[tt] CHE: Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind

[Premise Checker]

Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind
The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated September 19, 2008
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i04/04b01001.htm

Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming
By MARK BAUERLEIN

When Jakob Nielsen, a Web researcher, tested 232 people for how they read 
pages on screens, a curious disposition emerged. Dubbed by The New York 
Times "the guru of Web page 'usability,'" Nielsen has gauged user habits 
and screen experiences for years, charting people's online navigations and 
aims, using eye-tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests. In this 
study, he found that people took in hundreds of pages "in a pattern that's 
very different from what you learned in school." It looks like a capital 
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. Near the bottom, eyes move almost 
vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens 
quickly, too. "F for fast," Nielsen wrote in a column. "That's how users 
read your precious content."

The F-pattern isn't the only odd feature of online reading that Nielsen 
has uncovered in studies conducted through the consulting business Nielsen 
Norman Group (Donald A. Norman is a cognitive scientist who came from 
Apple; Nielsen was at Sun Microsystems). A decade ago, he issued an 
"alert" entitled "How Users Read on the Web." It opened bluntly: "They 
don't."

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. 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."

Those and other trials by Nielsen amount to an important research project 
that helps explain one of the great disappointments of education in our 
time. I mean the huge investment schools have made in technology, and the 
meager returns such funds have earned. Ever since the Telecommunications 
Act of 1996, money has poured into public-school classrooms. At the same 
time, colleges have raced to out-technologize one another. But while 
enthusiasm swells, e-bills are passed, smart classrooms multiply, and 
students cheer — the results keep coming back negative. When the Texas 
Education Agency evaluated its Technology Immersion Pilot, a $14-million 
program to install wireless tools in middle schools, the conclusion was 
unequivocal: "There were no statistically significant effects of immersion 
in the first year on either reading or mathematics achievement." When 
University of Chicago economists evaluated California schools before and 
after federal technology subsidies (the E-Rate program) had granted 30 
percent more schools in the state Internet access, they determined that 
"the additional investments in technology generated by E-Rate had no 
immediate impact on meas-ured student outcomes." In March 2007, the 
National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance evaluated 
16 award-winning education technologies and found that "test scores were 
not significantly higher in classrooms using selected reading and 
mathematics software products." Last spring a New York State school 
district decided to drop its laptop program after years of offering it. 
The school-board president announced why: "After seven years, there was 
literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none."

Those conclusions apply to middle-school and high-school programs, not to 
higher education (which has yet to produce any similarly large-scale 
evaluations). Nevertheless, the results bear consideration by those 
pushing for more e-learning on campuses.

Backers, providers, and fans of new technology explain the disappointing 
measures as a matter of circumstance. Teachers didn't get enough training, 
they say, or schoolwide coordination was spotty, parents not sufficiently 
involved. Maybe so, to some extent, but Nielsen's studies indicate another 
source. Digitized classrooms don't come through for an off-campus reason, 
a factor largely overlooked by educators. When they add laptops to classes 
and equip kids with on-campus digital tools, they add something else, too: 
the reading habits kids have developed after thousands of hours with those 
same tools in leisure time.

To teachers and professors, a row of glistening new laptops in their 
classroom after a dozen years with nothing but chalk and blackboard, or a 
podium that has been transformed from a wooden stand into a multimedia 
console, can appear a stunning conversion. But to the average freshman 
walking through the door and finding a seat, it's nothing new. Our 
students have worked and played with computers for years. The Horatio 
Alger Association found that students in high school use the Internet four 
and a half hours per week for help with homework (The State of Our 
Nation's Youth, 2008-2009), while the National School Boards Association 
measures social networking at nine hours per week, much of it spent on 
homework help. The gap between viewpoints is huge. Educators envision a 
whole new pedagogy with the tools, but students see only the chance to 
extend long-established postures toward the screen. If digitized 
classrooms did pose strong, novel intellectual challenges to students, we 
should see some pushback on their part, but few of them complain about 
having to learn in new ways.

Once again, this is not so much about the content students prefer — 
Facebook, YouTube, etc. — or whether they use the Web for homework or not. 
It is about the reading styles they employ. They race across the surface, 
dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking what they 
already want and shunning the rest. They convert history, philosophy, 
literature, civics, and fine art into information, material to retrieve 
and pass along.

That's the drift of screen reading. Yes, it's a kind of literacy, 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. If it did, then in a 2006 Chronicle survey of college 
professors, fully 41 percent wouldn't have labeled students "not well 
prepared" in reading (48 percent rated them "somewhat well prepared"). We 
would not find that the percentage of college graduates who reached 
"proficiency" literacy in 1992 was 40 percent, while in 2003 only 31 
percent scored "proficient." We would see reading scores inching upward, 
instead of seeing, for instance, that the percentage of high-school 
students who reached proficiency dropped from 40 percent to 35 percent 
from 1992 to 2005.

And we wouldn't see even the better students struggling with "slow 
reading" tasks. In an "Introduction to Poetry" class awhile back, when I 
asked students to memorize 20 lines of verse and recite them to the others 
at the next meeting, a voice blurted, "Why?" The student wasn't being 
impudent or sullen. She just didn't see any purpose or value in the task. 
Canny and quick, she judged the plodding process of recording others' 
words a primitive exercise. Besides, if you can call up the verse any time 
with a click, why remember it? Last year when I required students in a 
literature survey course to obtain obituaries of famous writers without 
using the Internet, they stared in confusion. Checking a reference book, 
asking a librarian, and finding a microfiche didn't occur to them. So many 
free deliveries through the screen had sapped that initiative.

This is to say that advocates of e-learning in higher education pursue a 
risky policy, striving to unite liberal-arts learning with the very 
devices of acceleration that hinder it. Professors think they can help 
students adjust to using tools in a more sophisticated way than 
scattershot e-reading, but it's a lopsided battle. To repeat, college 
students have spent thousands of hours online acquiring faster and faster 
eyes and fingers before they even enter college, and they like the pace. 
It is unrealistic to expect 19-year-olds to perch before a screen and 
brake the headlong flight, even if it is the Declaration of Independence 
in hypertext coming through, not a buddy's message.

Some educators spot the momentum and shrug their shoulders, elevating 
screen scanning to equal status with slow reading. A notable instance 
occurred last year, when in an essay in The New York Times, Leah Price, a 
professor of English at Harvard University, criticized a report from the 
National Endowment for the Arts — "To Read or Not to Read" (to which I 
contributed) — precisely for downgrading digital scanning. Her article 
contained some errors of fact, such as that the 2004 NEA report "Reading 
at Risk" excluded nonfiction, but correctly singled out the NEA 
distinction between screen reading and print reading. To Price, it's a 
false one: "Bafflingly, the NEA's time-use charts classify 'e-mailing' and 
'surfing Web sites' as competitors to reading, not subsets of it." Indeed, 
she said, to do so smacks of guile: "It takes some gerrymandering to make 
a generation logging ever more years in school, and ever more hours on the 
BlackBerry, look like nonreaders." (In truth, high-school students do no 
more in-class reading today than they did 20 years ago, according to a 
2004 Department of Education report.)

What we are seeing is a strange flattening of the act of reading. It 
equates handheld screens with Madame Bovary, as if they made the same 
cognitive demands and inculcated the same habits of attention. It casts 
peeking at a text message and plowing through Middlemarch as subsets of 
one general activity. And it treats those quick bursts of words and icons 
as fully sufficient to sustain the reading culture. The long book may go, 
Price concluded, but reading will carry on just as it did before: "The 
file, the list, the label, the memo: These are the genres that will keep 
reading alive."

The step not taken here is a crucial one, namely to determine the relative 
effects of reading different "genres." We need an approach that doesn't 
let teachers and professors so cavalierly violate their charge as stewards 
of literacy. We must recognize that screen scanning is but one kind of 
reading, a lesser one, and that it conspires against certain intellectual 
habits requisite to liberal-arts learning. The inclination to read a huge 
Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, 
the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to 
ponder a concept such as Heidegger's ontic-ontological difference over and 
over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative 
insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, 
blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking. The shape and tempo of 
online texts differ so much from academic texts that e-learning 
initiatives in college classrooms can't bridge them. Screen reading is a 
mind-set, and we should accept its variance from academic thinking. 
Nielsen concisely outlines the difference: "I continue to believe in the 
linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don't 
believe the Web is optimal for delivering this experience. Instead, let's 
praise old narrative forms like books and sitting around a flickering 
campfire — or its modern-day counterpart, the PowerPoint projector," he 
says. "We should accept that the Web is too fast-paced for big-picture 
learning. No problem; we have other media, and each has its strengths. At 
the same time, the Web is perfect for narrow, just-in-time learning of 
information nuggets — so long as the learner already has the conceptual 
framework in place to make sense of the facts."

So let's restrain the digitizing of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than 
that, 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. Digital technology has become an imperial force, and 
it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the 
undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off. 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, especially if every inch of the campus is 
on the grid.

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University. His latest 
book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young 
Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30), 
was published by Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin this year.