Education

Ugh, that should read "The thing in the way is that there still isn't a completely foolproof online business model for a house like HarperCollins or Random House to pull in the millions that they do putting the latest Grisham, King, or even Julie & Julia in Barnes & Noble."

I should have proofread BEFORE hitting "post"

Much of what you write resonates with me, though Tom's concerns seem valid.

Another concern: Who, exactly, is the "we" that glosses online texts so eagerly, and how valuable is much of that glossing? There is certainly a core of on-line readers who are every bit as engaged in their reading as were the Renaissance humanists who left their curious script all over manuscripts and early printed books.

I've seen some anecdotal research on teen-agers' on-line reading habits that could be construed as encouraging or worrisome, depending on your point of view. Encouraging, because many non-readers are now reading more on-line than they ever did in books. Worrying, because much of that reading is of the hunt-and-peck, episodic variety encouraged by hyperlinked texts.

Early manuscripts covered with annotations reflected multiple readers' sustained engagement with a single text--a sort of extended dialogue, across generations, of readers and writers with prodigious attention spans.

It's not clear to me that many young readers reading and commenting on on-line text enjoy the same sustained engagement with texts that challenge the understanding and reward long effort with often unexpected insights.

There was also, of course, the disturbing National Endowment of the Arts study suggesting that young people read fewer books for pleasure than they used to--so many new media competing for their attention. Is it possible that actual books promote greater patience and attentiveness? Could it be that the story of on-line reading is one of something lost and something gained?

I agree with Claus. Sometimes I worry that this rapid change in technology seems to be pushing us to place where we have to choose. Choose to be online reading or reading a book. Choose to be online "socially" networking or talking to the people in front of us. I applaud Shelley for creating a Paperless classroom. But maybe a classroom with all technology on no other outlets/devices is just a dangerous as a classroom void of technology. I love finding things online. But I can't imagine sustained readings of books strictly online. I haven't tried any of the new devices like the Kindle, and maybe they offer promising alternatives, but I am not tossing my books yet.

I would love to see your class, Shelley. It sounds amazing--a perfect marriage of 21st-century media and classical content.

I do still worry about the effects of online reading habits on student attention--though your approach seems to inspire students' sustained attention, collaboration and active engagement. Perhaps that's the best reason for using 21st-century technologies in schools rather than abandoning those technologies entirely to popular culture.

(First, I've enshrined this post in the Best.Titles.Ever Hall of Fame.)

@Tom, I feel your pain re: the effects of the Revolution on the Profession of writing. Free doesn't pay the bills or lead to Free time to write more. But then again, most of the Masters died less than rich, and wrote on the fly, and were loved (and profited from) posthumously. Maybe artists BC (Before Capitalism) and AD (After its Death, at least for commercial media) are meant to live hungry.

And maybe not. Nine Inch Nails, Doctorow, other folks experimenting with the "give it away and ask for a donation" model. Maybe that will work. 

Which brings me to:

@Claus and @Mrs CJ:

I've spent the month doing some pretty sustained "reading" online that has never been possible before. It looks like this:

Earphones in. Quicktime on. So far, Lectures One through Sixteen (50 minutes each) of Yale Professor Christine Hayes' Introduction to the Old Testament course. Browser open to trancription of lessons online by Yale. Diigo annotating (when I'm watching online) key points of lecture -- I pause the video, "find" the keyword of the idea I want to highlight on the cloud with Diigo, then hit "play" again and go back to that form of reading called "listening." Shelly points to its ancestors in original epic (and Shakespeare, which we watched rather than read originally).

I did an experiment last night: copied one full lecture transcript onto a trade paperback sized page of Pages (think Word for Macs), just to see how many pages of reading each 50 minute lecture represented. At 10 pt font, 1.5 space, it was 22 pages. I multiplied it by the number of lectures and came up with about 530 pages.

So I'll have listened to 530 pages of lecture -- and used their transcripts to highlight and annotate -- for free, thanks to the web.

I didn't lose my focus. On the contrary, I'm impatient with the world for getting in the way of my being able to watch the remaining eight lectures. Maybe that has to do with my age, or my history of being a lifelong bookish type. But maybe it had to do with having an urgent curiosity and a medium that satisfies it -- which may be the case for any teen too.

Having a laptop is a cursed blessing, as Claus and CJ note, for its infinitude. It's like living in a bookstore 24/7 that says "steal anything." So we browse this and that, but when we find what we want to read/watch/listen to now, I think we get around to finishing it about as often as we do with physical books (how many do we buy and never read, the analog version of a different ADD re: literacy?).

Too long.

Love this thread and post.

@Clay:  Yeah, I know ... so many greats did die poor and commercial success does not necessarily equal quality.  But I wanted to at least point out that there's a difference between writing and publishing.  One's a craft, a profession for those who are lucky.  One's an industry, and when gushing about what's new in reading and writing we tend to lose sight of how the industry actually works (kind of the same way we lose sight of the major problem with public education being that it's a bureaucracy).

@Clay and @Tom: Without a doubt, many great writers have died poor, and much great literature has thrived at a time when writers weren't particularly well fed. Still, shouldn't we spare as much concern for the writers as we do for their craft? I'd hate to think that the stuff that really endures pays so little while the people who make money out of money continue to walk away fat and happy.

@Clay: Your account of online reading is very inspiring. (I've also been listening to some of the Yale lectures--John Rogers on Milton is one of my favorites.)

Still, it's probably safe to say that your and Shelly's online reading practices are quite different from those of many young readers out there. That's why it's so nice to know that teachers like you are helping students become such committed, engaged and savvy online readers. If schools ignore new media, they leave students to their own devices (literally), and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

I found Shelly's comparison of 21st-century reading to medieval and Renaissance forms of reading and commentary very insightful. To me, though, there's a crucial difference. Many texts were devotional, and readers were in the habit of reading and re-reading them. What's more, even the wealthiest and best educated people had access to very few books, so they carefully glossed--and seldom glossed over--what they read.

Now, it's much easier to skip over passages, move from one text to another, search by keyword, etc.--all to arrive at our intended destinations much more quickly. I do it all the time, because--as Clay suggested--the internet is almost like Borges's infinite library, full of both meaning and gibberish.

This kind of reading has it's downsides. I remember reading a New York Times article in which teen-agers described their reading habits. They described how easy it is to skip "irrelevant" and "boring" details and get to what they want much more quickly. One fan fiction enthusiast described how she could change books so that characters she liked survived and those she didn't died." Don't you think this kind of reading can become a form of wish-fulfillment that reinforces our prejudices and widens our blind spots? Sometimes, a seemingly boring or irrelevant passage proves enlightening in retrospect. Sometimes we don't recognize the importance of seemingly trivial details until much later on. Sometimes we have to follow another writer's path from start to finish to learn something new.

So.... Online reading has tremendous benefits to those who can use it well, but aren't there also some potential pitfalls? In either case, it seems, schools should not shun new technologies. 

I should proofread.  I meant to write "its downsides," not "it's downsides"!

Just before I read your post, I read the following on OpenSalon, in which Scott Christian explains why he thinks print is in no danger of disappearing:

http://open.salon.com/blog/scott_christian/2009/07/09/the_800_pound_paper_gorilla

His main point is that we thought theatre, film, radio, and, recently, television, would disappear, and they haven't.  They've shrunk, they've transformed, and they've gone (or are going) from being our main forms of entertainment to harnessing more dedicated, knowledgeable audiences who are willing to pay (or pay more) for premium content. 

He argues that the same will happen to print journalism, and I would suggest that if the book publishing industry can follow the same model (they already do, to some extent, but adjustments still need to be made), books will continue to thrive.  They will not be the main source of info or entertainment for everyone, but they will have their own important place.