Grazing; a new way of learning

Graze craze

Can you watch TV without hopping at least once or whenever the ads appear? Are you an inveterate channel hopper? Do you now shuffle through a CD rather than listen all the way through? If you have an iPod, do you use shuffle, and even shuffle forward in shuffle? Do you skim through the newspaper in a way you never used to? Do you start more books than you finish? Find yourself preferring lots of little dishes rather than one huge main course? If the answer is yes to even some of these questions, you’re a grazer.

The Association of Online Publishers recently described a group called the ‘online elite’, high earners and spenders who couldn’t live without the internet. Over 2.2m UK twelve to seventeen year olds go online in search of entertainment, according to a study by internet research specialists, Nielsen/NetRatings. This is more than 75 per cent of all online UK 12 to 17 year olds and has increased by more than 20 per cent in a year. The next generation are already extreme browsers with online music, online games, P2P downloads, messenger, websites, texting and mobiles. Howard Rheingold has documented this softening of time, association and assembly, through mobile technology, in his book Smart Mobs.

We have all become grazers. Digital abundance gives us more than we can cope with, so we browse and graze through information. Google, having defined ‘browsing’, may have inadvertently created a way of life. Dipping in and out of email, mobile calls, web services and voicemail have become the norm for millions of workers. Mobile devices, the internet at work, and more powerfully, at home, all open up grazing opportunities.

If you are one of those people who don’t have a TV, computer, mobile or iPod and only have a fixed line telephone, you’re not likely to graze much. Then again, you’re so rare that you’re likely to be on the endangered species list. If, like me, you have a home computer, work computer, laptop, mobile, iPod, multichannel television and use P2P, email, bookmarked news sites and messenger, you’re an extreme grazer.

Grazing and informal learning

So how has this affected learning? Informal learning is clearly being recognised, not as everything beyond formal learning, but as a way of learning in itself. One facet of informal learning is grazing. We graze for knowledge, graze on the internet, graze colleagues for news and information, graze TV and graze literature. The week-long course, detailed conversations around one topic and intense study of a single book, have all given way to looser activities. If we don’t like it, we’re out.

This has been obvious in e-learning for some time. Critics lambast the medium for its supposed ’drop-out’ rates, forgetting that grazing is at the heart the medium. If you could graze classroom courses, lots would be walking out. They don’t because it’s rude. In fact they simply disengage cognitively and start grazing in their own mind. Have you ever been to a conference where you don’t start grazing internally?

The grazing learner demands immediate access to relevant information whenever it is needed. They want the right stuff from any location at any time. There is really only one medium that provides this – the internet. We increasingly find ourselves turning to this medium, via a browser, to graze through knowledge. This behaviour can even become addictive.

Of course, there’s a downside to all this, that will no doubt already have been screaming out at you. Grazing can lead to a superficial approach to learning and knowledge. For all its attractions, it keeps the learner skimming at the surface and rarely allows the mind to descend into deep knowledge. Deep learning demands attention and sustained inquiry.

Or does it? There is also the view that the internet has changed the way we think about knowledge and learning. The mind is no longer the repository for knowledge (always a flawed view of the way the mind works). It is a skilled manager of knowledge and learning, increasingly knowing what to learn and memorise, as opposed to knowing where it is for electronic recall. Why learn what is always available online? Indeed, if you do have to look it up repeatedly, you’re then likely to reinforce this knowledge into long-term memory.

Grazing may turn out to be a very natural form of behaviour, more fitting to the demands of modern life with its many unexpected demands. It may promote flexibility of thought and less focus on rote learning and unnecessary commitment to memory. I graze, therefore I learn. (see also Epic’s White Paper on Informal learning)

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