Digital technology has become an imperial force in education, and it should meet more antagonists argues Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein. Clearly he’s among those antagonists. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he makes a strong case for reading online as a lesser kind of literacy, with profound implications for teaching and learning.
Pointing to the work of Web researcher Jakob Nielsen, who has studied the eye movements of readers, Bauerlein notes that people read online in a physically different pattern than text on a printed page. Online, readers eyes move in a pattern resembling the upper case 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,” says Bauerlein. ”Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored.”
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.
In short, online literacy is simply not literacy as we conventionally understand it. “Yes, it’s a kind of literacy,” Baurlein writes, ”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 scanning doesn’t foster flexible minds that can adapt to all kinds of texts, and it doesn’t translate into academic reading,” he writes.
Bauerlein is writing from the persepective of a college professor, and he concerns himself with higher education, but his arguments pertain to all classrooms where we are worshipping at the altar of technology. “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,” he concludes. “Pencils, blackboards, and books are no longer the primary instruments of learning, true, but they still play a critical role in the formation of intelligence, as countermeasures to information-age mores. That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitize learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students’ minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate, and they can’t do it by themselves.”
Good, smart stuff from an iconoclastic thinker. Of course, you stopped reading two paragraphs ago.
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Balanced Literacy also encourages non-linear reading: the child is supposed to gather “clues” from everything but the text itself: the pictures, the cover, the title, the diagrams, the chapter headings. Even while decoding, the reader is supposed to make use of such peripheral information instead of (or possibly as well as) sounding out the word. BL takes this bad habit too far. While pictures and so forth do offer clues, nothing but careful reading can tell you what is in a book.
Textbook writers likewise celebrate distraction. If you look at just about any textbook (math, social studies, science), you will see the page cluttered with pictures, graphic organizers, and “strategies.” This diverts students from the text and around the page; thus the mental pogo stick is exalted as yet one more “strategy” towards comprehension.
So, superficial reading cannot be attributed to the digital age alone. We have textbook writers and pedagogists who simply don’t like to read, and who actively promote methods of skirting the text. Enough of this! It is time to demand educators who know and love literature, and who demand careful reading of excellent books.
I read your articla because of the title. love it. thanks
You have a good point, but the reply from Diana is right as well. I’d like to add that people tend to read more about what they are interested in. A young person is always developing new interests so there is a need to catch their attention, help them taste new things, but if there is a real interest then they will zero in on the subject and devour it. So both methods should be used. A taste of many things along with the discipline of having to dig deeper into a subject, can produce well rounded reading habits.
Somebody has to present an argument here.
First, I love to read and I agree that many do what is suggested, reading in an ‘F’ pattern. However, I prefer to read online for the simple reason I am able to enlarge the text or change the font in order to facilitate ease of reading and reduction of eye strain.
I did read the entire article, and all of the responses.
Second, I do sometimes use the ‘F’ pattern, which is a useful tool. Email and web-pages offer so much information, one cannot mentally digest all of it. The ability to scan for information either useful or interesting is a necessary skill in the real world… one that has taken this writer some time to develop. I am the type who wants to grab all of it, to really understand everything I read, but, if I were to do that, I would do nothing else!
I have been, and am about to be again, an online student who does read every word of text as well as join in the online class discussions. And, I am an honors student, both in the physical classroom and online.
I have already devoted far too much time to this subject. As a home-educator and midlife grad student, my time is precious. I have children to read to and with.