Transcript

From parent to digital friend, a necessary journey? Luca Bruschi at TEDxTrastevere

thank you good evening everybody tonight this is more appropriate than today at 10 pm I'm going to talk about mature patients technology and major kids I've been in touch with the PC since when I was 11 and it was 1982. today I work also in the technology field and I've been dealing with my other patients my children since when I was 35 and it was to 2006. you know shorter time but believe me a more intense period and more patient so when I started thinking about sharing my experience here I realized about education technology kids and water are strongly related in our life in fact the water this in the ocean could be thought as composed of billions or drops and the water is also the key element of our life in the universe as many species before have a very easily and very well highlighted so the ocean can be can be seen as an infinite set of jobs of life but today in the digital era there is also another element that seems to be as important as water in fact more most of us cannot stay more the 10 minutes without checking in the Facebook status or without sending a WhatsApp or a Twitter message all of them are drops of information they together build the new internet this is critical then to realize that the importance of surfing the internet with the new with the same awareness and same competence as the server writes the ug ocean wave Because The Internet Is Beautiful is interesting it's extremely fascinating but it could be dangerous as well and it is even more critical when the Surfers are our drops of life our kids they are the first digital generation they were born in a world of connected devices they play online games they listen to fairy tales similar from the internet and they can chat with the school friends for us it was different because I had my first internet connection in my college Years and it was through a very slow modem why reconnected with my PC today our kids don't even know they need some stuff to be connected with a cable to the net for them my internet is everywhere is in the air delivered with the internet since the very beginning of their life it's not a college-time discovery I retrieved some data from the East at Italian Statistical Institute and they show they are they show their online activity or Italian population and they organized by age range in percentage this this data show clearly a trend for kids from six to ten because their line activity is growing after year but there is another key point because kids between 11 and 14 have an an online activity which is higher than ours their parents that's why I decided to volunteer in a safer internet day which is a Day celebrated every year in February and it seems to teach to the kids or to save the internet in a safe and in a happy way and to teach also the parents the school teacher as well how to deal with it volunteering at sad is an incredible experience I can tell you that standing in front of 30 40 primary school kids who serve with you with expectation and curiosity is a totally different experience for my profession I usually am meeting the customer and they talk to cios and to CEOs but it is completely different and in this talk I don't want to bother you with technical advice with antivirus staff or with cyber bullying issue but I want to share with you my key learnings and top ends we could use as a parents in dealing with our kids use of the internet whenever I start a new classroom I usually warm up the audience with some questions and one of the first thing I do is to show this image hopefully most of you can recognize it because I tell you that the first time I did it there was one of the kids youngest guy in the audience who cried out immediately a CPU he was very sure about that and actually it was right so I prepared a bunch of wins to get the audience to the right answer but let's give them all and as soon as the CPU mystery solved I start to focus the attention on what is it what it is exactly and why we can find it first of all we can find it everywhere in every electronical device today we have a CPU it is in our PC in our tablet in our smartphone in our gaming console in our TV and when it comes to the definition it's funny because the next slide has been shown already in this in this meeting so the word has changed because we query Wikipedia for everything and I created also for the CPU and it is easy to alight the task of the CPU because it just reads instructions from memory and execute them anything else that means that the CPU and the devices we are today and today are in our kids hands are also very powerful doesn't do anything by themselves they will do exactly what we want to do with them it's very easy that's why we have to use these devices in a clever and a wise way and it is even more to even if we think that these devices are internally connected and the internet is pretty much different from the first internet in fact in the very beginning in the old days the user was just a passive reader it just got a few information in a textual way today internet is more interactive the user is an active actor on the internet he has a social life he can buy stuff from the other part of the world it can listen to music and share the same playlist with his friends it can be in contact with anybody in the planet it happened to me last week to have a video call with my grandma and she lives in La Spezia and I live here in Rome and my two kids had the opportunity to talk and to see her as they were in the same room but actually they were 500 kilometers away of course this kind of interaction raises some security issue because whenever you're interacting with someone else on the internet there is a filter between you your kids and the other person and the filter is the device itself and is also the Avatar which is the digital entity behind which that person could hide himself and could also fake his identity it raises also some behavioral issue because whenever you upload an image or you write something on the Internet it will be stay there forever it will be a drop of your life of your kid's life which will be permanent in the into the ocean and whenever I talk to other people about this this issue it seems that they are in this team underestimate their kids digital life and their kids competencies one time in one session I had in a primary school there was a very very young girl at 10 years old who came to me during the break and said Luca I developed enough for Facebook and I was astonished because in that very moment I realized that she was just a little bit older than my daughter and she had already developed an app for Facebook and believe me it's very different from just getting a tablet and playing Candy Crush and this kind of a sorry underestimation brings also parents in behaving in different way because you can we can have parents very focused on the real world and they stress so much the basic principle never talk to strangers and when it comes to the digital world they leave their kids alone online in the online dimension and we can have also those points they call the scared parents they are those who believe they can prevent their kids from going online but these are just a couple of example of parents behavior and if we stop for a while right now and we think how many times we are given our smartphone to our kids treating the smartphone as a babysitter probably too many times we have to think that the online activity of our kids starts very soon remember the bubble graph before and remember that the new generation as an online activity higher than our it means that we the parents in our 40s in our 50s are losing ground in a technology race and I think also that the kids our kids already overtaken Us in that race so we have to we are to be to behave to be very sure about the their kids digital life and there are several reasons why we don't we are not updated probably the new internet is not very interesting for us or we think that our generation is not able to use the new technology or simply we don't like it but just few of us are very aware of the how dangerous this entity could be because leaving our kids online alone will could lead them to meet a stranger for example on the internet but even more likely it could lead also to get in touch with an inappropriate material because you know the new interface is the touch interface is very easy to use and my daughter my son is very very quick very fast there's more more fingers they can touch here and there and it is very easy to to click on a link to have a pop-up with a bad image or as a friend of mine told me recently he left his kid alone in a gaming console and was playing a game when he went back he found out that the small Creator three years old have gone to the store bought a new game and was playing to that and it was worth 50 euros and I told him welcome to the digital era therefore we as a parent should improve our technical skills you know I'm in the technical series and every day every month every year I have a new products to sell because there are new products released and the best way to become an expert on this product is to practice to put my hands on them and this is the same in the technology field with our kids is the same in the sport if you want to master it you have to practice but there is a good news you can have fun it could be very enjoyable together with your kids and we have to be able to explain our kids what the social network is which are the differences between blog and charts and why we need to protect our online identity but you know it's just the first part of the journey to become a digital friend for our kids and you know just to be clear in the title in my title special is a a question point it's necessary it's not an option we have to do that for sure because the second part of the journey is even more important we cannot postpone this issue we cannot say our kids are too young for their online life because we've seen that their death day is today they're going online today right now and if we don't do that if we don't follow them in their online life probably we are creating a huge barrier between us and Them and you know building a barrier is a is very it's very simple it's very fast breaking it down could be very complicated and could take a long time One Night in August 1961 the Berlin Wall was built and you know many families were split immediately overnight and that wall lasted for 28 years thank you very much