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08 Dec 08

Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind - ChronicleReview.com

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

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education reading online onscreen comprehension learning research

03 Mar 08

The Expert Mind -- Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well - Science & Technology at Scientific American.com:

  • He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called - helaine on 2007-01-26
28 Jun 07

Two Weeks to Academic Success - lifehack.org

  • Whether you’re currently in school, thinking of going back to school, or thinking of completing some industry-specific learning courses to help advance your career, it will be necessary for you to get your mindset back into “learning mode.” Gary North, PH.D. created a fifteen lesson (one per day) training plan to help you get mentally geared up. The following are links to the fifteen sessions. Even if you’re not completing all fifteen, I think there is some fantastic information in the sessions on their own:
11 Feb 07

Second Life Education: Second Life as a Virtual Learning Environment

  • Even up to present, much of distance learning has been made time convenient but impersonal. Avatar-based virtual world education is highly interactive, providing the same convenience of not having to travel while providing a richer, more effective and more enjoyable experience. For such, many students would most gladly make the scheduled time for the virtual classroom.



    Whether used for distance or classroom learning, the benefits of this rapidly expanding and adaptable virtual technology become manifest. The most common disadvantages that have existed in online education are now overcome. Educators are not slow to step into and embrase this present, simple to use, interpersonal and further developing media.
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