Passivity
There is an experiment that was recently done. To subjects were put in an environment together. One was able to interact with the environment. The other was not. They received exactly the same visual stimulus, one as a result of his actions, the other due to outside influences. The one who interacted with his environment learned from the environment. The other did not.
The result: If you do not actively engage in an activity, you cannot learn anything from it.
This is why Sesame Street learning is not really beneficial. You're watching it, but you're not participating. You're not learning in a meaningful way.
This is one of many reasons I dislike passive activities. They're good in moderation, but today, passive entertainment seems to be the sum total of entertainment. TV, movies, spectator sports, CDs...
Even video games, for the most part (there are exceptions) are less about affecting the outcome of the game as they are about following the script. You are swept along in the story being told, and occasionally you have to successfully perform some task before you are allowed to see the next part of the story.
I call TV the potted fern-izer. While watching TV, you are behaving, functionally, like a potted fern. Like I said, some TV is good. Heroes, for example was a GREAT story. Well, season one was. I haven't seen anything from Season Two. It was well told and had a great plot with interesting and plausible characters. Lots of subplots, lots of complicated developments...
But I like to think of it this way: any given video rental store is likely to have somewhere in the area of 7,000 titles. At an average of 2 hours per title, if you were to watch even a quarter of those titles, that's 3,500 HOURS of your life you've spent sitting on your butt doing nothing. That's a lot of hours.
Sports, in particular, boggles my mind. Why watch someone else playing a game when you can go out and play the game yourself? Maybe you won't be as good, or have all the fame and money that comes with it, but is that the point? Why can't it be fun just to play the game?
That's why I prefer active entertainment. Board games. Roleplaying games. Sitting around a table talking. Going for a walk in the woods. Something where you're doing more than just sitting on your ass all day.
That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
/rant
The result: If you do not actively engage in an activity, you cannot learn anything from it.
This is why Sesame Street learning is not really beneficial. You're watching it, but you're not participating. You're not learning in a meaningful way.
This is one of many reasons I dislike passive activities. They're good in moderation, but today, passive entertainment seems to be the sum total of entertainment. TV, movies, spectator sports, CDs...
Even video games, for the most part (there are exceptions) are less about affecting the outcome of the game as they are about following the script. You are swept along in the story being told, and occasionally you have to successfully perform some task before you are allowed to see the next part of the story.
I call TV the potted fern-izer. While watching TV, you are behaving, functionally, like a potted fern. Like I said, some TV is good. Heroes, for example was a GREAT story. Well, season one was. I haven't seen anything from Season Two. It was well told and had a great plot with interesting and plausible characters. Lots of subplots, lots of complicated developments...
But I like to think of it this way: any given video rental store is likely to have somewhere in the area of 7,000 titles. At an average of 2 hours per title, if you were to watch even a quarter of those titles, that's 3,500 HOURS of your life you've spent sitting on your butt doing nothing. That's a lot of hours.
Sports, in particular, boggles my mind. Why watch someone else playing a game when you can go out and play the game yourself? Maybe you won't be as good, or have all the fame and money that comes with it, but is that the point? Why can't it be fun just to play the game?
That's why I prefer active entertainment. Board games. Roleplaying games. Sitting around a table talking. Going for a walk in the woods. Something where you're doing more than just sitting on your ass all day.
That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
/rant