Paper Proposal

I am excited to write my paper on digital natives raising digital natives because it is a pertinent and relevant topic right now (in my opinion), has not really been explored yet and is important to the new generation of children being born, whose parents are tech-savvy.

I was inspired while reading Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives because I consider myself to be a digital native,  and will be starting a family soon, like many of my peers who are already parents. This topic needs to be addressed because hereafter, everyone born will be a digital native, raised by digital natives. The first generation of digital natives were introduced to computers, cell phones and portable video games, but now babies play with iPads and kids scroll through Netflix like they are reading a book. Parents are more comfortable with technology and need to be educated on how and what to do and not to do, especially since they themselves are never without their smartphones.

I intend to compile research (thank you, Cheri!) like surveys, knowledge from sources like John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's book,  and INTERVIEWS/personal surveys. I will create a survey via Qualtrics and pose questions to those I'm connected to on social media sites like Google+, Facebook and Twitter. I know it will be a limited survey but at least I will get some modern, quick information from digital natives who are now parents. Through personal interviews, I can contrasts parenting methods of digital natives and digital immigrants.

Overall, I want to show that we, as a society, have reached a shift where digital immigrants are no longer the majority and that parents will be embracing technology and already have vast online presences. My paper will by no means be a parenting guide because I am not qualified to write such a thing, but a call to attention that this is an issue parents need to consider as they raise their children, through the combination of wise traditions and innovative advancements.

Ashley's Edition of Gamification in the Workplace

Heidi is searching for a way to make the work environment more engaging, and as such is studying gamification in the workplace. Her idea is to incorporate video game-esque tactics and software into companies to motivate and excite employees. I know my current job as a secretary (a desk job) often bores me and it's only four hours a day and I get to move around/have new encounters (for the most part) every day. I cannot imagine sitting in a cubicle for eight hours every day, continuously entering the same information into a software program. Thus, I highly support Heidi's cause and have done a little research on it.

I began with a simple Google search of random phrases like "how to make the workplace more exciting," "company software that acts like a video game," etc. and I either got too many results or not related results. Surprisingly, or not, when I entered "gamification in the workplace," I got the results I was looking for.

This first article, "Adam Penenberg: How Gamification is Going to Change the Workplace" is extremely helpful! I was so surprised to see that companies like Microsoft, IBM, Canon and L'oreal use "gaming" as tools in their research, recruiting and repairs. 

I looked up Adam Penenbeg's book Play at Work: How Games Inspire Breakthrough Thinking and was surprised to see only one Amazon customer review. And it's by a friend/colleague! So, this tells me that the topic is still very new and unexplored.

This presentation by Carnegie Mellon University's Professor Jesse Schell is referenced in the Forbes article and is about the world of game development, even projecting games into future workplaces.

At the bottom of my first article, there were several search suggestions and oen of them was "Safety and Training Games". This got me thinking about whether we need to take baby steps into introducing gaming into the work industry. Several companies use games for recruiting and training and that's a great start. I know a lot of companies do team-building activities and maybe gaming could be included. This also raises an important point-what about the people who don't like gaming? Ultimately, companies will have to have several versions of software to appeal to all their employees. 

Another angle to explore is the benefit of video games! In this DataBeat article, they found that, "The study found that trainees who used video games to train had a nine percent higher retention rate, an 11 percent higher factual knowledge level and a 14 percent higher skill-based knowledge level, according to an announcement today by the game industry trade group, theEntertainment Software Association". Heidi can also use statistics about gaming, in general, to emphasize longer attention spans, more agile fingers, better focus...etc. Because there is not a lot of specific research on gaming in the workplace, she will probably have to juxtapose data found in other studies like low motivation in the workplace or the rise of boredom and job dissatisfaction in data entry jobs. 

It is an awesome and apparently beneficial idea that I think many hip companies like Google and Amazon would be quick to adopt. 

Parenting in a Digital Age

This post is for my teammate Ashley. As I understand it, she has been looking at parenting in a digital age-- specifically how growing up with technology impacts our generation's parenting styles.

I decided to try and find as many useful articles and sources as I could. I know that curating information on topics is frequently what takes the most time when researching, so hopefully this will help you in that phase of your researching.

Here is what I found:

This link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/parenting-in-digital-age goes to a list of different links that Psychology Today has already curated regarding parenting and technology. I found this article to be especially interesting, as it references a flipped classroom, which is part of what I have been looking at for my project. However, in this article the emphasis is on flipped parenting. The article includes a list of rules that the parents and children came up with together about technology.

I also found a national survey about parenting in the digital age which I only skimmed. However, it looks promising from what I did look at.

This website is entirely devoted to helping parents in a digital age.

This article about iPad Bootcamp for Parents also looks like it might give you some insights on your topic.

I hope some of this helps you! Let me know if you need more help. I would be happy to help find more resources for you!