I miss my daily newspaper, and cannot understand the assertion that the computer easily takes its place. Even Samuel is used to my daily routine of reading my morning paper with my coffee. As a bitty baby, I'd let him cuddle up with me while I read the paper and eased into the day. Now he enjoys looking at the comics and the car section while I peruse the weightier stories.
Except there is no newspaper at the moment. The Times messed up our subscription so it will be a few days before we get it again. And I'm afraid that news organization is on a steep decline; it recently released about 40 percent of its staff and stopped publishing any papers on the weekend.
This is more than a minor annoyance because newspapers all over are having a tough time holding their own against electronic media. From a technological perspective, I can understand the problem. A news producer can sit anywhere and send her story via internet to the far reaches of the world for little more than the cost of having a computer and an internet connection. A newspaper requires actual ink being placed on actual paper and someone to deliver the final product to your house.
But the internet changes how we read and learn. Glancing over a newspaper page, a compelling photograph or an intriguing lead paragraph may draw me into a topic totally new to me, one I might not have realized could hold my attention. As I follow that story onto another page, other items draw me in and inform me on a broad array of topics.
We have already reared a generation of kids who don't know the pleasure of sitting on a rainy afternoon paging through the encyclopedia. How many times as a child, might I have been looking up, say, the state of Florida for a school report and been drawn into an article about frogs, then studied the pictures of all the different flags, and so on through the "F" volume.
Its this accidental learning that I'm afraid we're losing. Am I adhering to a buggy whip, like those quaint old folks of 1910? Maybe. But anyone who's truly interested in how his child learns should be aware that the medium can shape the message and the very fundamentals of what and how we learn.
2 comments:
I was just passing through your blog, and I'm not sure how old you are, but I am, at 28, something of a mix between the pre-internet generation and the current one. I remember reading encyclopedias, but I had to explain to my 10 year old niece what an encyclopedia was not long ago. I do see your point about accidental learning, but, at least for me, I feel that the internet is actually a much more effective medium. I learn so much from the internet by following random links that it actually interferes with my ability to learn what I should be learning as a college student. Often times it is in the course of researching for a paper that I am drawn to random links, especially on Wikipedia, where I learn nearly everything but the thing I am looking for. Nice blog.
-Michael
The Internet certainly aids our homeschooling! Hard copy and electronic -- it's a mixed bag with advantages to each.
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