My son (at the age of 3) loves to look at pictures on the net. We're sharing a wiki to help with that. At the moment he's into trucks, but pretty much anything that he can ask about there's a copy of on the net, so it's fun to do a guided search.
I tried for a while to do what I needed to by just searching Google images, but there was too much randomness in the results, and too many very specific things I had a hard time searching for that he wanted to get back to over and over again.
I have a page then for "trucks" in the wiki, with a list of pages for different kinds of trucks in it (street sweeping trucks, ice cream trucks, etc). At the top I keep track of the questions he's asking. At first it was just "I want to look at trucks"; recently as we've come up with enough alternatives, the questions are now more detailed, like "I want to look at tilt-cab fire engines". Those were hard to find, but now I have them on a wiki page so it's a single click.
It's really neat to annotate the questions as we go, and sometimes that can go in interesting directions. Saul is a fan of the Elgin Pelican street-sweeping truck; that led with a little prompting on my part to pictures of real pelicans. Pretty much any animal elicits the question along the lines of "What do pelicans eat?" so a little bit of Google and cut and paste later and we have some pictures of pigfish. I like to write down what he asks exactly as best I can so there's a chance to remember it as well as to ask a bit more of him next time we're on that page.
He's not up to navigating himself yet - though it does make me wonder what an Atari joystick interface to a wiki would be (just up down left right and fire). I'm not ready to give up the keyboard just yet.
My eight year old is desperate to "Google" (her verb, not mine) at every opportunity. I'm torn, because (a) I consider computer time to be much like TV time, something I'm inclined to ration strictly at this age, and (b) I see enough horrifying pictorial content lurking at every turn on the web that I'd prefer to be at her elbow when she's Googling, or barring that to have a dedicated kid's computer locked down with triple redundant Net Nannies. I'm not the puritan that this makes me sound like, I just don't want to throw her into the deep end of explicit visuals until she's had a chance to develop her own defenses.
Meanwhile, her school has a low-tech precaution which probably works as well as Net Nanny, although not well enough to calm my fears: they teach the kids to add the word "kids" to every Google search. Not bad, huh?
Posted by: Prentiss Riddle | December 15, 2003 at 10:41 PM
What do pelicans eat?
Anything that fits the bill.
hur hur...
Posted by: anonymous | July 18, 2005 at 07:27 PM