The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the potential impact of digital reading on children's attention spans and expert reading skills.
Maryanne Wolf emphasizes the dual nature of digital reading for children: while it captivates their attention, it may inadvertently hinder the development of deep, reflective reading skills. This tension between engagement and cognitive growth raises important questions about how technology shapes our reading habits and mental processes.
In practice
In a discussion on children's learning habits, this quote can illustrate the potential risks of technology in education.
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
In reading, we are both scientists and poets.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.
There's no question that our children's attention and memory is changing when they are reading too long, too much, too early on digital screens.
I've always wanted to write a book relating my experiences growing up as a deaf child in Chicago. Contrary to what people might think, it wasn't all about hearing aids and speech classes or frustrations.
Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.
There is a huge gap between what students want for their future and what their schools are offering.
When you're writing for the Internet, you have the analytics, and you know that people are bailing every second. But various people kept reminding me that once people have bought a book, they're in. You don't have to be selling them on every page.
Each close you use should be an educational process by which you are able to raise the value in the prospect's mind.
Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.
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