How Media Is Changing The Way We Learn

Editor's Notes

• #2: This presentation is designed to be less of a presentation and more of a two- way discussion.
• #3: This report is based on a nationally representative survey of 2,002 3rd–12th grade students, ages 8–18, including a subsample of 702 respondents who also volunteered to complete seven-day media use diaries. The study was conducted from October 20, 2008 through May 7, 2009.
• #6: In our educational backgrounds it is likely that most of us have studied Jean Piaget’s theory on the four stages of child development.   We are going to use Piaget’s theory of child development as a starting point to look at student’s cognitive development and the types of media that research shows that they are being exposed to at each level.
• #7: Children use five senses to explore the world.   Object Orientated
• #8: 59% of American Children under the age of 2 watch television
• #9: And 42% watch video or DVDs (Rideout, 2003)
• #10: Toys are becoming more embedded with digital media
• #11: Children in this stage gain the ability to use symbolic representations of the world such as images and language.   Children in this age group experience a great increase in verbal abilities, a burgeoning ability to use symbols in imaginary play, and a rapid increase in short-term memory and information processing capacity However, they are limited by their egocentricity, whereby they have difficulty taking on perspectives other than their own.   Children in this period fail in Piaget’s classic conservation task mentioned above. Children focus on the apparent visual difference, or only one aspect of the beaker (height, rather than width), and claim the amount had [has] changed. (Sometimes called logical thinking)
• #12: 70% have used computers and 50% have played video games   Preschool children are drawn to digital media that allow them to experience “opportunities for learning, mastery, and silly fun,” particularly through stories featuring “familiar and attractive characters   Children in this stage gradually develop the ability to discern real from non-real and factual from
• #13: (tweens) Children in this period acquire what Piaget calls “operations,” or internal representations of a reversible transformation. In other words, the child can imagine changing something and changing it back, such as pouring the water back into the tall, thin beaker in the conservation experiment. For Piaget, operations such as these are the foundations of future logical thought. However, children in this period still struggle with systematic, strategic thinking and abstractions. This period is widely concerned [considered] the “crowing achievement” of cognitive development, because it allows fully abstract thought, rigorous logic, and scientific hypothesis testing. It must be noted, however, that depending on the domain, many adults do not achieve formal operational reasoning, and that there may be types of reasoning beyond formal operations as well.
• #15: Pg. 12 different way of looking at media by age The amount of time young people spend with various types of media changes as they age—for example, younger children read more, tweens watch more TV, and older teens listen to more music
• #16: Massive Communicators Eight- to eighteen-year-olds today spend an average of a half-hour a day (:33) talking on their cell phones, and an average of 49 minutes a day (:49) listening to, playing or watching other media on their phones (:17 with music, :17 playing games, and :15 watching TV)— 80% of teens never shut off their mobile phones, enabling them to constantly participate and manage contact with their social network (Stald, 2007, pp. 5-7). not to mention the hour and a half a day that 7th- to 12th-graders spend textmessaging Separate from multitasking is a need (or desire) to constantly monitor one’s incoming data across multiple platforms; media theorist Linda Stone calls this practice “continuous partial attention (CPA)”.  
• #17: the only media activity that hasn ’ t increased among young people over the past 10 years is reading traditional print media. Time spent reading books for pleasure has increased slightly, but time spent with magazines and newspapers, which held fairly steady from 1999 to 2004, has declined substantially since then.
• #18: For the first time since we began this research in 1999, the amount of time young people spend watching regularly scheduled programming on a television set at the time it is originally broadcast has declined (by :25 a day, from 3:04 to 2:39). However, the proliferation of new ways to consume TV content has actually led to an increase of 38 minutes of daily TV consumption. The increase includes an average of 24 minutes a day watching TV or movies on the Internet, and about 15 minutes each watching on cell phones (:15) and iPods (:16). Thus, even in this new media world, television viewing—in one form or another—continues to dominate media consumption, taking up about 4½ hours a day in young people’s lives (up from a total of 3:51 in 2004). But how young people watch TV has clearly started to change. Indeed, today just 59% of young people’s TV watching occurs on a TV set at the time the programming is originally broadcast; fully 41% is either time-shifted, or occurs on a platform other than a TV set
• #19: TV multi-tasking TV Multitasking. Among 7th–12th graders, about four in ten (39%) say they multitask with another medium “most of the time” they are watching TV; another three in ten (29%) say they do so “some of the time.”  
• #21: Visiting social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook is the most popular computer activity among 8- to 18-year-olds, accounting for an average of :22 a day across all age groups. In a typical day, 40% of young people will go to a social networking site, and those who do visit these sites will spend an average of almost an hour a day (:54) there. The percent who engage in social networking ranges from 18% among 8- to 10-year-olds to 53% among 15- to 18-year-olds.
• #23: Youth who spend more time with media report lower grades and lower levels of personal contentment. For purposes of comparison, young people were grouped into categories of heavy, moderate and light media users. Heavy users are those who consume more than 16 hours of media content in a typical day (21% of all 8- to 18‑year‑olds); moderate users are those who consume from 3–16 hours of content (63%); light users are those who consume less than three hours of media in a typical day (17%). Nearly half (47%) of all heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly C’s or lower), compared to 23% of light media users. Heavy media users are also more likely to say they get into trouble a lot, are often sad or unhappy, and are often bored. Moreover, the relationships between media exposure and grades, and between media exposure and personal contentment, withstood controls for other possibly relevant factors such as age, gender, race, parent education, and single vs. two-parent households. This study cannot establish whether there is a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades, or between media use and personal contentment. And if there are such relationships, they could well run in both directions simultaneously.
• #24: It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain . “ We are how we read.”- Neo placity Maggie Jackson author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark says Attention is now considered an organ system. Three types of attention: The first is orienting — the flashlight of your mind. In the case of visual attention, it involves parts of the brain including the parietal lobe, a brain area related to sensory processing. To orient to new stimuli, two parts of the parietal lobe work with brain sections related to frontal eye fields. This is what develops in an infants’ brain, allowing them to focus on something new in their environment. Orienting is largely in place by kindergarten.   The second type of attention spans the spectrum of response states, from sleepiness to complete alertness. The third type is executive attention: planning, judgment, resolving conflicting information. The heart of this is the anterior cingulate — an ancient, tiny part of the brain that is now at the heart of our higher-order skills. It’s executive attention that lets us move us beyond our impulsive selves, to plan for the future and understand abstraction. The executive network is largely in place by age 8, but it develops until the mid-20s. We are programmed to be interrupted. We get an adrenalin jolt when orienting to new stimuli: Our body actually rewards us for paying attention to the new. So in this very fast-paced world, it’s easy and tempting to always react to the new thing. But when we live in a reactive way, we minimize our capacity to pursue goals.
• #25: The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver. shift from orality to print culture profoundly impacted how we engage with ideas. Text-based literacy may have restructured the human brain in a beneficial way, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that other literacies can have the same or similar effect.   The Revolution on how we learn with the Internet is going to be bigger than Gutenberg . This kind of thing does not happen very often to our species. It is a socio-technological change .
• #26: In contrast, Vygotsky positioned the child within a web of culture and suggested that cognition was the product of that culture. For Vygotsky, cultural symbols and artifacts were fundamental in determining both what a child learns and how s/he learns it.   Lave and Wenger take constructivism one step further by removing individual cognition from the equation altogether and arguing that learning is primarily a social construct enacted in a community setting.   Vaill emphasizes that “learning must be a way of being – an ongoing set of attitudes and actions by individuals and groups that they employ to try to keep abreast o the surprising, novel, messy, obtrusive, recurring events…” (1996, p.42).