Time Flies
Now, more than ever before, people have such short attention spans that they no longer want to sit down a read an article when they can spend a fraction of the time that would take and scroll through their twitter feed. Instead of learning an in depth view of one aspect of the world around us, people are using twitter and other quick news sites to get a small snippet of many things in society today. Who’s to say which way is better, but it’s incredibly important to realize what the preferred news form is in today’s culture.
Multimodal learning
One reason why I believe many people don’t enjoy sitting down and reading an article is because it’s boring. Today’s society has so much stimulation all the time, whether it’s cellphones, television or just constant interaction with friends, that we need to find a way to keep our interest peaked while learning. This is where multimodal education can be implemented. Multimodal texts are:
“works that use more than just words and letters to communicate a thought–they may include audio, video, photographs, drawings–basically, any visual element used to supplement the text in some purposeful way.”
Because they are more than just words on a page, it’s natural that they are engaging and keep the reader’s attention in a different way than articles and books do. Additionally, because they are so broad, while someone may not enjoy one form of multimodal text like a podcast, they may very well enjoy a collage instead. It’s no wonder that blogs have taken off as a popular form of writing, they’re multimodal too.
Think about what a typical day is for you and I’m sure that it is full of multimodal activities. Whether it’s reading your favorite blog, watching an educational youtube video (TED Talk, Khan Academy) or even just watching the daily news, these are all different forms of multimodal text that has captured your attention. As society continues to have shorter and shorter attention spans, multimodal education and learning is going to become more an more important as well as common.
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