While googling for inspiration about children and new technologies, I found this intriguing post and a website:“This is Sophia Berglund - Right now she is 25 months old and growing so fast in her capabilities in communication - already she can muster small sentences in English, Korean, Japanese and some German! She can even translate! Sophia can create lines, shapes and forms by way of painting her communication…”“Part of her 1st and 2nd years were spent in S.Korea where she was born into one of the most advanced mobile “handphone” cultures in the world - literally 5minutes after birth her first ever picture (and video) taken by a mobile/handphone and sent to our friends and relatives, she made her first mobile location based phone call at 5months and at 6months she was surfing mobile internet and watching mobileTV! She had her first “co-location” experience in 2006 when friends “broadcast” the ? / Bi (Rain)**concert live over their handphone to my handphone - Seoul - to - Jeju…Sophia is growing up into a digital world. Already she has a real-demo phone given to her by a friend at LGe - which she mimmicks her immediate social circle in making calls and surfing data.”My apologies to Andrew Berglund (the father) for thinking at first this was a hoax I must have been reading too much SF novels. He said the child is now , hope he will post more.My question about technology usage in toddlers is first: how do we avoid sedentary attitudes and postural problems, not to talk about the over-developed thumb, a urban legend regarding mobile use among japanese teenagers, recurrent in Sunday magazines.Another question would be: although communication tools encourage enhanced sociability, how does the lack of face-to-face interaction affects learning of emotions, empathy, and all the other skills that Daniel Goleman calls “emotional intelligence”.

A lot of new projects appearing this month in this blog, maybe because for once I have been around a little more so I actually saw some of what is going on..
During the seminar on cross media at Cinekid Patrick Crowe introduced this brilliant project for teens, called Total Drama Island, by the multiple award winning Xenophile Media (interactive Emmy for alternate reality games Fallen and Regenesis. oops, sorry, Regenesis is an EXTENDED reality game). The interactive format makes fun of the various Survivor and Big Brother-style TV formats, and creates a highly ironic universe in which the system is basically the same, with a twist. The interaction architecture is all but obvious, and I found the ironic approach very educational, as irony may be the only defense left when one grows into a mature viewer.
If you wish to have your avatar selected for the Total Drama Island TV show, you should win a lot of games online - have fun!

The Cinekid festival was great - fantastic choice of films and seminars, and the main area at Westergasfabriek was lovely, a real children’s heaven (or maybe parents’?)
The area devoted to educational projects featured, together with chemistry, physics and biology, a preponderance of projects related to climate change and global warming (I wonder why….)

virtual tennis can be played indoors

here is how it feels to live at the North Pole

here is the “Climate Casino”