Ruben Van Havermaet on 2008-10-11
maybe this also depends on how you measure student achievement. changing the tools with which you conceptualize the world is bound to change the meaning of what we regard as achievements.
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Don't agree with a lot of points here, like the title itself, but some interesting observations. Author asserts that "the shape and tempo of online texts differ so much from academic texts that e-learning initiatives in college classrooms can't bridge them". To the problem of students being unable to process long, in-depth 'traditional' texts, author offers the following solution: "let's restrain the digitizing of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology in young people's lives, let's frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces." I doubt it's even possible to create slow-reading 'islands' when the whole of students' lives takes place in a fast-reading environment, as the author confirms. Would it not be more effective/doable to adapt academic materials and the way we handle them, so that they can be better processed in 'fast-reading' manner?
enthusiasm
Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming
By MARK BAUERLEIN
When Jakob Nielsen, a Web researcher, tested 232 people for how they read pages on screens, a curious disposition emerged. Dubbed by The New York Times "the guru of Web page 'usability,'" Nielsen has gauged user habits and screen experiences for years, charting people's online navigations and aims, using eye-tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests. In this study, he found that people took in hundreds of pages "in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school." It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. "F for fast," Nielsen wrote in a column. "That's how users read your precious content."
The F-pattern isn't the only odd feature of online reading that Nielsen has uncovered in studies conducted through the consulting business Nielsen Norman Group (Donald A. Norman is a cognitive scientist who came from Apple; Nielsen was at Sun Microsystems). A decade ago, he issued an "alert" entitled "How Users Read on the Web." It opened bluntly: "They don't."
In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, "'Reading' is not even the right word." The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the "nut" and nothing else. A 2003 Nielsen warning asserted that a PDF file strikes users as a "content blob," and they won't read it unless they print it out. A "booklike" page on screen, it seems, turns them off and sends them away. An
Slow reading counterbalances web skimming.
The author is trying to point out that reading the quick paced information on the internet is pushing away our (youth's) ability to perform "slow reading". Some interesting points but i don't agree with his automatic assumption (for which no arguments are provided) that reading dense texts is superior to reading newer forms of representing information (hypertext).
Ruben Van Havermaet on 2008-10-11
maybe this also depends on how you measure student achievement. changing the tools with which you conceptualize the world is bound to change the meaning of what we regard as achievements.
Ruben Van Havermaet on 2008-10-11
Although i would also regret the decline of slow reading, i think this picture is not complete without making a distinction here between the different tools/media that generate "texts".
Maybe these new tools (computers, internet, ...) are not the best media for the dense texts generated by the "older" media. There are ways of representing information that more easily allow for "fast-scanning" (mind-mapping sofware like compendium and freemind), in fact pushing the hypertext idea to the extreme.
Because the internet today is imho still not using the original hypertext idea to its full potential (see Engelbart's "Augmenting Human Intellect). Basically, it's just old media (webPAGEs) linked together. See Lev Manovich for an interesting discussion on what we today call "new media" (The Language of New Media).
Article discusses how students read on the Web and how to combat the skimming.
This is a great read with valid points often passed over in ed tech circles.
YOUTH & TECHNOLOGY
Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind
Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming
A strongly worded caution against the use of elearning in the liberal arts, based on research that examines the technical practice of reading on screen--is this a subset of reading/literacy, or a form of non-reading?
Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming
Hard not to say ho hum once again. Over-generalizing, and assigning to e-reading the typical fare of too much skimming, etc. Agreed: Close reading of print is a good thing and absolutely necessary in lib ed. Now, can we move on? \\
So let's restrain t
Youth and Technology
That's the drift of screen reading. Yes, it's a kind of literacy, but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention — in a word, slow reading. Fast
On line literacy
Reading on the Internet: do we do it? Prof. Bauerlein says no, but I did. One interesting idea: fast eyes. Are we training our eyes to do a certain type of looking/ reading? This may be the case--but if we can train our eyes for fast looking, surely we can train them for slower more contemplative reading. Certainly no case is made here one way or the other, and I go away unconvinced.
Public Stiky Notes
Maybe these new tools (computers, internet, ...) are not the best media for the dense texts generated by the "older" media. There are ways of representing information that more easily allow for "fast-scanning" (mind-mapping sofware like compendium and freemind), in fact pushing the hypertext idea to the extreme.
Because the internet today is imho still not using the original hypertext idea to its full potential (see Engelbart's "Augmenting Human Intellect). Basically, it's just old media (webPAGEs) linked together. See Lev Manovich for an interesting discussion on what we today call "new media" (The Language of New Media).
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