On Children and Digital Depictions of Nature Carol Kaesuk Yoon, who writes frequently for Science Times and in 2002 collaborated with me on a story about the growing human influence on that thing called "nature," had a thought-provoking essay in the paper this week titled "Nature Follows a Path of Pixels Into Children's Hearts." In the piece she explains how she has grudgingly come to accept a role for digital media - including viral YouTube videos of a tickled slow loris and sneezing baby panda - in engaging children with the real living world. I agree that Internet exposure to animal behavior can have an important influence, just as books and National Geographic articles and Jacques-Yves Cousteau television shows did for me. But I see the most promise in a hybrid of digital and direct experience, in which children and young adults get out in the wet, wriggling, fluttering world - whether a wilderness or Thoreau's "swamp on the edge of town" - and then use the Web for that deeply human practice of communicating the things that catch our attention. On example is a teaching method of Professor Margaret Rubega of the University of Connecticut, who requires students in her bird biology class to use Twitter to document when they witness bird behavior. When the course is running, the hashtag #birdclass lets you track their observations. Read "On Birds, Twitter and Teaching" for more. Another is the 70-second video snippet above, which is an excerpt from a short film my younger son, Jack, shot for Dot Earth in 2008 after we paddled up a mangrove-lined creek in a heavily developed Florida neighborhood. There's a moment toward the end where Jack's voice conveys vividly the power of direct observation, but also the sense of achievement that came with capturing a perfect closeup of a baby heron to share with others. There's a one-two punch in this process - direct experience, and sharing - that, I think, has more lasting power than comes through idly surfing animal videos on YouTube (Jack does plenty of that, too) or even watching nature films on the Discovery Channel. I'd love to see the folks at Google's YouTube division, or at Discovery, or here at The Times, test ways for young people to share stories about the natural world - or the human-built one - through this kind mix of direct and digital means.