Idit Harel

New York, 04/04/1998

"MaMaMedia: a children's media company"

SUMMARY:

• Edith Harel is the founder and CEO of MaMaMedia, a children's media company in New York which creates activity-based programming for children on the Internet (1).
• She decided to set up MaMaMedia after many years of research at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and Technology Center and at the MIT Medialab and after many years of working with children, teachers and parents (2).
• MaMaMedia is a playful name which makes children smile, and communicates that the company is about playful learning (3).
• Harel believes that as the price of computers falls many children who were in a disadvantaged position are going to begin to enjoy interacting with computers, accessing information and connecting to knowledge in a way that they were not able to in the past. Furthermore, the Internet will give the haves and the have-nots an opportunity to talk to each other (4).
• MaMaMedia promotes self-expression and tries to create a place where children bring something from within themselves into on-line communication (5).
• Rather than controlling what children see on the Internet, MaMaMedia tries to bring together interesting sites. Once there, children tend to stay (6).
• One way of blocking pornography from children is by creating a safe place with a lot of constructive activities. Children of today need tools and experiences for them to explore their technological imagination and fluency (7).
• MaMaMedia focuses on the home because in the United States that is where the computer is now. Children who access computers and use multimedia products in the home will then go into schools and begin to change them (8).
• A lot of parents, teachers and policy-makers are very concerned about the three "Rs": reading, writing, and arithmetic, but the children of the 1990s are very different: they feel very comfortable with non-linear thinking; they are multi-taskers; they are technologically fluent and they also want to create media. MaMaMedia calls it the generation of the three "Xs": exploration, expression, and exchange (9).

INTERVIEW:

Question 1
Please introduce yourself.

Answer
I'm Edith Harel, the founder and CEO of MaMaMedia. MaMaMedia is a new children's media company in New York and we are creating activity-based programming for children on the Internet.

Question 2
Why the name MaMaMedia and what is its purpose?

Answer
After many years of research at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and Technology Center and at the MIT Medialab with Professor Papert and other colleagues at MIT Medialab, after many years of working with children and teachers and parents in schools, introducing advanced learning environment, introducing technologies to the schools, we decided two years ago to start up MaMaMedia as an example of something of this in the home. At this time we realized that computers were rapidly entering American homes: 60% of American homes with kids under seven now have a multimedia PC. Many of them are beginning to acquire a second one or an Internet appliance such as Web TV. A lot of these kids are now coming to the computer with a great desire to express themselves, to explore. They feel very natural with it. It was only natural for us to take all of our experience and everything that we'd learned from working with children in schools and doing very creative projects with computers and trying to really package them for home consumers, and involve parents and kids together on the Internet in learning projects in the home.

Question 3
And what about the name MaMaMedia?

Answer
MaMaMedia is a playful name. We were looking for a good name that kids will love, that will make them smile, that will actually communicate that we are about playful learning. We are a learning company, but the learning philosophy that we support in our product strategy is really about exploratory learning, discovery learning, playful learning, very much like the kinds of things you will learn when you play in the sand and build sandcastles or play with blocks or paint with paint brushes and oils and crayons. It is this playfulness that we bring to the Internet. So we were looking for a name that would make people smile. And I guess it works. It works with boys and girls and mothers and fathers and business people.

Another thing about the name is that MaMaMedia means the mother of all media. And we feel we need to give this service to kids, with a lot of different kinds of media. They are all digital and they come in bits, not in atoms. But they actually reflect or allow you to express similar experiences that you have with multiple media.

A fun thing about our name, which is the third aspect of it, is that when you turn it upside down, the three capital M's are actually W's, which stand for the world wide web. So there are a lot of reasons why MaMaMedia is a nice name. The fact that you can actually turn it upside down and you discover something is also part of the company's message.

Question 4
Let's talk about educational opportunities and who will benefit. Will poor people without access to computers and the Internet be more disadvantaged than those with access?

Answer
For the first time, after many, many years of doing projects with computers, I strongly believe that a lot of the kids who were usually in a disadvantaged position, because computers were so expensive, are going to begin and enjoy more and more from interacting with computers and accessing information and connecting to knowledge in a way that they never were able to reach in the past. We have already the beginnings of low-cost computers and very powerful multimedia PCs and the price is dropping. A lot of people in the industry are actually trying to push prices down. I think as access prices come down, as computer prices come down, we will see more and more communities, more and more kids from disadvantaged and developing societies coming in and connecting to the network.

We also see the development of new appliances. I think a lot of video game companies are going to connect the games to the Net. A lot of toys and gadgets and things that we wear and musical instruments will connect to the Internet, so very soon kids will have their own gear. They will connect to the Net because their watch is connected to the Net, because their toys are connected to the Net, because they have an appliance that they can use with their remote control, and they will also have a more powerful PC that they can connect to the Net if they would like to do heavy-processing types of projects.

But there will not be just one way, so you will be able to work on a spectrum of projects and connect to the Net for many types of purposes. I think it will give the haves and the have-nots an opportunity to talk to each other and to express themselves and to exchange ideas using the network.

Eighty-five percent of American children already use computers and that is an incredible statistic. Whether they use them at home or in schools or in libraries or in community centers, we see that there is a way for kids to access knowledge, to access information, and to really be in touch and interact with each other using computers on a very large scale. And that is a very promising fact.

In the last four or five years we have also seen the price of computers really dropping, access fees going down, and - I think it's mainly in the US right now but we will see this phenomenon happening internationally - as access and computer prices drop, a lot more kids, including the children of developing nations, will be able to come online. I think that developments such as Internet alliances and different toys that connect to the Internet and different kinds of gadgets that connect to the Internet will actually allow more and more children to come online in multiple ways, and that is a very exciting new thing.

Question 5
Your company is dedicated to education and to children. From your experience, do you think that we should control how children surf on the Net, and, if so, how?

Answer
There are two questions that we are looking at very seriously right now. One is the way we use the technology and way we use the Internet. MaMaMedia promotes self-expression. So you have to think about using the Internet for self-expression very much like the way you use a pencil. Do you want to control the way a child uses a pencil or the way a child uses crayons? Probably not. You want to give them a chance to explore and discover and express themselves in a safe environment. But you want to make sure that you create a place where they bring something from within themselves into the project, into the communication online.

Question 6
Is the Internet a dangerous place for kids?

Answer
Is the Internet a dangerous place for kids? That's a question that we ask very often. And MaMaMedia takes a constructive, positive approach. What we have here is a content team that is very powerful. We surf the net, and we select websites of high quality, that are very safe and have really wonderful pieces of information about whales, about birds, about dinosaurs, about sports, about all the stuff that kids find very interesting. We screen it and filter it and we put our seal of approval on it. Right now we have 1500 such websites in our safe database. And so our approach is not to use keywords and block kids, but rather to bring them to a playground or to a channel that is filled with a lot of good stuff. And once they are there they just stay there. We know that about kids. So this is the MaMaMedia approach.

Then there is the issue of organization, because it's not just about giving them a lot of websites, but also organizing it and reorganizing it and giving them a lot of surprising new organizations on a regular basis as part of the programming. So we package websites in three different ways. We have a way that we package websites in what we call "sandwiches". It is food for their minds, for their thinking. We create web "sandwiches" for kids. These are like little thematic directories for kids. We pick a topic like a Natureburger and in the Natureburger we put a lot of websites about dinosaurs, about pets, about animals, about rain forests. We have a sandwich called Healthfood Hero which is a sandwich where we put websites about body and mind and cool sports. And we have a website Kids Deluxe where kids can find kids' stories, kids that wrote stories or published poetry or created different kinds of messages or even websites. That is a way of both building the child's experience around a set of websites - like a safe sandbox - and then organizing them in this playful way that we call sandwiches. Then we give them a tool to build their own sandwiches for themselves, for their friends, and they begin to understand the hierarchy of a directory or how searches are done.

Another thing we do is surfing parties. We pick a theme, for example the color blue, and we put together five websites about blue whales, and three websites about bluebirds, and seven websites about blues music, and three websites about blueberry pies. We also have a button there if we forgot a blue category. So in any website about a blue topic, the kids can actually submit it to us so they are contributing to the community. This is what I mean by taking a constructive, creative, positive approach to this issue of safety, which is very important to us.

We have another way which is an area called Buzz. In Buzz kids share projects and also visit each other's bookmarks. So when they surf on the MaMaMedia database of good quality sites, they can always collect and pick websites that they like, and we have the visual bookmarking system for them that they can put together, and then kids can visit each other and look at each others' bookmarks. Usually, when you use Netscape or Internet Explorer or any other browser, we cannot surf each other's bookmarks, but on the MaMaMedia system, kids can actually collect and share and visit each other's bookmarks. So there is a whole new way of doing activity-based surfing for the purpose of playful learning.

Question 7
OK. What about pornography on the Net?

Answer
There is obviously a huge collection of sites related to pornography and sex and violence and a lot of bad stuff is out there because it is a decentralized system - and it should stay this way -and people express themselves and they express themselves about a lot of good stuff but they also express themselves about a lot of other things. What we do is we are trying to really educate parents and teachers about the positive elements of integrating the Internet.

One way of blocking pornography from children is by giving them an incredibly exciting channel where there is a lot of activities that they can do and where they can play, especially when you think about the 12 and under kids, the kindergartners, first, second, third, fourth graders. If they are engaged in something that is meaningful and they are not going to wander around. And this is what we are trying to do. We are trying to create a safe place with a lot of constructive activities for them to do that they get hooked, and they just stick to it - very much like a video game but for learning. We do have a project with a center for children and technology here in New York, where we are beginning to introduce the MaMaMedia engines and our products to teachers and community centers. What we are trying to do is to take the approach that what is really needed for the children of today, as well as for the children of the future, is tools and experiences for them to explore their technological imagination and their technological fluency. We would like boys and girls to grow up in a world where the Internet is the place for them to come and feel very confident: "I know how to figure it out. I know how to use it. It's actually good. I can invent websites, I can program websites. I feel comfortable with it. I have a story to tell you. Here is a website that I published. I can invent a machine. I can be part of the next generation of people who are inventing the next generation of computers." And when boys and girls feel the same, this is what MaMaMedia is all about.

Question 8
You were saying something about the project with public schools. Can you tell us more about that?

Answer
Right now MaMaMedia is focusing on the home, because in the United States this is where the computer is now in a very dominant way. We also believe that there is something very special that is happening now that we call kid power. I think that kids are going to access computers and use multimedia products, access the Internet in the home, and will have very enriching experiences by themselves, with their siblings, with their parents. They are then going to come to the schools and help us change them. So this is an opportunity for people like us who are educational activists - people like Seymour Papert - who for many years have been working together on entering schools, introducing new media learning environments, and using the computer as an agent of change, and educating teachers and educating children how to really restructure the curriculum in the school structure. But it took a lot of time and effort to convince the school system to change. We really believe that we have a second chance now by reaching kids and parents directly and informing them through this very powerful experience. They will help us change the schools, I think, five years from now.

Question 9
Computers and the Internet can sometimes help handicapped people. Do you plan any projects for those people?

Answer
The way we think about the handicapped is that if there are partners who have that focus and that is their interest and that is their expertise, we will collaborate with them. There are many aspects of our products and our approach that work really well, because we don't have a curriculum or a top-down program. What we have is a set of tools and a set of engines for kids to come can create a little multimedia character. They come in and they have an interface design tool like Buttonzapper, so they design the MaMaMedia interface. They have a place for them to build a little city called Presto where they can put together a mail shop and a surf shop and an animation shop and a noise shop. These kinds of environments are making something that is closer to toys, crayons and blocks than to worksheets and that kind of task curriculum stuff in schools. In its nature it's allowing a lot of people with expertise in special education or learning disabilities to come and grab it and incorporate it into their systems.

A lot of parents, teachers and policy-makers are very concerned about the three "Rs": reading, writing, and arithmetic. For a hundred years people have been trying to develop programs for teaching kids reading, writing and arithmetic, the basic skills. I think that the kids of the 1990s or kids that have not been born yet are actually a very different kind of kid. I would like to point out, maybe, four or five characteristics of this new generation of kids.

One is that they feel very comfortable with non-linear thinking. They can be linear thinkers but they can be also non-linear thinkers in a very comfortable way. They are multi-taskers. You can see them listening to music and playing with the computer, with blocks on the floor, watching TV, downloading something from the Internet and playing a video game as the thing is being downloaded. They move from one thing to the other. Sometimes parents and teachers call this concentration problems, but I think that that is the way kids can concentrate these days. It is a whole new way of thinking, a whole new thinking style.

And they also are technologically fluent. They feel very comfortable with technology. They are born into a world where there are already laptops and PCs and appliances and some toys that are connected to the technologies in very different ways. They feel very comfortable with all of this. Imagine us without cash machines on the street. We cannot even imagine life without them. This is the way this generation thinks about computers. They don't care whether it's Macintosh or a PC or is a video game station or Nintendo 64. They just grab it, they figure it out, and they just want to know what the activity is. And they feel very comfortable.

Then their relationship with the different technologies and the different activities is very interesting, because in addition to being consumers of media, in addition to flipping channels on the television or putting a CD-ROM in and out, these kids are growing into a world where they are used to seeing people creating with digital media. So they come to us and say: "How did you make that blue? How do you animate that stuff?" From the very beginning they think about these questions. So in addition to consuming media, to controlling media, to choosing media experiences, they also want to create media. So we are adding a whole new dimension of increasing control. And their relationship with media, their attitudes arevery different. This generation is not about reading, writing and arithmetic, it is really about exploring with digital media, expressing yourself with digital media, and exchanging ideas with visual media. At MaMaMedia we call it the generation of the three "Xs": exploration, expression, and exchange.