Our youngest, Tait, can often be heard telling his brother to pause one thing or another. It could be his favorite television show (changes on an hourly basis sometimes) or a Nintendo DS game or a podcast about space. He gets extremely frustrated if he's watching a television that can't be paused. What kind of effect does this have on his development? I know he's not the only one out there that expects that anything with a screen can be paused.
What are his expectations?
TV can be paused and rewound (sometimes up to 7 times to see a certain animal on Bindi's show).
Movies can be watched on his iPod Nano or his dad's computer. Pause? Check. Rewind? Check.
Video games? Pausing, saving, and sometimes even a replay or two.
This sort of time-shifting of entertainment is an amazing thing for us "older folk," but it's an expectation for our current generation. What sorts of consumer behavior will this generation have once they get some spending money? It's a very powerful thing to be able to temporarily "pause" life. The entire process makes you feel completely in control.
Now for a bigger question, how can "the pause effect" help Tait's learning?
Pausing is not something the typical school is really set up to do...
