These findings did not necessarily surprise me at all. It is obvious that young people today are spending more and more time with media. One way this might affect my teaching is it may require me to spend more time learning about the technologies my students interact with most and, if possible, learn to integrate them into the classroom in some capacity.
However, looking at the information and data presented more critically in the key findings, I had a couple questions that I thought would be important to raise. For example, the data states that while time on computers , watching TV and listening to music has increased over the past 5 years, time reading print materials has decreased. When you further break this information down, it shows that time spent reading magazines and newspapers has almost cut in half. This begs the question; couldn’t young people be getting their news and magazine information online? The article does not go into detail about what these young people are doing online and it is reasonable to think they are still getting this information, just from a different medium. I’m not saying whether this new way of getting information is good or bad, but a question that is not addressed within data presented. It is difficult for me to comment on whether or not this increase in media usage is a good or a bad thing without more information about what these young people are doing with the technology addressed in the article.
I agree with you that we have to spend time learning about technology that our students use. I think that this will help us find the way to use the technology that it is interesting for them for more educational purpose. Yes, the numbers looked scary when I first saw it but then I was thinking about how long is my 12 years daughter in front of the computer. She spends a lot of time on the computer but significant amount of that time is on school work. A lot of her projects required computer research. For her group projects her friends and she are working together on Scype. Her writing homework has to be typed. I agree with you that before we judge if the information in this report is disturbing or not we have to look not only how long our kids are exposed to media but, also what do they use it for.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Veselina that you raise a good question re: what is it that students are doing when online or using digital media. There is more detail later in the study that indicates the percentage of media use on the computer (p. 20, relatively low at 14%) and what they are doing on the computer (e.g., p.20, reading magazines and newspapers, also low).
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