Media: Issues and Current Research
Saturday, 2:30 PM - 4:15 PM
Hynes CC 312

Chair: Aletha C. Huston, University of Texas at Austin

Research on Media’s Influence on Child Development
Speaker: Ellen Wartella, University of California, Riverside

Biographical Sketch
Ellen Wartella joined UCR on July 1, 2004 as the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost. She also is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCR. Dr. Wartella is a leading scholar of the role of media in children's development. She was a co-principal Investigator on the National TV Violence Study (1995-1998) and is currently co-principal investigator of the Children's Digital Media Center project funded by the National Science Foundation (2001-2006). She serves on the Kraft Food Global Health and Wellness Advisory Council, the Decade of Behavior National Advisory, the Board of Trustees of the Sesame Street Workshop, and the National Educational Advisory Board of the Children's Advertising Review Unit of the Better Business Bureaus. Dr. Wartella is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Children Youth and Families and recently served on the Institute of Medicine's Panel Study on Food Marketing and the Diets of Children and Youth (2006). She is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development and is the past President of the International Communication Association. Dr. Wartella earned her Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota in 1977 and completed her postdoctoral research in development psychology in 1981 at the University of Kansas. She joined UCR after serving as Dean of the College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin.

Learning and Developing with Virtual Peers and Other Radical New Technologies
Speaker: Justine Cassell, Northwestern University

Biographical Sketch
Justine Cassell is a full professor in the departments of Communication Studies and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University, and the director of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior. Before coming to Northwestern, Cassell was a tenured associate professor at the MIT Media Lab where she directed the Gesture and Narrative Language Research Group. In 2001, Cassell was awarded the Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award at MIT. Cassell holds undergraduate degrees in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth and in Lettres Modernes from the Universite de Besançon (France). She holds a M.Phil in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and a double Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Linguistics and Developmental Psychology.

Abstract
The discussion of the role of computational technology in children’s development has become increasingly polarized over the last years. On the one hand we find a frantic push to place computers and internet access into all U.S. schools, and on the other hand, a frantic push-back to place a “moratorium” on children’s access to computers. Clearly the answer lies at neither end of this long spectrum, and a careful review of existent studies shows a number of benefits, a palmful of harmful effects, and a plethora of unknowns. My own response has been that the answer lies in responsible and developmentally-informed design and evaluation of technology that specifically targets the needs and unique abilities of young children. Computers will not go away, nor should they, as they provide benefits to children that are either unavailable elsewhere, or too resource-intensive otherwise to be practical. History also teaches us that whereas initial fears about movies or radio or television concern the very presence of the medium, it is the content of the medium—the message—that must be evaluated and improved. Thus “computer technology” need not be incompatible with play-based learning, physical activity, active engagement, and social interaction, those features of childhood whose loss computer phobists decry. In this talk I will describe a program of research wherein computer technology is designed to address some specific needs of children (for example, to read and write, to engage socially with others, to be self-efficacious) based on some specific abilities of young children (for example, to tell stories, to interact physically with peers, to make friends). I provide examples from a decade of research into children's development and into the implementation and evaluation of new technology (such as virtual children, story listening systems, and online communities) to support that development.