Wednesday, March 19, 2008


Are younger people different then us? Todays pervasive networked communication has to affect their learning behaviors. I suspect that it could even change the 'learned' elements of their cognitive processes.

Early versions of Sesame Street had a lot of very short
(1-2minute) segments. This meant that the kids were trained to have
short span attention, then jump to another topic. The newer Sesame
Street episodes have longer segments, e.g. "Elmo's World", that last
15-30 minutes. Anecdotally, I notice that my 4 year old's attention
span tends to mimic that of the activities and adults around her.

When I was in college, everyone was walking around plugged into a
newfangled revolutionary device called the "Walkman". Everyone was
talking about what a difference this was (as if the transistor radio in
the '50s didn't exist). I watched its prominence fade away when I was in
grad school, and everyone today seems to have forgotten about it.

It just reminds me of the old expression (and I tried to Google it to
find out who said it first, but there were too many links without


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