Asked my 4-year-old what to draw. “A spider thief!” she said. “And then the police spider comes in his spider police car!” “But what has the spider thief stolen?” I asked. She got a worried look on her face. “ALL the presents.”
I learned that the factors harming our attention are not all immediately obvious. I had been focused on tech at first, but in fact the causes range very widely – from the food we eat to the air we breathe, from the hours we work to the hours we no longer sleep. They include many things we have come to take for granted – from how we deprive our children of play, to how our schools strip learning of meaning by basing everything on tests.
[...] when a mother read from paper, she often held the book between herself and the child, with the child very close to her, either tucked under her arm to facilitate visual sharing or in a very relaxed posture with audio sharing, but little sight of the book.
When children read from a screen, they tended to hold the tablet in a ‘head-down’ posture typical of solo uses [...] leading [the mothers] to curl round behind the child in order to ‘shoulder-surf’ the screen, rather than adopting the ‘curled-up’ position common when reading the paper book.
As motion and zooming may direct children’s attention to a detail of the illustration in a similar way as an adult pointing at the detail and providing comments or explanations, multimedia may be just as beneficial in supporting story and language comprehension as interaction with an adult explaining the meanings of the story and sophisticated words in the narration.
[...] contemporary digital cultures provide rich opportunities for the promotion of play that is rooted in children’s everyday experiences. This is not [...] an inferior form of play; rather, it sits alongside more traditional play activities and is important for creative development
We believe that designers could think more about how [e-books] can be designed for sharing [...] Book Trust figures report a drop from 86 per cent of parents reading with their five-year-olds to just 38 per cent with 11-year-olds. There is a possibility that the clever redesign of e-books and tablets might just slow that trend.
For Kucirkova, improving digital books is a matter of “social justice”. “Unfortunately, many digital books are of really low quality,” she said. “We mustn’t forget that there are many families where reading is not an activity that adults enjoy and they might not enjoy it with their children. So in those families, having a book that reads to the child is a huge asset. At the very least, we need to equalize the quality of the two formats.”
“I’m not saying that the digital book can ever replace the loving adult. I’m just saying that it can be a good substitute if there is nothing else,” she added.
One day, I asked Otis what he thought of Hobbes. “What do you believe? Is he real or is he stuffed?” In a tone that connoted my knucklehead status, my son answered, “He’s a real tiger, but for some reason grown-ups think he’s a stuffed animal. I guess they just don’t know any better.”
His explanation silenced me. I realized I’d made a grave mistake. I was one of the (stupid) grown-ups. [...] Whether Hobbes was live or stuffed was beside the point. To believe in Hobbes is to believe in the power of imagination.
Reading e-books promotes traditional literacy skills and is particularly supportive in the area of vocabulary development, and young children’s interaction with enhanced digital books also advances their facility to communicate and comprehend across modes and platforms, sometimes called trans-literacy development.