The new generation of e-learners: Who is thinking of the children?

Young e-Learners of the 21st Century are currently 4-5 years old. They are sitting at computers for hours on-end playing games that utilize the insidious cognitive learning strategies devised by psychologists involving `Operant Conditioning'. They are subtly and subliminally encouraged to believe that killing and decapitating a small cute flying dragon has nothing to do with reality. At 6 years of age they are accessing information through human-computer interaction (HCI) (Preece, 1994), hyper linking through virtual cyber space and integrating multimedia texts of unknown origins to find material for a school project. They sit in non-ergonomically designed furniture motionless for hours concentrating on bright colourful screens designed to capture, conquer and suppress the physical active that is required to develop growing bodies. Who is looking after the children of the future? Do instructional designers consider the complex interaction of learning styles of human beings? Whose responsibility is it to design, develop and mass-produce web-based educational system (WBES) that actually take into consideration the physical, cognitive, educational and social needs of the new generation of e-Learners?