As I sit on the board of Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, I have been thinking about the different ways people learn. RFB&D gives students the tools to learn by listening. We call that a disability. I think it may soon be seen as an advantage.
A group of Danish academics say we are passing through the other side of what they wonderfully call the Gutenberg Parenthesis, leaving the structured, serial, permanent, authored, controlled era of text and returning, perhaps, to what came before the press: a time when communication and content cross, when process dominates product, when knowledge is distributed by people passing it around, when we remix it along the way, when we are more oral and aural.
That's what makes me think that RFB&D's clients may end up with a leg up. They understand better than the textually oriented among us how to learn through hearing. Rather than being seen as the people who need extra help, perhaps they will be in the position to give the rest of us help.
And I thought that as I read Matt Richtel's piece in the New York Times today, "Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction." It starts off lamenting that a student got only 43 pages through Cat's Cradle. But as @HowardOwens responded on Twitter: "Gee, a 17-year-old only gets 43 pages into his summer reading assignment. Like, that's never happened before."
Richtel and the experts he calls blame technology, of course, for shortening our attention spans, just as Nick Carr and Andrew Keen do, lamenting the change. But the assumption they all make is that the way we used to do it is the right way. What if, as I said in Short Attention Span Theater (aka Twitter), we're evolving:
"Maybe the issue isn't that we're too distracted to read but that reading can finally catch up with how our brains really work."
Richtel, to his credit, focuses at the end of his piece on a distracted student who can, indeed, focus -- not on the books he's assigned but on the video he's making. Maybe that's because he's creating. Maybe it's because he's working with tools that give him feedback. Maybe it's because he is communicating with an audience.
I spend time on this topic in my next book, Public Parts (when I can concentrate on writing it -- that is, when I'm not blogging and tweeting as I am right now): Technology brings change; change brings fear and retrenchment. Gutenberg scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein reminds us that for 50 years after the invention of the press, we continued to put old wine in this new cask, replicating scribal fonts, content, and models. That's what's happening now: We are trying to fit our old world into the new one that is emerging. We're assuming the old way is the right way.
Mind you, one of the joys of writing this book is that I've had cause to start reading books again. I'll confess I'd fallen off the shelf.
Now I'm enjoying reading books as part of the process of creating, sharing, communicating. I'm learning not just by reading and absorbing but by rethinking and remixing. And I'm thinking the result of my next project after this one may not be a book but something else -- a talk, for example; a book may be a byproduct rather than the goal.
So is this new generation distracted or advanced? How can they best learn? How can they teach? What tools can we use today besides books? What new opportunities do all their tools present? That's what educators should be asking. That's the discussion I'd like to see the Times start.
@SivaVaid(hyanathan) just said on Twitter: "There are no wires in the human mind. So it can't be 'rewired' Get a grip." Right. What can be rewired are media and education and that's what we're seeing happen -- or what we should be seeing happen.
Follow Jeff Jarvis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jeffjarvis
It has been a total nightmare what all I've been through as a Mom trying to make sure her children are educated!
Secondly, why would you need a college degree to educate your children at home? One of the beauties of homeschooling is that you explore and engage with information right along with your children. I think the most successful homeschool situations are not those where the adult is set up as the authority who knows all, but rather in schoolrooms that allow children to take the lead in exploring information, figuring out how to apply it to their own lives, and digging more deeply into areas that interest them.
Here is a website that refers to the legal homeschool requirements for the state of Ohio: http://www.time4learning.com/homeschool/homeschooling_in_ohio.shtml
As a first-year homeschool mom, I can tell you that the doing is not as frightening and difficult as the contemplating. If nothing else, commit to trying it out for a year. If it doesn't work, then you send your kids back to public school none the worse for the wear.
http://reading-sage.blogspot.com/
The Internet on the other hand gives us opportunities to shorten or lengthen our attention span. Gutenberg, Google Books, Knol, and many other things allow us to spend hours or days investigating a particular topic in ways that could only have been done at a university library before.
There are of course parts of the Internet that play into both the shortened attention spans and increasing narcissism of moderns. Twitter, blogging tools, Facebook, allow us to post endless items that we think other people should be interested in. The "beauty" of these systems is that we can pretend other people are both reading and interested in these postings as there is no counter or rating/feedback system built into most of these things. If you are starved for attention, an Internet tool as simple and old as e-mail requires that your audience respond from time to time, while these newer and more "successful" tools do not.
(New York Times story link is not working by the way).