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Helping Johnny read and UNDERSTAND e-books
October 24, 2009 | 5:54 am
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By David Rothman
If books go E, what happens to the e-book natives, so to speak—the kids who learn to read off the screen, rather than paper? Will they have less ability to keep up with complicated books? Replying to my TeleRead piece in the Huffington Post, a reader said so. Here’s how I responded:
1. Display quality will keep improving–which should help.
2. A comprehensive strategy of the kind I described would train teachers to update their pedagogical techniques for the era of e-books.
3. Young people are going to be screen-oriented whether we want them to be or not—so we might as well digitize books so they don’t just do Facebook,Twitter YouTube and the rest.
4. TeleRead in the end would vastly increase the number of books available to young people and others–making it easier for them to find titles they actually wanted to read. The more reading they do–including the recreational variety–the better they will be as readers.
I could well have added a fifth reason—the ability of e-books to offer inexpensive, colorful illustrations which, if used well, not overused, can help whet the interest of younger children in the text. Pixel Qi technology could help. Children could use e-readers in the monochrome mode, saving power and increasing resolution, but switch to color when they wanted. I’m not saying that every book should be a picture book. But good presentation could help schoolchldren get into books in the first place.
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Comments:
David
Just saw this. we gotta talk. can you email me offline at danbloom in the gmail dept.? you bring uop a very good point and the answer is YES, if kids learn to read from screens, we will be in deep doo as a civ, ask me why?
DANNY
am reading yr HuffPost piece now and the reply . DO EMAIL ME SIR
re
If books go E, what happens to the e-book natives, so to speak—the kids who learn to read off the screen, rather than paper? Will they have less ability to keep up with complicated books?
What we need to do, I feel, IMHO, is to teach early reading on paper books, and allow kids to learn to read on paper books. Ask Dr Marynnae Wolf at Tufts about this, she will dish. THEN, at the same time, sure, kids can also read on screens, no problem. BUT David, trust me, if kids learn to read on screens, all will be lost. Screens should supplement books, and let the firms make all the money they want with e-books, but we MUST keep paper books alive for elementary school kids, at least. SOS!
Danny, thanks for your comments. I’m at dr@teleread.com and davidrothman@pobox.com, and you’re welcome to email—or phone me at 703-370-6540. The contact info is very public. My time’s limited, but I’ll do what I can.
A few points:
1. The issue isn’t just how children read but what they read. E-books would allow wider variety of choices matching their needs and interests. Even early on, there might be an argument for customized content in many cases.
2. Even the “how” can vary with E. Some children may respond better to certain color combinations or kinds of type. I myself can read more easily off a good LCD screen than off an E Ink machine with limited contrast.
3. If you go by the work of literacy experts, children would seem to respond better to material watching their needs and interests. We go back to the “what.”
4. As Steve Jordan or someone else pointed out here, reading a work full of of links is different from reading a novel without the Web-style clutter. The Web experience isn’t as “immersive,” to use language from Bill Hill. I myself would be wildly in favor of letting readers turn off links to avoid distractions.
5. Using the “what,” I’ve made a strong case for E, but if the “how” matters so much, then we could still have a TeleRead approach but allow for a brief period in children’s lives when they would be reading off paper.
6. The “what” and “how” aren’t the only variables. How about the issue of how the teacher is training the child to process the material? When distracting links are present, a teacher can encourage children to ignore them, at least initially.
7. An e-book with well planned links just might offer fewer distractions than a paper book with a chaotic layout with plenty of sidebars.
8. I’d remind you that when the Last Book vision is truly realized, then E will have flippable pages and there won’t or at least needn’t be a difference between P and E anyway.
Thanks for caring about these issues, whether or not you agree with me.
David
Hi David, and thanks for a good response to my two earlier posts above. I do care, and so we all. And I am not anti-Ereaders or anti-screen reading at all, I love these screens as much as everyone here. But I worry that we might leave Mr Paper behind, and paper book reading as well, and I am not sure that is good for the future of humankind. What I envision is
1. a new word one day, like screening or screading, to help differentitae screen reading from paper reading, not because one is a priori better or worse, no, but just because I feel they are very different animals now. But both are good and useful, and
2. a future where paper book and paper newspaper and magazine co-exist healthily with Ebooks and iPhones and computer screens for email and blogs and Internet surfing. I love it all.
3. More brain scan studies with MRI machines to try to ascertain what the differences are — if any.
But I with you and Paul on all this, from the sidelines here in Taiwan, and yes, I care. As a writer, a reader, an ideaman, a humanist, a dreamer, and a climate activist (http://pcillu101.blogspot.com)
And one more thing, David, I might be completely wrong about all this, and if I am, I am willing and ready to eat crow. I am not always right about many things, my batting average in Idea City is about 50/50.
Let’s see where all this leads. The main thing I am interested in now is “nomenclature” — as Richard Curtis the literary agent in NYC says in his new blog post:
“Motoko Rich, Is That a Vook You’re Screading or Are You Just Kindling?”
http://www.ereads.com/2009/10/is-that-vook-youre-screading-or-are-you.html
Wow. People are back to that ‘reading on screens’ thing. I have to add my 2 cents.
1. Many e-ink readers are just electronic hornbooks. Kids learned on those just fine. In fact, weren’t those ‘the good old days’ of education? (Ok, let’s say without the corporal punishment.)
2. The codex-fixated should remember that before it came the scroll. (If you’ve not seen the Medieval Helpdesk video, check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ )
3. The most important thing about reading on a screen, is the *reading*-part.
4. Reading on an e-ink device is less unlike reading a paper book than those who have not tried it would think. I still sometimes reach with my left hand for the upper right-hand corner of my Kindle to ‘turn the page’. (This is embarrassing when it happens in public.)
5. The ability to electronically search a text was *invented* because enough graduate students, scholars, and other serious readers preferred actually *reading* (i.e. making forward progress through their texts) to interminably flipping around through the book’s pages trying to re-locate a particular passage. People may set store on “if the beginning is thin, you’ve just started; if the end is thin, you’re nearly done” more than is really useful or meaningful. Of more concern may be the degree to which even the sophisticated reader may unconsciously choose shorter texts over longer ones. Many related considerations (weight and bulk, for example) go away in electronic format.
6. The integrated dictionary that some devices/software are equipped with makes it easy for a kid to learn unknown terms in context. Like most adults, most kids don’t want to look up even words they can’t figure out from context. But when they do, they already use Web-based dictionaries for other things, so the ‘death’ of print dictionaries and their use may already be coming about for other reasons.
7. Reading is *way* more important to the mind than ‘having books’.