In The Writer's Journey (3 ed, p 232), Christopher Vogler notes in terms of screenwriting that today's youth have a shorter attention span than ever but at the same time are more sophisticated than ever in terms of the ideas they can assimilate in short fragments. While he is instructing Hollywood screenwriters on modern approaches to writing and editing films, this description of today's youth perhaps rings true for what we see in our classrooms – certainly the short attention spans. Although it seems somewhat paradoxical to speak of this generation as having more sophistication than ever but shorter attention spans than ever, if it is true, is there some way we can harness this in the classroom ie using more intricately spliced ways of presenting material to appeal to the way today's youth processes information? Has anyone experimented with applying these ideas to law teaching?
I wonder if there has been any research into what kinds of information might be susceptible to this kind of assimilation in short fragments. Screenwriting conveys very limited types of information, and most of it is highly cliched and predictable once you know the tropes–that's what the Scream movies and other films that play with horror conventions are about. I don't know if the sort of learning that takes place in a classroom–certainly a law school classroom–works the same.
I would be interested if anyone has done any research on that question – or indeed how you would go about testing that.
In some ways, the ability to assimilate or make sense of the puzzles of disjointed narratives may have some similarities with what we are asking students to do in law school eg identify issues and puzzle together solutions, but there are certainly glaring dissimilarities too. I'd be interested to know if anyone has done any research on these kinds of questions.
There are studies, and my understanding (and as the title of books like "The Myth of Multitasking" suggest) is that they generally show that younger generations multitask more, but are not any better at it than prior generations, and thus suffer the same cognitive deficits from cramming more into less time as everyone else, but experience them more often. (See e.g., http://my.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/40095/anempiricalexaminationoftheeducationalimpactoftextmessage-inducedtaskswitchingintheclassroom-educati.pdf; http://www.csudh.edu/psych/Multitasking_Across_Generations_Carrier_Rosen_Cheever_Benitez_Chang_2009.pdf).