Mark Bauerlein wrote an interesting analysis back in September on whether or not “screen reading” is comparable to more traditional forms of literacy, and ultimately finds the former wanting,
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.
. . .
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, [Leah] 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.”
I think Bauerlein makes the mistake of blaming technology for what is really a particular fad in electronic learning. That fad essentially argues that we need to engage (i.e. pander to) students by pandering to the media forms they’re most accustomed to. Marc Prensky seems to be the standard bearer for this approach. As he puts it in Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,
First, our methodology. Today’s teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students. This doesn’t mean changing the meaning of what is important, or of good thinking skills. But it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other things. Educators might ask “But how do we teach logic in this fashion?” While it’s not immediately clear, we do need to figure it out.
Second, our content. It seems to me that after the digital “singularity” there are now two kinds of content: “Legacy” content (to borrow the computer term for old systems) and “Future” content.
“Legacy” content includes reading, writing, arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the past, etc – all of our “traditional” curriculum. It is of course still important, but it is from a different era. Some of it (such as logical thinking) will continue to be important, but some (perhaps like Euclidean geometry) will become less so, as did Latin and Greek.
“Future” content is to a large extent, not surprisingly, digital and technological. But while it includes software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, etc. it also includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages and other things that go with them. This “Future” content is extremely interesting to today’s students. But how many Digital Immigrants are prepared to teach it?
I completely agree with Bauerlein, but the reality is that for a variety of reasons it is Prensky’s view which seems to be prevailing.