Sticky Stories

Martin Owen's criticism of Marc Prensky's digital native metaphor inspired me to read Prensky's original article, the second part of which outlines the evidence for his proposition that digital natives not only think differently, they have physically different brains. The paragraph that caught my attention was paraphrased from Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. (I was sensitised to this because I am currently reading The Tipping Point following Derek's recommendation).

Prensky paraphrases Gladwell (p. 101) to make the point that digital natives do not have an inferior attention span, they just choose strategically that to which they attend. It is Prensky's submission that digital games, one such choice, are "one good way to reach Digital Natives in their 'native language.'"

Those who have read further into The Tipping Point, however, will know that there is another way of grabbing a child's attention—storytelling. To quote Jerome Bruner in Gladwell (p. 118):

They [children] are not able to bring theories that organise things in terms of cause and effect and relationships, so they turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection. If they don't catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn't get remembered very well, and it doesn't seem to be accessible for further kinds of mulling over.

This research inspired the children's television programme Blue's Clues which bases its format around narrative, presenting a 30 minute story to children which is repeated Monday through Friday. I can vouch for its stickiness, having carried out my own research; my two preschoolers sit in front of the television transfixed weekdays between 8:30 and 9:00 a.m.