I wrote a small piece yesterday on a similar problem. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/conundrum-professional-learning-nandkumar-saravade
We have to deal with shorter attention spans. Regards, Nandkumar > On 04-Jan-2019, at 3:31 PM, Deepa Agashe <daga...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Interesting to hear all your perspectives on this. > > I’ve now had multiple debates with my PhD students, who keep trying to > convince me to set up a twitter account for our lab. And I continue to resist > because I find it very distracting, and counter to the idea of developing > scholarship (which to me requires time, solitude, and space, all of which > seem very limited in the fora in vogue). My students are happy to have long > and deep verbal discussions, but when I solicit opinions or perspectives by > starting an email thread for the lab, there is almost no response. > > So I too am converging on the idea that the current crop of kids just don’t > write long-form. Perhaps I am paranoid, but I worry that a lot of interesting > views will be lost over time because nobody is bothering to expound on them. > A century from now, can historians piece together our narratives from the > shards of twitter? > > > >> On 04-Jan-2019, at 15:13, Nishant Shah <itsnish...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Because a lot of my work is with young kids, it is actually surprising to >> see how much email is actually used, but not for conversations. For a lot >> of the 16-22 year olds that we we work with, email is home base. it serves >> different purposes of notification, sign-ups, verifications, cloud storage, >> and archiving, but not direct communication. So a lot of emailing is a >> trigger action rather than information transfer. One of my PhDs calls this >> an extended cybernetic loop without a closure, because emails are used to >> direct attention and click on things. This does beggar the question of >> where to people do long-form writing. And the only thing I can sense is >> that they don't. If it is not going on a blog or on social media posts, it >> is not going anywhere. Instead, different ideas seem to go on multiple >> platforms, and surprisingly, emails sometimes become the consolidating >> drivers that stitch them all together. >> >> I, personally, just queer the thing by writing whatsapp messages that >> scroll to an infinity and facebook posts which defy good advice of brevity >> and ramble at will. >> >> On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 1:21 AM Charles Haynes <charles.hay...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >>>> On Thu, 3 Jan 2019 at 19:08, Thaths <tha...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>> On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 9:47 AM Dave Long <dave.l...@bluewin.ch> wrote: >>>> >>>>>> These days I think [email] is mostly used by us old fogies. >>>>> Fair enough, but what, pray tell, do all those non-old-fogies use to >>>>> convey thoughts that are too long for social media comments and too >>> short >>>>> for blog posts? >>>>> >>>> >>>> Not being on most popular social media (Twitter, FB, etc.) I am not >>>> qualified to answer this. But when have I let such trivialities get in >>> the >>>> way of offering my opinions? :-) >>>> >>>> I posit that one way the youth of today are conveying their thoughts in >>>> through non-textual means: Through Snapchat (i.e., marked up >>>> photos/images), and through the sharing of meme images/animations. One >>>> mixed (textual and non-textual) medium popular in many parts of the world >>>> (and with many parallels to emails/mailing lists) seems to be WhatsApp >>> and >>>> similar messaging apps. >>>> >>> >>> It seems to me that none of those media support the kind of thing Dave was >>> asking about: "too long for social media comments and too short for blog >>> posts" does that mean they just don't do that sort of communicating? >>> >>> -- Charles >>> >> >> >> -- >> Dr. Nishant Shah (Ph.D.) >> Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India ( >> www.cis-india.org ) >> International Tandem Partner, Inkubator - Leuphana University, Lueneburg, >> Germany >> # +49-0176-841-660-87 >> http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shah >> http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah > >
