have been energized by the rise of Web-based commerce. The rise of Pokemon led to “the development of online role-plying game Neopets, which took advertising to children to an entirely new level. (p. 84)” We are treated to numerous mini-histories of the origins of several crazes, including those of Pokemon and Tamagotchi, some of whose marketers found they needed to “deodorize” their products in order to achieve greater success in the American market by softening Japanese characteristics. These adaptations came amid changing means of merchandizing, led by eBay and other online organizations. Each of these fads involves role-playing, a game category that had never been particularly successful in the USA before. Neopets developed a new online business model. The site’s designers created a hugely multi-layered Web site with “worlds resembling a Tolkien story crossed with a theme park: the Lost Desert, Haunted Faerieland, Terror Mountain, Mystery Island, etc., on which to play a variety of games. This pulled in a large number of visitors who have spent lots of time involved in activities during which they are exposed to myriad product placements of commercial drinks, toys, movies and other commodities (Neopets calls this “Immersive Advertising”). Users earn points by following links to commercial websites, or by divulging contact information and consumer preferences. Seiter found that children universally visualized the author of the Neopets.com as a lone hobbyist whose motivation was simply to share the fun of online games. Children had difficulty detecting the advertising elements on the site. In a semi-concession that such a site might accomplish some good, Seiter notes that “websites such as Neopets.com… reward tinkering, strategizing, obsessive play, and absorption. (p. 99)” Seiter acknowledges that she and many others (including this reviewer) were swept up in the mid-1990s euphoria concerning the Internet’s potential for revolutionizing human communications, making information universally accessible, providing a tremendous new opportunity for education. It is not surprising that her enthusiasm has abated. What is useful to note are ways in which it has. The Internet Playground argues that contrary to the promises of technology boosters, teaching with computers is very difficult. Indeed, although Seiter recognizes a number of admirable qualities to the Web, her overall assessment is mightily gloomy. Nevertheless, she concludes with the concrete and practical proposals for incorporating computers into educational settings in ways that will serve the needs of students and society alike. In the final section of the book: “‘Off the Treadmill!’: Notes on Teaching Children the Internet,” Seiter presents her conclusions. Among them: “We need to find new ways to teach children about the Internet and the Information economy, because phenomena like Pokemon demonstrate rapid transformations in business approaches to the children’s market.” She emphasizes the deepening of the divide between the technologically rich and poor. Early attempts to accomplish bridging the divide were helpful, but those efforts have not continued to be supported. Even affluent school districts struggle to keep up with the enormous costs of maintaining up-to-date equipment, software, and teacher training. She feels that in the long run, her course’s lessons involving writing and image making were more valuable than those concerning computer use, although the computer’s role was the strong hook that captured and kept many hard-to-reach students in her program. Seiter suspects that the primary goal of the philanthropy to bring the Internet into schools was less to provide a public service that was to enhance learning, than it was an educational boondoggle whose effect is to create and reach new markets for commercial enterprises. She urges teachers to educate children to be more critical thinkers about cyberspace, increasing their understanding of the Internet’s cultural and geographic biases, the differences between sites providing public relations and those with less biased information, making the physical act of reading easier by enlarging the type on dense websites, getting students off the Internet to use software that is better suited to children’s ages and levels, like Kid Pix and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. As I wondered if Seiter thought the Internet has become more trouble in the classroom than it’s worth, she summed up, “More and better-paid teachers will always be more educationally beneficial than computer technology from an educational standpoint. (p. 106)” The Internet Playground describes a four-year study of real children at work and play on the Internet, and it’s a reality check. We might wish that Ellen Seiter’s media literacy project pointed to an Internet that inspires and informs students to ever-greater life achievements. (After all, the romantic in each of us needs nothing more than the ideal playground.) Instead Ellen Seiter reveals how difficult it is to use this killer app in education. As critical as elements of her study are, we can find encouragement from her allowance that the Internet is highly motivating, and in the company of careful educators, continues to show promise. With all the hype that has driven the promotion of implementing uses of technology in education, it is all the more useful to hear Ellen Seiter’s sober description and analysis of what she has learned. References Apple, Michael. (1996). Cultural Politics and Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Cummins, Jim, and Dennis Sayers. (1997). Brave New Schools: Challenging Cultural Literacy. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Freire, Paolo. (1994). Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Schofield, Janet Ward, and Ann Locke Davidson. (2002). Bringing the Internet to School: Lessons from an Urban District. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Seiter, E. (2000). Television and New Media Audiences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ___ (1999). Oxford Television Studies - Television And New Media Audiences. City: Oxford University Press. ___ (1993). Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture. City: News Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. ___ et. al. (editors). (1989). Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power. London and New York: Routledge. ___ (1981). The Promise of Melodrama: Recent Women's Films and Soap Operas. Dissertation submitted to Northwestern University for a Ph.D. About the Reviewer Michael Delahunt is currently pursuing his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction at Arizona State University, Tempe. His research interests are the uses of Internet in art education, and the place of politics and other aspects of visual culture in art education. Delahunt has been an art educator for nearly thirty years at elementary and secondary levels, currently at Copper Canyon Elementary School in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is the author and publisher of an online art education reference, ArtLex Art Dictionary (1996-2006, http://www.artlex.com/. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.