Richard Nantel

The Web and all it has to offer is making patience obsolete. We’re now used to getting:

• Instant entertainment: Have 30 seconds of downtime? See what’s new on the YouTube home page or click your StumbleUpon toolbar button for a quick fix.
• Instant news: Have all the bad things in the world gone away? Better check Google News again to see.
• Instant financial updates: Why wait for your monthly statements when you can go online and spy on your money to see what it’s doing this very second?
• Instant weather reports: You checked the weather this morning. The temperature may have moved a degree since then, so you might want to check that forecast again.

My generation thinks this is all pretty amazing. Before the Web, we waited for the 6 p.m. news to find out what was going on. For entertainment, we’d plan our week around being home on a specific day and time to watch a favorite TV show. For a younger generation, stories of life 20 years ago must sound like something out of Little House on the Prairie. The pace of life back then must seem snail-like.

Dr. Maria Montessori, founder of the Montessori Method, coined the term the “absorbent mind” to describe the ability of an individual to absorb all aspects of one’s culture and environment without effort or fatigue. For this to occur, the learner must have unbridled access to the information and experiences he or she needs. In a world of instant gratification, access to information required to learn needs to be immediate. Younger learners especially will likely have little patience for limitations on what content they can access and when they can access it.

If you’re designing learning content, you should keep instant gratification in mind. Include links to resources that provide additional information. Make it possible for the learner to dig deeper into a subject. Don’t assume a learner will be content to wait a week for the next module to appear. Don’t design textbooks in a way where key information is withheld to be covered in class by the instructor. Always assume some learners will be ready to absorb more content immediately.