Children on the Internet
The Internet today is a part of kids' natural environment. Most children have access to the Internet at school and/or at home. In 2000 there were 55,475,000 U.S. households with personal computers.[11] 99 percent of public schools have access to the Internet.[8] The number of Internet users worldwide is expected to grow to 300 million by 2005, from roughly 150 million currently, according to an estimate by IDC. The greatest growth will be in Asia and South America. The number of online users will rise 61 percent to 95 million in the US, more than double to 88 million in Europe and quadruple to 118 million in the rest of the world. NUA Internet Survey, on the other hand, estimated total number of people online to be 407.1 million in November 2000 .[5] In November 2000 almost 20 percent of all digital media users were children. [4] A recent National School Boards Foundation telephone survey of 1,735 randomly-chosen households showed that children predominantly use Internet at home and in school. [9] In a survey of 10,000 students aged 12 to 24, from 16 countries, Ipsos-Reid Group found Internet to be widely available to Swedish and Canadian students. 78 percent of students in Sweden and 74 percent in Canada are able to go online at school. 80 percent of Swedish children and 71 percent of Canadian students have web access at home. Taiwan ranked third, with 63 percent accessibility at school, followed by the UK, US, Netherlands, Australia, South Korea,
Mexico, Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Brazil, and Urban China
Parents and teachers consider Internet to be a primarily educational/developmental tool. The Kids.net study showed that children find the Internet easy to use, and like to use it for fun, games, e-mail, chat and instant messaging. Two-thirds of the children think that it helps them with their learning, and one-third would like to use it for lessons if they were home sick from school. [13] Children also go online for learning activities that are not connected directly with school. The absence of information filters, such as editors and peer reviewing, on the Internet presents a challenge to students, who are using the web to find information for their assignments. Children cannot properly estimate the validity of the information they find on the web. They rely upon search engines and accept information in visually appealing easily accessible pages. [7] Potential exposure of children to controversial information on the web resulted in many practical guidelines on Internet safety for parents and children and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 on the Internet.[1] This act provides an official definition of a website directed to children. However, despite the abundance of web sites for kids, principles of web design for children are not yet well defined. Kids' active, extensive and rapidly growing presence on the Internet poses both a challenge and an opportunity for researchers and web designers.
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