According to an article at Sciencedaily.com, children being exposed to new technology, such as video games, also have a new way to learn. According to the article "Patricia Greenfield (UCLA) looked at more than 50 studies of technology's effects on children. She found that media does limit some aspects of their mental skills, but also help improve them in other ways. " It also describes today's children as better multitaskers and better at visual reasoning skills. "However, the changes aren't all positive: while children can cope with complex information, it doesn't always aid learning. For example, one test found that children who watched a version of CNN Headline News with only the news announcer on screen remembered much more detail about the stories than those watching the standard version with mulitple on-screen graphics."
Technology, according to this study also appears to damage critical reasoning and attention span.
What this article states to me is that while video games can create different learning environments for children and technology can help children to learn, educators must continue to develop the best ways to help children and not just show movies or give games to play. Parents must also be aware that giving children the newest technology and letting them run loose may be inhibiting their children and their ability to learn in the future.
http://www.infopackets.com/news/technology/it/2009/20090130_technology_has_mixed_effects_on_child_development_research_suggest.htm
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One of the things that I found to be interesting was that surgeons were better at what is called "key hole" surgeries if they were proficient at playing video games. In fact, the article stated that surgeons that play video games and did well at them, learned these "key hole" surgeries better then if they were to actually be a part of an actually surgery! That is amazing in one hand, and then actually scary in the other. I think that some skills that are important to adult living, such as being a surgeon or even driving a vehicle, mandates an actual "hands on approach". Visual learning is important and I think that it is a medium that has it's advantages, but I also believe that some people learn while actually doing the task, and there is no substitution to be had, but to actually be involve and do it the old fashion way.
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