A newly released study in Australia raises questions about whether digital literacy is actually undermining children’s ability and interest in reading.
A Four Corners investigation has found there are growing fears among education experts that screen time is contributing to a generation of skim readers with poor literacy, who may struggle to gain employment later in life as low-skilled jobs disappear.
By the age of 12 or 13, up to 30 per cent of Australian children’s waking hours are spent in front of a screen, according to the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children.
Robyn Ewing, a Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Sydney, said this was having a tangible impact on vocabulary and literacy.
“Children who have been sat in front of a screen from a very early age start school with thousands and thousands of words less, vocabulary-wise, than those who have been meaningfully communicated with,” Professor Ewing said.
Four Corners gained exclusive access to the initial results of a national survey of 1,000 teachers and principals conducted by the Gonski Institute.
The survey found excessive screen time had a profound impact on Australian school students over the past five years, making them more distracted and tired, and less ready to learn.
The Growing Up Digital Australia study has been described by its authors as a “call to action” on the excessive screen use “pervasively penetrating the classroom”.
The study lead, Professor Pasi Sahlberg, said while teachers reported there were benefits to technology in the classroom, most also believed that technology was a huge distracting force in young people.
Is
digital literacyTwitteracy undercutting literacy?Is grass green?
Is sky blue?
Is Twitter twitiotic?
The really sad part is that the twitiotic ones are the adults.
No need to add letters. It’s in the name. Twits.
Its no accident that Trump is the king of Twitter.
The platform is tailor made/designed for attention seekers like Trump.
Anyone who knows anything about child and adolescent psychology understands that the worst thing you can do is give an attention seeker the attention they seek.
The people who respond to Trump on Twitter are simply feeding the beast.
Twitter’s business model is founded on this dynamic.
The Twitter King
The Twitter King
Like Seuss’s Thing
Will always act
To eyes attract
So keep them out
Without a doubt
Cuz once they’re in
They’ll surely win
Shhhhhh don’t criticize paying privatizers for more and more technology to undermine public educators – the billionaire hedge-funders may hear you…..
not only undermine real life human educators, but create and control the entire student curricula
I would caution jumping to conclusions. I recall 30 years ago my son’s friends who were not readers becoming avid readers of hip hop BBs and then later social media. It was a gateway to reading. My son later went on to more sophisticated reading. I suspect there are class differences because poor kids had few rewards for reading before digital. I think the challenge is how to use both digital media and traditional sources to encourage and broaden reading. Same goes for video games that should be used to expand reading skills.
Don’t jump to conclusions is right. If I had a nickel for every time someone has told me that digital literacy or technology is the panacea of the future, I would be a wealthy man. “IPads are 21st century civil rights,” said one. How much data-driven drivel has been forced on my students and me? Who knows? Don’t jump to conclusions indeed.
Perhaps there are some class differences, but it was not long ago that poor kids had no access to computer technology. The importance is in how it is used. I think the article tried to make that point. More important in building a reading culture is finding what they want to read whether it be graphic novels, song lyrics, or poetry.
Don’t reduce this to a criticism of Twitter. I haven’t read the study, so I am speaking only for myself here, but I suspect that the study is much more than a condemnation of social media. I remember the struggle to get kids to actually digest what they were reading rather than doing a quick skim before downloading an article for a cut and past exercise later. We actually used to limit the number of computer resources students were allowed to use in researching a topic. The majority of their research had to come from hard copy sources and face to face interactions. Taking notes was more than a time consuming waste of time. Nobody wanted or could reproduce a source beyond properly credited quotes,etc. The student was forced to learn to paraphrase material, which actually aided in their internalizing of facts and ideas. We have become so obsessed by the speed of transmission of material that no one actually experiences more than a kaleidoscope of images or ideas.
This study along with some others indicates that the time students spend on devices should be limited as students become more passive and less inquisitive. Other studies have shown that an increased number of adolescents are more depressed due to too much time spent on-line. In addition, a recent study has revealed abnormal changes in brain development in preschoolers that spent more than an hour per day on-line. The message is a clear one. While computers are useful tools, too much time spent on-line is harmful to developing brains. Now we just have to get Silicon Valley and Wall St. to get the message.
Here’s link to the study on the brains of preschoolers. All those Pay for Success preschool plans are potentially causing more damage to the brains of poor preschoolers than we think. https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/04/health/screen-time-lower-brain-development-preschoolers-wellness/index.html?fbclid=IwAR37DRq5tL7DVJLmP5aVF7ketTWco-vnVHMsExbrCpDO4y54AITPdVaXyJg
We’re up against mega-powerful tech billionaires who want to destroy public education and replace it with the web. If the techlash is strong enough to completely destroy edutech and replace it with books and union teachers, good. Screen time and data collection are harmful to children, harmful to public education, and harmful to democratic society.
I read the description of the study. It is part of a multi-national program and it is not asking tech companies anything. The people who are supplying information are teachers, parents/careivers/grandparents, and students.
This approach is unlike so many studies in the US, including those from the National Center for Education Statistics, that are framed as if the prime purpose is to function as marketing research for the tech industry. See this for example. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017098.pdf