For many of us, there’s a tremendous amount of pressure to keep up with an increasing pace of change and to learn new skills more quickly and to absorb more information.

This is all very new. Our brains aren’t used to the pace of learning that the information age demands. Hyperlinks lead us deeper into exciting new worlds, but the vastness of it overwhelms us. What are we to do?

We seem to have natural defense mechanisms for dealing with learning overloads. We seek out mindless entertainment and distractions. Some of our favorite mindless distractions are TV, browsing FB, Tumblr, and pintrest. But, there’s another type of distraction that’s becoming increasingly popular: edu-distraction.

Great examples of edu-distraction include many of the most popular YouTube video series such as Drunk History, VSauce, and Thug Notes.

Education and university traditionalists argue that an education needs to involve boredom and long hours hunched over textbooks. Some say that the increasing blending of education and entertainment is a sign that we’re getting dumber and that our attention spans are getting shorter.

WatzThis? disagrees. We see a trend towards combining serious education and serious fun, and we welcome it. We feel pressure to always be learning and are excited by the possibilities, knowledge, and opportunities that await us — but we need rest. The Internet is enabling us to invent a brand new state of being mindlessly entertained into becoming educated.

An education through entertainment may look nothing like a classic liberal arts education. But, once our methods have improved, and our abilities to learn and be entertained simultaneously becomes sharper, it may just turn out that students of the future will learn much faster than ever before, without experiencing burnout.

What do you think?

Learning Through Distraction
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