So okay here we are mid-August and we’re starting to get all the stories about how if you study the tech phenom it turns out that laptops and iPads and e-readers and e-textbooks make you learn less well. Here’s a recent story.
The reason that student up there in my headline stays with regular textbooks is that they force you to stay focused on one thing, and they force, as well, an active intellectual relationship to an argument, narrative, formula, whatever. It’s just your mind and the text, just you alone grappling with a particular aspect of history or science or art as it unfolds, as it presents itself in a certain chronological fashion.
Writers of textbooks work hard to introduce a topic, give some background, start with easy stuff, move up to more difficult stuff, etc. If you aren’t able to follow the course of this presentation, you are unlikely to absorb what the book wants you to absorb.
You absorb this material because your focused, engaged mind is allowed independently, over time, to shape an understanding of a certain thing, to see an idea emerge naturally from earlier ideas, to see how ideas develop and become more complex, etc. One researcher says:
“When I asked study participants why they didn’t use their laptops to look something up, I heard some version of ‘because that’s my distraction.’ “
With a laptop, you’re all over the place – Facebook for five minutes, something vaguely relevant to what you’re studying for three minutes, email for seven minutes, French taunting in Monty Python and the Holy Grail for six minutes. You simply can’t think straight.
“[W]ho is [online] right for?” asks a community college president. “[I]t’s really great for certain groups of students, but … to be online, you have to be very self-disciplined. It’s one thing to get up for a 7:00 a.m. class. It’s another thing to see your computer, and you can either play … some cool computer game with guns and stuff, or you can do your economics class. Probably the temptation for some students is not to do the econ class, and so we still probably need to think about ways to really make a connection with students, and really with faculty.”
All of this is obvious, mes enfants.
But it doesn’t matter. As with anti-depressants, there’s a universal market in these goods, and they’ll get shoved down our throats.
August 10th, 2010 at 8:05AM
“they’ll get shoved down our throats.”
Probably.
I’ve resisted buying a Kindle because of obvious flaws with prior versions. The current one – at $138 – has ALMOST all the kinks worked out. I.e., you can take notes, bookmark, hold 3,500 books, read pdfs, change font size, is fast, etc., etc.
At $99, I’ll pull the trigger.
As public domain texts become available, the intrusion of these devices will be complete.
Resistance is futile.
August 10th, 2010 at 9:04AM
I’ll be getting either a Kindle or an iPad, primarily for the purpose of reading public-domain texts (viz from the Gutenberg Project) which are just too long to read conveniently on-line and too cumbersome to print out, also PDFs (especially corporate 10-Ks) which suffer from the same problems. For books that are available in traditional book form, though, I’ll stick with that unless there is a very substantial price difference.
The distraction factor is a very interesting point in the relative positioning of these two products.
August 10th, 2010 at 10:49AM
Kindle is much less distracting and expensive than iPad…
(Not even considering iPad)
My wife, an art historian, points out that the only remaining defect – for her – is the lack of color on Kindle. I’m sure that will be taken care of eventually.