Have you heard that you can send more than 10K characters very soon on Twitter? OMG! But why?
My previous blog on ‘sexual harassment’ was around 600 words (around 2500 characters). Many of my blog readers thought it was long. The one prior to that was around 900 words, prompting me to rethink subsequent posts to a 600 words limit. Most newspaper columns are restricted to around 800 words. Now this 10k-Twitter – r u kidding?
Those with instant gratification mindset will not have any energy left to focus on any content once it exceeds 500 characters. I found out about it in the hard way. Most of my friends were using smartphones to reply to my emails and I was accused of writing emails that are too long. They were couple of paragraphs of couple of sentences. When I eventually migrated to smartphone, I realized how tiresome it was to read long emails more than a paragraph on those small screens. Now this 10k-Twitter – r u kidding?
In our fervor to offload all that we have to say in one go, we have stopped noticing the 21st century communications have a different philosophy. The smartphone sizes, the virtual screens to type, the neurotic suggestions of words of irrelevant meanings the one you intended, and many other things make the exchanges not only long, perhaps longer than the wall of china, but also make both parties end the conversation exhausted. Now this 10k-Twitter – r u kidding?
The viral effect of such long conversations with short bytes to bite are seen increasingly on support chats, call center calls and, nowadays, even around the dinner table; say anything that lasts more than 10 seconds, you might have lost all attention to what you are saying. Now this 10k-Twitter – r u kidding?
Most often than not, the research papers gather dust, research studies go unnoticed, but abstract of most of the research papers, however irrelevant are read invariably! Go figure!
Most of the learning in 21st century is centered on multi-media learning which also has contributed to our declining capabilities to take in the meaning of an article that is more than 800 words. We have developed or increasingly developing other capabilities to take in more from pictures and sounds and DIY activities – much more than what 800 words can deliver.
The learning pedagogies are increasing in the number of flavors they come in to address the 21st century attention spans for learning – from project based learning to problem based learning to 40 plus flavors that I was able to glean from the TALE 2014 conference in New Zealand. QTIME learning was one of them and if someone had noticed the fundamentals of QTIME learning pedagogy, one would find that the learning dimensions are limited to four. With four learning quadrants from each dimension, many may feel overwhelmed by a mere16 attributes of 21st century learning – even when they are represented by one word. You will not find long winding mission and vision statements that plague many company websites – all lost if they are missing pictures and sounds!
Have I provided you enough evidence to ponder on the futility of this 10k-Twitter attempt?