As people who can read it is hard to put ourselves in the shoes of those who can’t – reading for learning, reading for communicating with others, reading to protect ourselves against illness and even knowing when and how to take medication, reading to gain employment and reading for having a voice in decision making in the family and local, regional and global communities.

-Dereck Wenmoth

I am a firm believer that effective reading methodologies should be applied to online texts.  I am not sure if I buy the argument that K12 and liberal arts classrooms should be more technologically naked because students have entrenched ideas about the act of  online reading, an argument opined by Mark Bauerlein in Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind.  According to Mark:

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.

[It] 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.

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.

We need an approach that doesn’t let teachers and professors so cavalierly violate their charge as stewards of literacy.

His approach: Remove the technology and rely less on online texts for learning and understanding new material.

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.

Pretty reactive. Definitely not proactive.

Educators should give the act of online reading equal importance.  Why not?  If teachers want students to “slow read” digital texts, then shouldn’t we employ some of the same reading methodologies that work with physical books and printed words?  Should we just say, “Forget it, our students are just going to read online material in the same manner that they read chat scripts and text messages?”  Explicit teaching is the answer IMHO.  Explicitly teaching the act of online reading using tools that support effective, proven techniques.

I wrote a post awhile back about using reading methodologies and techniques to improve online text comprehension.  The post was orginially an exploration of how you might use a tool like The Awesome Highlighter and a relatively well-known reading methodology, SQ3R, in a classroom setting.  Since that time, I have found myself “slow reading” for meaning using Diigo’s highlighting and notes feature, but not always using SQ3R.  Knowing the tools and understanding the purpose for my reading a particular text was important. In fact, I “slow read” Mark’s article!  Click the image below to see an enlarged version of my online highlighting and notes.

Perhaps Mark does not know about the tools or the techniques…

I originally wrote this post to share a new tool that I encountered yesterday.  The tool is called Vocabgrabber.  Vocabgrabber analyzes any online text and generates lists of the most useful vocabulary words.  It shows you how the words are used in the context of the writing piece and then supplies definitions for both phrases and individual words.  That’s a pretty powerful feature set, the print equivalent of the bold key words that are commonly found in textbooks.

Vocabulary View

Word Analysis of This Post

If educators begin to use tools like The Awesome Highlighter, Diigo, Vocabgrabber, and Dictionary Tooltip in conjunction with reading methodologies while explicitly teaching the act of online “reading for meaning,” then there is no reason why digital texts need to take a backseat to physical books, journals, and magazines.