Instruction in a Information Snacking Culture?

There's a trend that seems to be ongoing, but I'm noticing it even more recently. People seem to be spending less time going through information in depth and less willing to spend time on information. We seem to be snacking on information, not consuming it in big chunks.

And it's been something I've been really wondering about on all kinds of levels. I've mentioned before Stop Reading - Skim Dive Skim and that seems to be how people consume blog posts much more these days. I've also noticed a trend towards more twitter mentions of blog posts, but less deep commenting behavior much less thoughtful blog responses.

Inside corporations, there certainly seems to be a continual theme of spending less time on learning activities. In some cases, there's almost an anger about providing additional information to employees.

Thus, for February the question is:

Instruction in an Information Snacking Culture?

There are a lot of aspects to this question:

• Has there really been a shift? Are people changing their information consumption? Are they really snacking more?
• Do we need to think about instruction differently? Is it a matter of better design so that people are engaged beyond a snack?
• Is this a problem? I feel like it's harder to get a deep conversation going, especially in a twitter world. But maybe that's me. How can we effectively work and learn in an information snacking world?

I'm hoping this will actually be a case where we will get beyond snacks to a good exchange because this is something that I'm really wondering about and would like to discuss.

How to Respond:

Option 1 - Simply put your thoughts in a comment below. This may be hard given the complexity of the topic.

Option 2 -

Step 1 - Post in your blog (please link to this post).
Step 2 - Put a comment in this blog with an HTML ready link that I can simply copy and paste (an HTML anchor tag). I will only copy and past, thus, I would also recommend you include your NAME immediately before your link. So, it should look like:

Tony Karrer - e-Learning 2.0

or you could also include your blog name with something like:

Tony Karrer - e-Learning 2.0 : eLearningTechnology

Posts so far (and read comments as well):

• The Big Question - Snacking Culture
• Holly MacDonald: My First Foray Into the Big Question
• My take on the big question
• Terry Eberhart - Digin4ed: “On Instruction in an Information Snacking Culture”
• Janet - Just enough? Or not enough?
• RK Prasad - Information Snacking Culture
• Suzanne posted at her blog
• Claudia Escribano - Learning a Little at a Time