For Amazon, e-books outsell hardcovers

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.

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A return to consumption

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.

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Literacy of touch

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?

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Is this the future of reading?

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.

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Banning laptops doesn’t solve the distraction problem

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:

• Call upon people randomly. On the first day of classes, let students know that at any point in the lecture, you may call upon them. Cut up your roster and, when participation reaches a low point, randomly pull a name out of a hat. Ask them to concisely summarize something you just said, or discuss implications for a different scenario, etc. The point is to let them know that there’s rewards for paying attention…and consequences for not paying attention. I did this pre-laptops in the classroom and it improved discussion. It’s also a non-confrontational way of ensuring participation/attention.
• Turn to someone next to you. One strategy I find highly effective in teaching is to identify a concept from the readings and say, “For the next 3-5 minutes, I’d like you to turn to someone next to you and discuss what you think the term participative media means. Think of a few examples from the readings/your own experience and be prepared to share them with the larger group.” I usually either walk around to hear people’s conversations, or meet with a student close by who hasn’t found a conversation partner. While everyone is meeting, I pick a particularly chatty group, or volunteer the person I’m speaking with, and ask them if they’d be willing to go first. As people share their ideas, I write them on the whiteboard, or insert their insights into my slide presentation and use our discussion as a springboard for the next part of the lecture.
  Having people speak in smaller groups primes them with ideas for sharing in the larger group and so accomplishes two goals: engages them in the discussion and empowers them to participate.
• You can have “laptops down” moments, where you ask everyone to close their laptops to help them think and focus.
• I start the quarter off being honest and saying that it’s really tough to speak to a large crowd and tougher still when you have to compete for their attention (e.g., talking in class, or using tech to tune out), so to make it easier on me and more interesting for them, I’ll be asking questions throughout the lecture and if I see someone not paying attention, I will most likely call on them.
• Have students present some of the info, where appropriate. Each class period, I have a 5 minute block for student presentations — students definitely seem more interested in information from their peers. If the students get the info wrong, I use it as a teachable moment.

Audience from Napoleon Dynamite spoof posted on YouTube

• I also do fun things, like take pictures of the audience when they look the most bored and include it in the next class period’s powerpoint, just to let them know what my view is like. Then I use the image as a background for some of the slides. People love to see themselves.
• Or, the best scenario is to incorporate the laptops into instruction. Even in a lecture, you can have scavenger hunts or discovery moments. For every class period, I assign a couple bloggers to report on what they learned. You get a record of the class, students who missed have a useful resource, and students with restless finger syndrome have somewhere to focus their energy. Here’s a link to course blogs from past students: http://www.brenmesm.blogspot.com.

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.

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Does anything work in the U.S. education system?

When I was in high school in the late 80’s — early 90’s, it seemed that the U.S. education system was an abysmal failure — after all, weren’t the Soviets and the Chinese students scoring higher in math? Today, headlines still decry our education system as a failure. In a recent op-ed piece published in the New York Times, “One Classroom, From Sea to Shining Sea,” Susan Jacoby advocates for a national system with a standardized curriculum, standardized teacher training, and standardized funding. She states that our system has outgrown its antiquated independent heritage.

Funding. It’s difficult to discuss problems with our educational system without discussing funding. As a California resident, I’ve watched funding drastically diminish with, among other things, the passage of Proposition 13, the Enron scandal, and our latest recession. Education is not a funding priority. Regardless of curricular referendums, standardized testing, and increased accountability for teachers, without consistent and ample funding, our schools will continue to degrade. Without realistic budgets for classrooms, teachers, and materials, we are expecting the impossible from our schools. Even as a university teacher, I have often purchased supplies for my students and classroom. Under the best conditions, teachers labor with limited support. Imagine spending 6 hours in a classroom with thirty 12 year olds (those of you with pre-teens understand the challenge of an hour with just one), five days a week. While competing for their attention and attempting to manage the classroom chatter, now imagine that class days are longer due to budget cuts, or you’ve had a wasp’s nest near the outside classroom door for six months, despite several requests to have it with removed, so you need to keep the door and outside windows shut. Now imagine that most of the toilets don’t work because the district has had to cut a majority of its maintenance staff (I’m describing a colleague’s actual experience in a Southern California school district). These externalities are rarely part of discussions about our education system. Instead, let’s talk about standardized testing and holding teachers more accountable.

Education isn’t simply something to criticize. We all have a stake in its success. We choose. We choose to prioritize other issues, vote against bond measures, argue the intricacies of esoteric tax rules, and then blame our teachers, their training, or some other indefinable scapegoat for our failure to adequately educate our future. Let’s put our energy into figuring out an ample funding scheme for our schools, giving teachers and students the resources they need, create a climate of success and then re-visit questions of standardized tests, national curricula, and teacher accountability.

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To blog or not?

I recently attended a truly fascinating workshop, but I’m not going to blog about it…yet. I’m studying how a particular user group conducts research online, so if I discuss preliminary observations, I risk biasing my sample.

To blog or not to blog seems to be a conundrum facing many researchers. Some choose to blog immediately to spread their idea. Others choose not to blog at all and wait until their peer-reviewed publication. Many of us are caught in the middle, attempting to balance information sharing with respect for our study participants or patience with the process. The immediacy pervading the Internet seems to pressure researchers to engage in flag planting, rather than wait a year or two to publish their results in a peer-reviewed publication.

So, what’s the problem? On the one hand, I find it exciting to be able to immediately comment on topics of interest as well as learn from other’s perspectives. Waiting until the data is in takes a while and often, other technologies have already replaced the ones under study.

Why wait? As researchers, we have a responsibility to get our facts straight. Often, experts’ hunches about a practice or theory are correct or approximately so, but we have a responsibility to the public who trust us to label hunches as hunches and findings as findings…the two are not the same.

I’m interested to hear from my colleagues how they approach information sharing. I think it’s important to engage in scholarly conversation, while at the same time conduct quality research and I do not find these pursuits to be exclusive. At the same time, I do not post to my blog preliminary hunches or observations while I am in the midst of collecting or analyzing data. I expect research I read to have been carefully vetted, and in turn attempt to do the same.

Since blogs do serve as academic discussions, I think it’s completely acceptable to noodle over new topics, as long as we label this exercise as opinion, or noodling, and not claim it as fact.

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Affinity-based browsing

Yesterday, I attended the RoSE Design Charrette, hosted by the Transliteracies Project at UCSB. Under Alan Liu’s guidance, many interesting, innovative interdisciplinary projects have emerged from this program.

In anticipation of attending, I read the online description of RoSE. Like seeing a movie preview, I started to imagine what I thought RoSE would be. I hoped for an improvement on current content delivery systems, in particular, I wanted something that could ease the challenge of finding high-quality information online. A couple years ago, I had a conversation with one of Transliteracies’ project members, Pablo Colapinto. As most good conversations happen, this one was over lunch and I was expressing my dissatisfaction that we weren’t living like the Jetsons yet, in particular, how they could tell their computer what they wanted to eat and it would appear on a conveyor belt.

As our conversation continued, Pablo asked me, “How would you like your information served?” This question has stuck with me, because it seems so necessary and practical, and yet doesn’t seem to be addressed by current systems. Why, when engaging in search or any use of the Internet, can’t the user filter information according to demographics or other preferences?

To a certain extent, online advertising practices provide a model for this type of targeted content delivery. Using psychographic (e.g., attitudes or opinions), sociographic (e.g., purchasing behaviors) and demographic (e.g., age, ethnicity, location) data, advertisers create profiles of specific types of users. Online user behaviors are culled by Google Analytics, Facebook Connect, and many others. Our offline data is also collected and connected to our online behaviors. Offline data aggregators include Acxiom, Experian, and TargusInfo. Combining data about what we buy with information about what websites we frequent, advertisers put us into affinity segments, which are basically groupings that reflect our behaviors and preferences. For example, someone who recently purchased a BMW and read TripAdvisor reviews for the Sofitel is likely to be put in the luxury segment. Likewise, someone who booked a Disney vacation and researched vaccination information would probably get categorized into a parenting segment. Using behavioral data of others in the same affinity segment, advertisers can predict the types of ads likely to interest you.

The problem here, of course, is that it’s creepy for our browsers or search engines to start targeting content delivery based on behaviors/preferences we’re not 100% aware are being collected. However, if so much data is being collected about me, I’d like to use it to make my life easier. There’s an obvious tension between privacy and convenience.

The process could be transparent. I could set my browser or search engine preferences to deliver information based on my preferences. Just like ordering a sandwich, where you get a list and tick the boxes you’d like, I’d like a preferences option with drop-downs where I could say how I want my information delivered.  I could finally have the option of filtering for the types of websites I’ll actually read.

Given the data that Google and others collect, it seems completely possible for me to enter my age, location (although I think Google already knows this), and an interest, say ‘teaching’ into a Google search and the search engine could target its results based on what others with my similar preferences selected. The results would be similar to Amazon’s “people who purchased this book also bought…” or “people who viewed this page ended up…” In essence, I could be served the information I want using filters based on information Google already collects, and using affinity segmenting to determine what I might like based on the behaviors of others with my shared filters. I think to a degree this already happens, but is often apparent in ads/sponsored links (and the process isn’t transparent), rather than actual content filtered on projected usefulness/relevance.

These preference filters could sit on top of existing search algorithms. For example, when I search for Gran Torino, my preference filters would indicate that I’m interested in teaching, so I’d be served content based on what others interested in teaching viewed in relation to Gran Torino. Ideally, instead of getting all search results related to the film, I would receive listings targeted toward classroom use or discussions related to education. At the very least, perhaps search results could be filtered based on what others in my affinity group viewed, so it would prioritize reviews, places to purchase, etc., that I’m most likely to visit and save me a bit of sifting.

Borrowing the model of affinity marketing, by categorizing myself based on preferences, I could benefit from the collective behaviors of people with shared interests. This preference filter would make the current obtuse practice transparent and adds convenience to my search.

Joseph Turow addressed a potential downside of targeted information delivery in his lecture “When the Audience Clicks: Buying Attention in the Digital Age” presented at the Oxford Internet Institute. There’s a danger that once my Google searches and news viewing starts to be delivered according to my preferences, I limit myself to only viewing information tailored to me. Potentially, as targeting becomes more sophisticated, we may lose the breadth of information currently provided by newspapers, television, and our expansive searches, and only receive information that confirms our beliefs or supports our preferences. While to a certain extent, current media options already allow us this option (e.g., Fox News), we may further limit ourselves as content delivery becomes more targeted.

So, how to tame the super-sized information portal that is the Internet without sacrificing the breadth and choice we love? I’d like a balance between sifting through a mountain of results to find a few relevant links and restricting myself from broader views based on preferences I select. Seems possible. Perhaps we don’t need to keep the filters on all of the time, but they’d be there when we need them.

As it turns out, RoSE addresses issues of humanities scholarship, namely, identifying relationships between authors and their work. While it didn’t fulfill my Jetsons’ fantasy of chocolate cake on demand, it did prompt me to dream for a bit and envision the type of search I’d like to use.

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Studies in Educational Technology

A colleague of mine recently asked for reading recommendations in the area of Educational Technology, and I started thinking about the trail I followed (a la, Vannevar Bush) to arrive at my current notions of the field.

I taught college composition from 1998-2003. Some of my colleagues were teaching Dreamweaver or FrontPage in their composition classes. By teaching, I don’t mean that they were teaching how to communicate on the Web as much as how to use the programs, in other words, they were spending class time showing what each button of the respective programs did. In essence, their courses were software instruction classes instead of writing classes and, in my opinion, the students’ writing suffered.

I came to composition instruction fresh from industry, where technology was a tool to get a job done. I wondered how, as instructors, we could use technology to fit our needs, rather than the other way around. This, I found, was not a popular approach in my department. Once I entered grad school, I signed up for the main listserv in the field of computers and composition and made a disappointing discovery — they, too, were focusing on how to fit their lessons around the technology. In fact, in 2005, I attended one of their conferences at Stanford and spent three or four days completely frustrated by the focus on technology, rather than writing. Who cares about Drupal or Flash if the students can’t write?

At that point, Larry Cuban’s Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (2001), addressed my concerns. While Cuban is skeptical about educational technology, he also reports on successful use of ed tech, and that’s what interested me. In particular, he described Esperanza Rodrigues’ preschool classroom at Benjamin co-op, in the Bay area. In teaching students about shapes, Rodrigues blended strong practice using both offline and online techniques, seamlessly moving between using and not using technology to enhance the learning experience. By strong practice, she had a clear lesson plan and learning goal, she engages the students in the learning process, reinforces the lesson and pushes them beyond their comfort level to a new understanding. In my opinion, Rodrigues demonstrates best practice in using technology in education — she uses it as a tool to enhance a strong lesson plan, it is not the main feature and she has not formed her lesson to fit the technology.

A few months later, I read Richard Mayer’s (2001) Multimedia Learning for the first time. I was happy to discover he was at UCSB and started attending his classes. Multimedia Learning establishes clear, rigorous methods for measuring whether learning occurs in multimedia environments and whether the technology enhances or detracts from the learning environment. Mayer offers research-based recommendations for designing learner-centered multimedia environments. [Note: Rich Mayer is my advisor. My research, thinking, and teaching have very much benefited from his mentorship.]

Around that time, James Paul Gee (2003) published What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, which approaches the question of technology and learning differently from Mayer’s text, but nonetheless makes very strong contributions. I was most interested in Gee’s claims about why video games are so compelling. The main take-away messages for me in terms of effective ways to incorporate technology into learning environments were the concepts of active learning (see DH Jonassen for more info), pushing students beyond their zone of proximal development (see Vygotsky for more info), and allowing for risk taking by making the consequences for failure low.

I became increasingly interested in student classroom engagement and wanted to compare engagement in classes that taught the same lesson, but one used the learning concepts I was studying and one did not. My colleague Doug Bradley and I developed a learning simulation in which we incorporated Gee’s and Mayer’s ideas. Not surprisingly, in classes where computers were available, but not used, students had high levels of disengagement, using the computers for off-task activities such as ESPN, shopping, and entertainment (we conducted this study before Facebook was popular). In the classes where we used the simulation, off-task activities were minimal, indicating that students were highly engaged (abstract available on ERIC).

While I’ve read many interesting and useful books and articles on Educational Technology, Mayer and Gee are my main influences. Another text of interest is Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point (2000), Chapter 3: The Stickiness Factor, where he discusses why kids love Sesame Street and  Blue’s Clues. Michele Dickey’s (2005) Engaging by design: How engagement strategies in popular computer and video games can inform instructional design, published in Educational Technology Research and Development presents research-based findings about engaging students using techniques from video games. Of course, there’s many others.

In her recent interview on Frontline, Sherry Turkle said “The point is we’re really at the very beginning of learning how to use this technology in the ways that are the most nourishing and sustaining. We’re going to slowly find our balance, but I think it’s going to take time…” She said that technology is neither good nor bad, but it is powerful. When considering the history of reform in education, we’ve jumped from one promising method to another. I agree with Turkle that the key is balance. We should prioritize learning and engage teaching methods that will best enhance the learning experience.

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Online Literacy & the Trouble with Information

My dissertation is now available online, thus increasing the chance that more than three people will read it. Here is the abstract:

In university settings, students are increasingly required to conduct online research to complete course-related assignments, yet often receive little instruction in the skills necessary to proficiently locate, evaluate, and use the information they find. By comparing the processes of 150 graduate and undergraduate students during a 50 minute online academic research task, this study examined the role of prior knowledge and cognitive processing in proficient online literacy practice. The findings of this study challenge the assumption that technology alone is all that is needed to effectively complete online academic research. Results of this research indicate that students who bring academic experience to an online academic research task are more likely to succeed than those with technical expertise alone. Furthermore, analyses of students’ cognitive processes yielded insight into online literacy proficiency, defined as the ability to select sources relevant to the research task, synthesize multiple perspectives to build understanding, and effectively communicate that understanding. While certainly requiring medium-specific adaptations, online literacy is not very different from offline literacy. Without the essential literacy skills of gauging credibility and synthesizing materials to form and communicate an understanding, the ease of information access afforded by the online environment does not matter. Findings from this research additionally show that deliberate practice afforded through years of schooling more significantly contributes to online literacy proficiency than short-term instruction.

Further, this research presents and tests a cognitive process model for online literacy proficiency. The model illustrates the interrelated cognitive processes of online literacy while additionally demonstrating the significant contributions of expertise to proficiency. While the scope of this study is limited to college students completing an academic task, the model has implications for other online literacy practices.

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