How do children learn today compared to how they learned when I was younger? Is there any difference at all? I think there is a difference. Children of today are using TV, computers, games and a lot of visual medias. It wasn't like this when I was a child. We had to read books in order to give our brains input. All the pictures and movies was all in our head, our inner eye was in constant work. In my opinion, children of today is missing some of the great stories, just because they can't sit still and read a book.
There's a program on the radio today. (Verdt å Vite. 12.30. NRK P2.) The topic is; What happens in the brain of young (?) people who are more social on the Internet than in real life? According to a specialist on this subject, the human brain changes physically, and endanger our ability to form our own identity, understand consequenses and to understand our fellow human beings.
Do any of you have any thoughts about this? Feel free to comment! :)
Today we have some kind of "wikipedianism". Children don't want to look up information in books and magazines, because they think it's a waste of time. It's better to have internet access and preparing things in "ctrl+c and ctrl+v" way or learn by copying information from different websites. It's not good!
ReplyDeleteIf this thinking holds for years children will not be like people - they will become computers :)
I think this post also is interesting, and connects to my post.
ReplyDeletehttp://imtoooldforthatemostuff.blogspot.com/2010/01/no6.html
Thanks
Hi Ole :-)
ReplyDeleteAn interesting post. I'd like to use it in our classroom as a trigger for reflection (for the other students). I do hope you don't mind :-)
I only have some reservations about the thesis that "human brain changes physically and endanger our ability to form our own identity". Physical change takes thousands if not millions of years in the course of evolution. BUT, I agree that due to contemporary media environment psyhological change may take place, and this change may affect the way individual identities are being shaped. These are very interesting issues within both educational and media studies.
BG
Hi Beata.
ReplyDeleteSure you may use it in our classroom, I don't mind. The reason for writing about this was really just to (hopefully) get some reactions. I listened to the program on the radio, and it was more about how the human brain reacts to sitting by a piano and not play, sitting by a piano and play, and sitting by the piano and imagining playing.
OleG
I agree.Though there is several opportunities when it comes to learning in our "visual media world", I think it is important that we use this recourses in a defensible way.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately today,the parents are busy people and many children are using the visual media in a larger degree than before.Therefore there is less and less verbal communication between the adults and the children and we don't use our language as often as we should.Many children are then missing conseptions,and we know that conseptions are very important when the children learns to write and to read.We say that the children have problems with writing and reading,but often the children are missing conseptions.We can say that children live at the day and the adults at the night, they don’t interact and the language and communication between these two doesn’t happen. It is important to underline that this doesn’t apply everyone!
Childrens capability to concentrate is reduced from 10 seconds to 5 seconds in the last twenty years. This is because the speed between the clips on TV,video games and computer games is increased. A five second scene has to contain a lot of action before it gets interesting for a child. Results of this is children with problems to concentrate.
But as I mentioned earlier, if we use this recourses in a defensible way, we can have a lot of joyful and valuable learning!
Being online "all the time" makes you lose out on so much human interaction. It takes time, after all, to learn expressions of feelings in someones face. It takes time to figure out tone of voice. If you are online and have more online interactions than IRL interactions, you will be worse off interpreting the world around you.
ReplyDeleteAnger is more than writing in CAPS LOCK.