Trusting Teens with Tech

Directly from the UK, we have ‘swinnie’ from the chat room responding to an earlier post from ‘psionicarchon’ RE: ‘You’re Never Too Young to Start Goal Setting’ - the YouTube video and corresponding blog posts. He writes:

I am 15 and have had a big interest in computers since starting secondary school (high school). And I started making websites with a generator using Freewebs then moved over to HTML, then to CSS, then PHP and MySQL. I am now planning to learn C and C++ as I am interested in gaming also.

I didn’t have a computer for myself with internet access until I was in Year 8 (2nd Year of Secondary / High School) and I used it for school work, email and making my websites. I then progressed to use Instant Chat, You Tube and Forums. I do a lot of IT Based subjects at school and hope to go into the IT Industry and having had the opportunity to use a computer with internet access at home and at school I feel it has helped me. I learnt to touch type and that is going to stand me well for the future as it is a modern life skill that many companies will look for when look at employing someone in an office based job.

Giving a child access to a computer is a good idea, but you need to be able to trust the child and give the child that opportunity to have access to the computer. Parental control is important, this means the parents, the computer cannot do it all for the parent. As the child gets older the control should be relaxed. Fortunately I can restrict myself to certain times and access.

Something worth bearing in mind is that I had been given access to a computer from around 6, 7 or 8 years old. I was allowed an hour maximum every day, and if I had been good I was allowed an extra half hour. Giving computer access to a child in this modern world I feel is very important but gradually increasing the amount of access will allow the child to appreciate the computer more and not take it for granted.

I do spend a lot of time on the computer, and I enjoy learning and am always looking for things to learn on the computer. I have recently set-up a Windows Server in my house which the house will soon be using as soon as I get more hard drives and more RAM. I have also experimented with Linux and will be looking at getting a Mac Mini in 2008 as that is one operating system that I have not used and have seen you using your lovely MacBook Pro’s on the live stream. I am also looking at getting into running my own web hosting completely free like ‘psionicarchon’, as I started out on free web hosts and find the adverts and other limitations annoying and frustrating.

Earlier this year, before I found your site, I set-up a blog that I give people help with technology, and have now also started a live stream and a Moodle (official website is www.moodle.org ) system that I will be posting courses to help users everywhere about technology. I will also be allowing members of the community to submit course material to me to be posted onto the Moodle system.

On a related note of parental supervision, i stumbled upon this video last night when waxing nostalgic. I emailed the link to my dad and we shared a trip down memory lane today. He was able to secure a copy of this program for our first home computer (a C64):

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