{"id":2933,"date":"2008-09-15T10:40:06","date_gmt":"2008-09-15T10:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/09\/15\/reading-online-and-in-college\/"},"modified":"2008-09-15T10:40:06","modified_gmt":"2008-09-15T10:40:06","slug":"reading-online-and-in-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/09\/15\/reading-online-and-in-college\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading On-Line and in College"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/cite> has an article about online literacy<\/a> this week (time-limited link, look quickly), and I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that the author is pessimistic. The article cites distressing findings from new research:<\/p>\n

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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, [Jakob] 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. Another Nielsen test found that teenagers skip through the Web even faster than adults do, but with a lower success rate for completing tasks online (55 percent compared to 66 percent). Nielsen writes: “Teens have a short attention span and want to be stimulated. That’s also why they leave sites that are difficult to figure out.” For them, the Web isn’t a place for reading and study and knowledge. It spells the opposite. “Teenagers don’t like to read a lot on the Web. They get enough of that at school.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This, of course, spells the death of academia as we know it, unless we resist the temptation of technology and require students to read books, slowly.<\/p>\n

Of course, I find it especially illuminating to put this up against Timothy Burke’s essay How to Read in College<\/a>, which offers some suggestions for new students facing large reading lists:<\/p>\n

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Professors assign more than you can possibly read in any normal fashion.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

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We know it, at least most of us do.You have to make strategic decisions about what to read and how to read it. You’re reading for particular reasons: to get background on important issues, to illuminate some of the central issues in a single session of one course, to raise questions for discussion. That calls for a certain kind of smash-and-grab approach to reading.You can’t afford to dilly-dally and stop to smell the lilies. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now, I know there are important caveats here– I have read all the way to the end of Burke’s essay, thank you– and that this is highly discipline-dependent. In fact, the author of the Chronicle<\/cite> piece is a professor of English (and the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30)<\/cite>, which has to win some sort of Cranky Luddite Title Prize), and most of his specific laments have to do with reading literature, for which Burke’s method doesn’t really apply.<\/p>\n

Still, it’s a striking contrast.<\/p>\n

Personally, I come down much more on Burke’s side of things– the method he describes works pretty well for most of the reading I do in a professional context. If I look at a paper, I’m usually after certain specific information, and I do more skimming than actual reading. The web style of reading is a pretty good approximation of what you need to do to efficiently find information in science articles.<\/p>\n

If anything, what the cited studies indicate to me is that we need to do a better job of teaching students how to find content efficiently, rather than forcing them to use old techniques and technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about online literacy this week (time-limited link, look quickly), and I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that the author is pessimistic. The article cites distressing findings from new research: In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The… Continue reading Reading On-Line and in College<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}