Digital vs. Print Media - It's All Just Reading, Right?

3/10/2014
Digital text accessed on computers, tablets and e-books are increasingly replacing traditional print and paper in the classrooms. Educational technology experts flout the many real benefits of the digital format: easy low-cost access to content; embedded interactive graphics; cross-linked references; easily searchable text; filterable bookmarks and annotations; and other platform-specific tools have revolutionized the way we interact with the written word. 

Or Not...


“… accessing the Internet makes large demands on individuals’ literacy skills; in some cases, this new technology requires readers to have novel literacy skills, and little is known about how to analyze or teach those skills.” [1]
Can we assume that the content buried within the text is as equally accessible in both print and digital formats?  There have been conflicting studies over the last 30 years. Recent understandings of the human brain are suggesting substantial differences in the literacy skills required by these two formats. Their conclusions raise concerns about how we teach literacy to youth who increasingly are relying on digital, and especially internet-based, sources of information.  This post draws from an interesting article in Scientific American that examines how people interact differently with print on paper vs. the screen, and suggests that the move to digital text imposes additional challenges to the process of deriving meaning and understanding from the written word.

Digital Texts Adds Challenges:
  • Digital formats encourage non-sequential reading across linked texts.
  • Skimming and superficial reading is common with web-based text.
  • Habits and attitudes affect states of mind as people interact with internet-based content.
  • Visual fatigue can arise through extended screen use.
  • The kinesthetic mapping of content in long texts is altered without pages to hold and turn.
  • Flat, windowed screens remove the spatial relationships between elements of text within a page and across longer texts.
These last two points touch on fundamental differences in the way that screen and print engage the brain’s sense of spatial relationships. 
 “To the human mind, a sequence of pages bound together into a physical object is very different from a flat screen that displays only a single “page” of information at a time. The physical presence of the printed pages, and the ability to flip back and forth through them, turns out to be important to the mind’s ability to navigate written works, particularly lengthy and complicated ones.”  “… having a good spatial mental representation of the physical layout of the text supports reading comprehension,”[2]
These factors may be behind the studies[3] that demonstrate that students usually prefer to read complex or long text in paper form. Several studies found that college students will often browse e-books, but print them out to do in-depth study or research.

Need Different Approach to Digital Literacy :

Technological innovations may ameliorate these issues at the device level (see video at right) and innovative formats may dazzle us with the uniquely powerful capacities of digital media (be sure to scroll through NY Times’ “Snow Fall”!). Nonetheless, we as teachers need to be aware of the impact of digital text and adapt our literacy strategies accordingly.  Done properly, we can build on the strengths of digital media while addressing the limitations and drawbacks.

See for example Christine Padberg's "Digital Literacy Toolbox", or join me and literacy strategists from the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project at the upcoming workshops and Summer Institute on using technology to support student research and literacy skills.

References:


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