Disney's latest venture is a creative move to begin making money through digital media and in an area --children's book publishing-- where Disney would like to see sales greatly improve. Despite my personal feelings for Disney as a whole, I have to applaud them for targeting the e-book format for children and for boldly offering it on a subscription-based service and thus leaving out the middle man.
However, I must admit my reservation is yet another old fashioned one: teaching children to read through a computer is wrong! And weird! And it's not how I learned! I can't help but think that a child should be taught to read by a parent or teacher and that the child must do a fair amount of the work in order to learn this most valuable skill. Will having a disembodied voice read The Little Mermaid from a digital page on a computer screen really be that much better or cooler than having it read from a real book by mom?
It might not be a hovercar, but the joy of learning to read via Disney Digital Books sure feels like the future.
This was just commented on my blog.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I'd like my kid to learn to read from it (psh, I'm teaching them Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid) but it could be useful if the parent is busy for a moment. A lot of parents now are using youtube to entertain their kids.
In the future I'll probably have to resort to that so kids can see the awesome that is 90's Nickelodeon.
I agree that a parent or teacher should be involved. Also, while I think Disney is often great in terms of entertainment value, there are millions of much better children's books than theirs.
ReplyDeleteRight now I feel torn between the sneaking suspicion that this Disney application is completely unnecessary and the idea that perhaps this might be incredibly helpful to some parents and I'm just too stuck in my ways to get it.
ReplyDeleteWhat's interesting is the idea of books = academics = teachers has become normalized in our society as the "proper" way to learn. What if this is more effective? Would parents be saving money by reading with their kids here than sending them to a charter school and instead subscribing to Disney's service?
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