Interesting. Is it a huge deal if they miss their 30 minutes a day?
I probably allow my kids too much time with screens, but the flip side is that, if they don't have screen access for a few days, they don't really care. They'll read some books or play outside, no big deal. I get wary of setting hard limits on their screen time, because (knowing their personalities) they would then never accept if they didn't get that time for whatever reason, and constantly be trying to make sure they get their screen time, rather than the current state of affairs where missing their screens for a day or two doesn't phase them one bit.
The concept of "Screen Time" is so insane. You can do everything on a "screen" from writing the next great American novel to watching porn. So, is X hours of screen time too much? Depends on what you're doing with it.
I'm reluctant to invoke the 'kids nowadays' trope. However - While there's a lot someone can do with a computer, the days of picking up marketable skills due to having to fight through technology to get a game to work are long gone. Portable touch-screen devices are tuned for content consumption and not content creation. Large industries exists today with refined abilities to grab and hold the attention of young minds.
All of that taken together means the odds of 'screen time' being a productive endeavour are IMO much smaller than they once were. If the overwhelming odds are your kid is going to be sucked into a skinner box for the duration of their screen time it seems prudent to put limits on that which might limit the damage being done.
Of course none of this is a substitute for knowing your kid as an individual and tailoring conditions to what's best for them, versus any kind of blanket rule stuff.
My 5 year old niece learned to read playing video games on those touch screens everyone hates. She’s doing exactly the same kind of role play most young kids do with dolls or action figures, but learning the interface and getting text to speech and speech to text is dramatically more educational than playing with dolls.
My nephew was the same way, it’s not better or worse than how we grew up just different. What people forget is escapism is normal behavior. Games, TV, Radio, Music, even Books have all been blamed for the younger generation not being productive except fun is also useful. Watching hours of TV doesn’t seem like a great use of time, but the 3,001th hour leaning a musical instrument, woodworking, or whatever has serious diminishing returns. Kids don’t actually benefit that much from doubling down on what adults think is important, just look at all those Asian countries that don’t turn hours of cram school into massive economic advantages.
Who gives a crap about marketable skills? My 5 year old understands what derivatives are because he scrolls through math content on YouTube. There’s a lot to learn out there and more accessible than ever. Obviously the parent has to be involved as they do with everything. The screen is not a babysitter.
Yes, but I'm saying that it's parents job to make sure the "screen time" is healthy just like it's the parents job to make sure the mealtime is healthy. There are these debates about "how much screen time is OK for kids" but nobody ever talks about "how many ounces of food is OK for a kid?" because there's a big difference between an ounce of broccoli and an ounce of doughnuts.
(not the narrator, but I was active when the narrator was creating these ...)
The rule for these audio clips was to do a search for any blog post on the internet which started with "No One Will Ever Read This, But ..." and where the blog had been abandoned for at least a year. If you listen to the audio and do some searching, sometimes you can find the post, if it's still up.
This is a fair criticism. There is a bit of a barrier to entry here. I think pengaru is unnecessarily harsh in his response.
The server has a limited number of admins (really only a single main administrator with a handful of volunteer helpers), and the process of adding an account is mostly manual at the moment, I believe (with some helper scripts, of course). There are efforts underway to improve this.
In the end, though, this is just one person's fun little side project. We're along for the ride, and I would like the admin to keep enjoying his project so I can share in that joy. If they don't have the time to address signup process improvements, I figure that's OK ... we're not in this for money or fame or anything, right? It's just ... fun (IMO).
Creating a user is luckily very automated, but we have had to increase the amount of information we ask to hopefully screen out bad actors who just want a shell account and then run bitcoin miners (which has happened several times).
It's a bit like a BBS, yes, and that's what drew me to the concept initially (I'm an early member of tilde.town; still reasonably active).
We do have an internal bulletin board, and an internal IRC (like the chat rooms of multi-line BBSes of the late 80s/early 90s). There are a ton of little projects by members, and the projects are pretty varied.
Sadly, the narrator of this set of audio readings has moved on from the project, to my knowledge.
That may be for the best, though. Some of the charm (in my own opinion) is that this little project was a gem to discover, a bit ephemeral, and special in its scarcity.
The statement "being told exactly what to learn" is so counter to my own university experience (admittedly almost 20 years ago now).
It seems to me that going to university to be told what to learn is counter to the actual goal of going to university, namely to have first-class access to resources (people resources, knowledge resources, laboratory resources) to pursue your own learning goals.
I've been tempted to go back to university in order to learn more about organic chemistry and chemical engineering, for instance. There's certainly a lot of information online, but a world-class chemistry lab with access to chemicals would be a great resource to have available to me, along with readily available mentors to help guide me when I have questions.
As for homework and essays, that sounds more like high school than university, from what I remember. It's always possible things have changed in the last 15 years, though.
The mechanical how people read at higher speeds might be an interesting topic.
What I often do when I am "reading" for knowledge can probably be simplified down to "I read fairly quickly", but there's no nuance in that statement to talk about what I'm doing when I'm reading and how I move so quickly.
I am often doing some combination of:
- scanning (moving quickly across sight-words, finding relevant points of entry into the subject matter)
- absorbing (slower process of gathering words surrounding the entry point to gain better local context)
- backtracking (taking local context and fixing it into a broader context)
- full-on processing (often this looks like deep reading, but it is more like deep thinking; I take in fewer words from the page, but connect them to concepts I already understand)
This is not a linear process, at least for myself.
This is different from when I read for pleasure. My pleasure reading can only really be described as "scanning" I think. Authors who craft their paragraphs so carefully would probably be horrified by how I enjoy their works of art, but I appreciate their works in my own way, and I find that this reading for pleasure is probably the fastest reading I do. I could easily consume a book of fiction in a day or two, and I always enjoy re-reading.
Another reading skills facet: my reading out loud is pretty clumsy (or it at least feels that way). I read often to my children, and it feels pretty slow and clunky. I enjoy doing it, but it's not the same type of "reading". Different skill, different goals. It's something I'm working on.
Re. the part about reading for pleasure: I do this too and used to think it was a bad habit. But, actually, after years of re-reading particular favourites multiple times, I uncover something knew that clicks more of the story into place. It’s a delightful experience that increases the re-readability of your favourite works :)
