Arthur wrote:
> There is a widespread belief among teachers that students' constant
> use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and
> ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks, according to
> two surveys of teachers being released on Thursday.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/education/technology-is-changing-how-stude
> nts-learn-teachers-say.html
Personally, I think TV has this effect. "Good" video has a high rate
of change, viz. technical effects such as cut, pan, zoom, voice-over.
Current TV (what little I've seen from my dentist's chair) also has
streaming text banners overlaid. What you see is what you get and it
only lasts a few seconds. Zombie out, just let it whiz by, have a nice
little trace state while you're at it, eh?
If, on top of 25 to 30 hours per week of TV viewing, you add the habit
of accepting frequent interruption of your thoughts or activity by
incoming text or IMs or phone calls, you don't have much time
available for blocks of concentration. Competent professionals are
driven nuts by such interruptions if they're constrained to permit
them. Kids are forming habits and growing the neural constructs that
will inform their adulthood. Ten minutes without a distraction,
without a change of subject, will come to feel, well, just *wrong*.
I don't have a cell phone or tablet, don't text or IM and don't have
TV or access to on-line video but I've felt that 20 years or so of
avocational computer programming and nearly that many years of net
access has reduced, not my attention span but my patience with tedious
manual tasks. Hand forging only moves hot iron a millimeter or so at
a time. Fabrication of larger projects -- simple things that in 1910
would have been part of a jr. high shop class -- require tedious
measurement, hand fitting and trial & error. [1] I find my patience
with that sort of thing declining. But maybe that's attributable to
age. Hard to say.
I find being able to look up some detail -- one that I've long
wondered about but but not strongly enough to spend a day in the city
at the university library -- really nice. How, exactly, did my Spencer
ancestors get mixed up with the Churchill family? [2] The sad thing is
that, when I *do* want to dig deeply into something, the original
scientific papers and monographs are behind pay walls at Elsevier or
other scientific publishing houses. So I *still* need to drive into
the city if I want the kind of detail needed to, say, write a serious
essay on a medical subject.
FWIW,
- Mike
[1] Unless you have really good blueprints. Typically, you don't.
[2] A complicate affair involving a special act of Parliament when the
1st Duke of Marlborough died without a male heir and a later
holder of the Marlborough title changing his name to
Spencer-Churchill in the hopes of fending off creditors. Huh.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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