In response to today’s article in the CHE, “Google Wave, Embraced by Many on Campuses, to Get Wiped Out,” I think it’s a shame when companies introduce a product, educators adopt it, and then it gets discontinued. This lack of consistency/reliability is difficult to overcome, especially when convincing people to try new technologies in their classrooms.
Today, Jeff Bezos announced e-books are outselling hardcovers at Amazon. What does the success of e-books mean for reading? I’ve been talking to people who read their Kindles or iPads on train rides or plane flights — and this is by no means a scientific sample — and most express surprise at how much they enjoy reading on the devices. This surprise is usually accompanied by a demonstration, showing me what they’re reading, how easy it is to turn the pages. Most cite the convenience of carrying multiple books or magazines in a lightweight device as a major benefit. For most of the families I’ve spoken with, the kids still seem to prefer books which, surprises their parents.
As Sellen and Harper report in The Myth of the Paperless Office, printed books offer affordances that digital devices do not. Mainly, with paper, readers can see where they’re at when they’re reading, in particular where they’ve been and how far they have to go until the end. They can hold their place on a page or within a book, spread out texts on a desk, and better find a spot in a text to which they’d like to return.
That said, e-readers offer their own affordances. Readers can, if they wish, carry their entire library with them (assuming the books are available digitally). They can search for a specific term, rather than thumb through an entire book. Plus, they can download a book instantaneously rather than waiting for it to arrive, or traveling somewhere to purchase/borrow it. Mostly, these arguments point to ease of access and convenience of locating specific materials, but what do these benefits have to do with reading? Do people read more because they can more easily access texts? I think the answer may be ‘yes,’ but the depth of their reading and length of attentional focus is another matter.
I wonder what we lose and gain as we transition toward a more digital life.
I’ve been traveling to Oxford for the past two years and in that time, I’ve gotten familiar with the City Centre area, in particular, the city’s homeless. For the most part, the same people show up at the same posts every day, with a few newcomers, but rain or shine, they’re there, selling the Big Issue late into the night.
Yesterday, walking home, I came upon a group of students in front of Debenham’s taking pictures as one student held out what appeared to be 50p and a homeless man reached for it. After a few students took the picture, the one holding out the money kept it rather than giving it to the homeless man. I was horrified. As I walked past them, I thought, this isn’t Disneyland, you’re photographing people who are suffering. As I made my way down Cornmarket Street, I overheard someone standing in another large group of students (I couldn’t place their age…somewhere between 16 and 18) say, “great! next we need to take a picture of a homeless person!” People in the group cheered. I noticed the girl talking was holding a sheet of paper, so I walked into the center of the group, snatched the piece of paper and demanded to know what group they were with. EF, the International Language School, which incidentally has pulled similarly unacceptable stunts in my hometown. Apparently, the students were on a Scavenger Hunt and one of the items to collect was a photograph of a homeless person.
Disgraceful.
I told the students that the people they’re photographing are suffering already and asked them how they felt about what they were about to do. Most looked at me blankly. One shrugged and muttered, it’s on the sheet. So, I asked, do any of you feel that this is wrong? Only two in a group of about 11 hung their heads. A few said, it’s part of the game. Of course I find the exercise offensive and wish on whoever wrote it that they could experience being down and out so that they’ll learn a little compassion. More importantly, though, it really bothers me that these students were ‘doing what they’re told’ without critically evaluating (1) the directive, and (2) its consequences.
A consistent theme in literacy research is an idea that critical engagement is an essential component of citizenry. Part of understanding an idea or concept is questioning it, determining how it fits with prior experience/knowledge, and forming an individual apprehension of what it means. Low literacy, then, is an inability to actively engage with a concept, either because of lack of access to information or low comprehension of the concept or its implications. In the case of The Scavenger Hunt, the students seemed to not critically engage with the assignment or compare it with what they know about human rights or respect for others.
So, while EF certainly failed their students in this assignment, I wonder why these teens haven’t learned this skill in school, from their parents, or just through life experience. I understand that peer pressure or group think were at play and there’s a lot of directions from which to approach this disgraceful act. I think it stands as a strong example of the consequences of a failure to critically engage.
Incidentally, when I pointed out the offensive nature of their Scavenger Hunt to the two EF leaders, they immediately tracked down as many students as they could to ask them not to complete that portion of the assignment. They hadn’t read the assignment before handing it out…
Imagine if, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he said, this phone is going to have applications that allow you to check e-mail, find nearby restaurants, update your Facebook, tweet, and use maps, but it’s going to be rubbish as a phone. It’s awkward to hold to your ear, it often drops calls, and most of the time, won’t get reception wherever you are. Would you have bought it? Remember, at that time, apps weren’t well known. Of course, those of you who have an iPhone can’t live without the apps now and don’t mind if it doesn’t really work well as a phone. You’re texting instead of calling anyway.
Now, we have a new mobile device, the iPad, which many describe as a reader. Sure, it has reading capacity, but the iPad isn’t a Kindle. The iPad has pinball. In fact, while it does offer business and communication apps, the iPad environment seems fraught with distraction.
What does pinball have to do with reading anyway? In my presentation last week at the Oxford Tablet Summit, I spoke about our cognitive approaches to reading. Understanding how we think is important when predicting interactions with technologies, because how our minds work doesn’t suddenly change when Apple introduces a new product.
From a cognitive perspective, the way we read remains relatively consistent, regardless of medium. As we read, our minds attempt to make sense of the content under study, comparing new information with prior knowledge, drawing connections, and forming an understanding. In an online environment, we encounter multiple media, which, depending upon their contextual relevance, may or may not support our sense-making process (see Richard Mayer’s Multimedia Learning for a thorough treatment of the topic). Regardless of medium, when content detracts from our sense-making process, our minds are prone to cognitive overload and distraction.
How much information can we handle? Cognitive load theory (Sweller, 1994) describes our minds like a glass of water. Once the glass is full, most of what is additionally poured into it will slosh over the sides. Have you ever tried to memorize a grocery list or driving directions only to realize you forgot a few of the items/steps? In 1956, Miller determined, using lists of numbers and words, that the human mind generally remembers only 7 items at a time. Test yourself. Here’s a list of words. Look at them quickly and then cover them with your hand, or scroll until they disappear.
table
electricity
aardvark
pencil
book
Oxford
stone
mirror
Now, cover up the words, or scroll up. How many words were in the list? Which ones do you remember? During the presentation, a majority of attendees remembered aardvark and Oxford, likely because they’re unusual terms. As listed though, the words do not have any significance, so they are difficult to remember. If you chunk the words–organize them into categories–they become easier to remember, allowing you to remember more than 7 words at a time. For example, table, pencil, book, and Oxford relate to each other and can therefore be chunked under a “study” category.
Stories help us make sense of information and thereby reduce our cognitive load. In the previous example, “study” gave part of the list cohesion and begins to tell a story. What word could create a story to help organize and give meaning to the following list?
table
sit
legs
seat
soft
arm
rest
This list is drawn from a study by Roediger & McDermott (1995), in which respondents generally assumed the word chair was part of the list. Since collectively the words relate to chair, this finding is not surprising. Chair is how participants made sense of the list. Thus, chair help the list tell a story.
Generally, on the Internet, stories are hard to find. We have a lot of information, but making meaningful connections is challenging. Story is a strength of newspapers. That classic who, what, when, where, why, how model that usually begins a newspaper piece is an excellent cognitive aid — it provides the information necessary for us to situate and make sense of the information. Perhaps that’s why readership remains strong even with competing content available. Our minds like stories.
So, what does story have to do with the iPad? News can contribute compelling content to the iPad reading experience. By content, I do not mean endlessly repeated AP feeds, but genuinely interesting content that provides a story to help us organize and understand key issues and daily happenings.
While the iPad and other technologies will certainly offer new options for delivering content, news writers should consider the ways in which their current content effectively conveys meaning. I mentioned story earlier. Using print newspapers as an example, next I’d like to explore the concept of cognitive containers. 
When we open a newspaper to read it and we’re holding it in front of our faces, or glancing down at it over breakfast, we’ve essentially shut out most other inputs. It’s basically us and the page. Our attentional focus is contained: it is directed toward the text in front of us, with minimal distraction. Of course, pictures and advertisements are on the page, along with headlines for other articles, all of which can potentially distract our focus, but for the most part, we are able to immerse ourselves in whatever we’re reading.
In contrast, when we read the same article online, we encounter links within the text. Usually, clicking on these links takes us away from the page we’re reading and introduces us to new content. Moving us from our initial page is a threat to our attentional focus because we often have difficulty remembering where we started, especially if we engage in a bit of link chasing (e.g., moving to Wikipedia, following links to other websites). Added to the online reading environment is the chance that while we’re reading, we may receive an e-mail alert, IM, calendar reminder, or Twitter post that will tempt us to momentarily leave the page. In this scenario, our attentional focus is not contained. How can we develop cognitive containers like books or newspapers on iPads and other tablet devices?
When reading on a laptop or desktop screen, windows may have loosely reminded us of where we’ve been or where we’re going. We can see which applications are open and, possibly, we may see multiple browser windows or tabs. With iPad, only one window appears on the screen at a given time, so the reader has no idea how many applications are running in the background. Are iPads more distracting than laptops? Probably not. Are they more distracting than books? Absolutely. Many universities are considering delivering textbooks via some sort of e-reader. In the case of iPad, students will potentially have a wealth of distracting options to tempt them away from their reading.
On the flip side, with careful design, content delivered on the iPad could create a cognitive container which keeps readers on the page and within the app, rather than linking to outside materials and potentially forgetting where they started. Kindle seems to succeed on this front by performing solely as a reader. At the Tablet Summit, NewspaperDirect.com demonstrated their online newspaper delivery service. The papers appeared as vivid pdfs — digital copies of the print papers, sans links within the articles. Combined with meaningful interactive graphs, such as this chart, titled “The Geography of Jobs” from Tip Strategies, Inc., newspapers could leverage the affordances of digital media while minimizing distraction.
References
Mayer, R. (2009). Multimedia Learning, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Miller, G.A. (1955). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on
our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 101, 343-352.
Roediger, H.L. & McDermott, K.B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering
words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition, 21, 803-814.
Sweller, J. (1994). Cognitive load theory, learning difficulty, and instructional
design. Learning and Instruction, 4, 295-312.
Started as a way to tutor his cousin, Sal Khan has developed an extensive library of online lessons in subjects ranging from Math to Science to History. While most online learning approaches are stuck in either the lecture format or the impersonal slide delivery (or worse, just a list of readings), Sal found a way to personalize the learning experience.
Sal Khan at Gel 2010 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.
His approach is simple, yet effective and inspiring.
The desktop revolution of the 80’s empowered us to create, not just consume texts. Desktop publishing is a concept most users take for granted, but was certainly a significant change from the typewriter. As Cynthia Selfe (1996) points out, prior to the 1980’s, most executives dictated texts to their assistants, rather than typing themselves. She states that even in the mid-1990s, e-mail represented “one of the few text literacy environments in our culture whose use is expanding rather than shrinking.” The past two decades have been chaotic in their creative output, thanks in part to the affordances of our burgeoning technologies.
The iPad feels like a step backward.
What I’ve disliked in my brief playtime with the iPad is that it seems to promote consumption of texts, but not creation. I can’t annotate, therefore I can’t engage the texts the way I wanted to. Since only one app can be viewed at a time, and the notepad and reader apps are separate, the iPad separates the reading experience from writing and vice-versa. There’s no camera for pictures. I can sort of write, but the ergonomics of it are awkward. I expected a smaller laptop, but got a larger iPhone. I’m sure with time someone will create apps for anything I need, but for now, it seems designed to encourage passivity.
Reference
Selfe, C. L. (1996). “Theorizing e-mail for the practice, instruction, and study of literacy.” In Sullivan, P. and Dautermann, J. (Eds.). Electronic literacies in the workplace (pp. 274-292). Urbana, IL and Houghton, MI: National Council of Teachers of English and Computers and Composition Press.
Touch is barely taught in schools. There’s the basics, scratchy, softy, smooth, but for the most part, we develop our sense of touch informally, through experience. I’ve been thinking about touch and tactileness a lot since the introduction of the iPhone and now iPad. Directing text through our fingers seems different than using a mouse. It feels closer and more responsive. What does this mean for our reading experience? Touch screens bring us closer to the feeling of a book. Tablets place the texts in our hands again, instead of on a screen. We’re closer, turning the pages with our fingers instead of a mouse. iPad empowers our fingers to highlight texts and move them around the screen. It brings the book back to our lap, in our hands, closer, and more under our control.
The iPod taught us that if we want to scroll down, we move our fingers clockwise, to move up, counter-clockwise, and the speed of our movements affect how quickly the text will scroll. While this movement isn’t intuitive, it’s quickly learned. To thumb through a book, iPad teaches us to glide our finger right to left, similar to how we move printed pages. To change screens, the iPhone and iPad require the same right to left glide. These actions have become second-nature to most users. What other movements will our new technologies teach us?
I’m preparing for a talk on the future of reading and decided to keep track of what and how I read today.
So, I started my morning checking e-mail, which involves two steps, my main e-mail (work) and my gmail (fun). In my gmail, there was a link to an article in the NYT about Ebooks. The brief blurb sounded interesting, so I followed the link. I’d read two sentences when a link to an article about cilantro caught my eye, so I clicked. At that point, my husband came in, saw I was reading the article about cilantro, which he had read the night before, and we had a conversation about it (cilantro has always been a point of contention for us — I don’t think there’s such a thing as too much cilantro, but I digress). I thought it would be fun to post it as a link to Facebook, so I did.
Facebook, need I say more?
A half hour later, I looked at my laptop with the Ebook article and promised myself I’d get back to it. Now, I started my real work, finishing an intro for an article I’m completing. For the next hour, my reading consisted of the draft and supporting materials (printed). Then, I needed a mental break, so decided to do some laundry and listen to a TED talk.
Before I left for a noon meeting, I checked e-mail. A friend had posted a question for me on Facebook. I spent the next ten minutes writing a response and then realized it would make an interesting blog entry, so spent another twenty minutes formatting my response for my blog.
After my noon meeting, a friend and I went and played with the iPad at the Apple store. I can’t remember anything I read except Winnie the Pooh and something from Stephen King. I don’t know whether that’s a reflection on the iPad reading format or my memory.
Once at home, I read people’s comments to my Facebook post, spent another hour revising my blog, and returned to Facebook again.
Then I returned to my draft for a while. After all the usual evening stuff, I’ve checked and responded to a few e-mails and it is only now, at 9:30, as I write this that I realize I never read past the first two sentences of the E-book article that started my day.
Is this the future of reading? Despite my best attempts, if I have access to e-mail or Facebook, I’ll check it. If I can look up something — relevant or irrelevant — to what I’m reading, I usually will. I work with two laptops: one has my e-mail and I use it to look up fun stuff on the Internet and the second is completely for work. I did this to create boundaries, but it doesn’t work. The fun laptop sits beside me, always open, ready to share e-mail. The work one tends to spend more time sleeping, unfortunately. Even though I know the data about attentional focus, how we do not multi-task, how it takes a significant time to re-focus mental resources on serious work, I tell myself I’ll just check something really quickly…it will only take a minute.
What I disliked in my brief playtime with the iPad was that I can’t quit out of any applications. There’s a decision that occurs when you quit out of something…it’s closed. With the iPad, like the iPhone, users just click on the next thing, serially leaving unfinished business in the ether. There’s no sense of closure or completion.
I’m not saying anything new here, but with print materials, readers can walk away from the tempting distractions of technology. We can focus on a specific concept or idea and quiet our mind enough to stay with this one idea. We’re not haphazardly jumping around. We’re not becoming hyperlinks.
Today felt like hit-and-run reading to me, where I skimmed many surfaces, but never fully dived in. I don’t want this to be the future of my reading experience. After several years with the Internet, I haven’t figured out an effective strategy for tuning out, which concerns me and makes me wonder how the rest of us are doing.
Your turn: Over the next few days, could you pick a day and keep track of what you read and how you read it (online, print, skimmed, read all the way through, interrupted to check e-mail, etc). Feel free to share your diary as a comment here or e-mail it to me. I look forward to hearing about your experience.
To ban or not to ban laptops in classrooms? What about cell phones? And calculators? Before we hand students a list of technologies to leave at home, let’s consider the real problem: attention vs. distraction. If you’re going to ban everything distracting students, you should consider what you’re wearing, how you talk, the guy in the front row who hasn’t called the girl in the 7th row, etc.
After teaching for several years, training teachers, and studying learning, I’ve developed a few strategies for maintaining student engagement. Of course, nothing is full-proof and there will typically be someone who falls asleep, looks clueless, glares at you during lecture, leaves after 15 minutes, or stares off into space. Try not to take it personally. After all, intentionally or not, I’ve been that student, haven’t you?
I just posted the following list on Facebook in response to a question on Metafilter and am re-posting it here:
Audience from Napoleon Dynamite spoof posted on YouTube
There’s a misconception that in lectures we should be the only ones talking. An ideal learning scenario is one in which we empower students to feel responsible for their learning experience and create an environment in which the technologies, no matter how seductively distracting, can be used as part of their learning.
A few weeks ago, our friends M&D had us over for dinner. After an amazing meal, I wandered into the living room and discovered, for the first time McSweeney’s. Their Panorama publication was sitting on the sofa and compelled me to read it. In its pages, I found a book review like no other. Before I knew it, I was lost in its pages. I looked up and my husband and M were reading, too. I’m usually not anti-social, but when I skimmed the bottom of the page and didn’t see a URL, I knew I wouldn’t find the articles again. I kept reading…we all did.
To be honest, I haven’t felt this excited about reading in a long time. Cradling the Panorama Book Review, I felt like I’d discovered something…and it was all mine. I felt that old sense of urgency I used to feel as a kid in the library when I’d find a new book. Or in college, in the reference section, when I’d find something I couldn’t check out. Back then, the text felt sacred, important, in fact, it would often be the most important thing in that moment. I had a sense that if I didn’t devour it right then, I wouldn’t have another chance.
Now, I take text for granted. I’ll get to it later, it will be there. In fact, it will be wherever I am. Since the supply exceeds my demand, sometimes I don’t even bother to tag or bookmark it…sure, it’s a laissez-faire attitude toward reading, but usually I’m able to find it again.
That moment at M&D’s, though, felt sacred. It was just me and the Panorama. Each page felt like something no one had ever read before. Sacred. Have I already used that word? Probably. In reflecting on that reading experience, I realize that the Internet is so communal that I rarely really feel an individual connection to anything. Everything is shared, ordinary. We’ve bought that that’s a good thing, but is it always? Isn’t there something magical about experiencing something alone?
Today, I read more of Panorama (I ordered my own copy and anxiously waited for delivery). The magic happened again. I felt like a Reader, not a consumer. No links to click, no backbutton, no comments, no delicious tagging, no digging. Just me and the text. I like the exclusivity of print. Sometimes it’s nice to feel like you may be the only one reading something. Sure, community is important and the collective is definitely contributing to our knowledge about everything from the everyday to the esoteric. But it’s also important for us, I think, to believe that we have original ideas, that we’re not one in 10 million reading about or thinking about the same thing. Now, as the kernel of an idea comes –
you instantly wonder…
has it already been?
…so you Google it…
as the staggering list of link results appear, you think, yes, someone has already thought of it…
I’m very much a proponent of digital texts, but their very strengths, access, speed, on-demand, sometimes make them a weak thinking partner. I hope we don’t lose the luxury of deep thought, of thoroughly losing ourselves in a text–rather than hyper searching, chasing knowledge instead of sitting with it.
