At the risk of reigniting a debate that has been had in my timeline in the past... here's a report of a University of Valencia that looked at over 20 paper examine the differential effects of reading digitally & on paper.
The research confirms my experience (my own & in the reading of my erstwhile students) that reading digitally is less likely to lead to long-term educational (knowledge) benefits...
@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon I wonder if that is partly because reading a book or a journal has extra sensory levels to reading on a tablet or computer. I much prefer paper to digital.
@purplepadma@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon There is that. I am a BMA member so get the BMJ delivered as part of that and ditto the BJGP. An expensive way of getting them though! You used to be able to subscribe but most are now all online. Print the articles off? No easy answer.
@purplepadma@nusher@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon Yes. For kinetic learners like myself, engaging with printed matter results in much greater retention of information than reading digital media. I highlight passages. If I have trouble focusing on content, I pencil notes and comments in the margins. I benefit from that spatial sense of where specific passages or data are located within the pages, or even on a specific page. For me, digital reading for pleasure, but printed matter is for serious work.
Yes, that's a really good point... that said, I'm not sure I'd hold up academic journal articles as a pardon of good writing - but perhaps that's not the issue; you can critically engage with badly written research....
@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon
I’d agree, with a slight qualification. Primary comprehension is better with books. Secondary reference usage, especially search and quoting, is far better with digital.
The problem imo is messing up the primary comprehension bit by not having the money for books and giving students crappy pdfs instead.
Now let’s do the debate on writing vs typing affecting mental retention …
I'd agree on search with digital, provided (!) good research skills a re inculcated - the problem I often used to have with students was the inability to use online search in an engaged & critical way.... used to lead to some hilariously miss-researched stuff in essays though....
@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon
This is not a very clear argument.
I find PDF textbooks more valuable since one can search text and illustrations, text that were hard to see before can be enlarged for clarification.
I moved to a much smaller home and would have had to leave my library behind if I did not make it electronic. It now fits on a Tb drive instead of taking up a room.
Are kids reading more rubbish rather than worthwhile texts? Yes, but that is not the fault of Ebooks.
@negative12dollarbill@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon
😅 I learned that lesson the hard way. So there is now a pristine, untouched Tb drive that is an exact copy and when the old one packs in, my first act would be to copy the backup.
@adritheonly@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon The professor enjoys reigniting this debate, and proselytising for print, if the number of times he has done so in the past is any guide.
@adritheonly@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon
I suspect there was a generation of teachers who insisted that their tests proved that students did not learn as well from printed books as they did from handwritten ones. I wonder if their tests were really testing what they thought they were testing, much as SATs etc. turn out to largely be testing access to certain classes of cultural materials rather than what they thought they were testing.
(I did great at SATs, 1/2 century ago...)
@elysegrasso@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon
I think you might be right. I embraced new technology the moment it appeared, first playing frisbee with vinyl, then with CDs, etc. but teachers, at least the ones I've known over the years (both my sisters are teachers), tend to stick to norms and are more traditional. The fact that kids have the entire internet in the palm of their hand must be concerning/threatening to guardians. It would make for biased testing.
In the late 90s, I had to teach introduction to web page creation classes with Notepad as my IDE, not because I was anti-IDE, but because I couldn't get anything else installed and approved.
That same course was later discontinued as "regional" by the Harris government.
@eyrea@adritheonly@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon Interesting comment, but not entirely relevant to the point of mine, which was that studies with results claiming that old ways are better may be showing more about the design of the tests than they do about the activities supposedly being studied.
Seriously. The trend has been to take that away from teachers (although, weirdly, governments often want teachers to do more classroom research), and implement a strict curriculum teachers have little say in shaping or providing.
@elysegrasso@adritheonly@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon Any classroom tests being conducted by teachers are being done on top of their existing workload, not necessarily by people with a research background. That makes it easy for the only completed tests to be only existing to confirm existing biases.
@eyrea@adritheonly@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon still not relevant to my point, which had to do with the structure and validity of scholarly studies, not classroom teaching or tests.
@eyrea@adritheonly@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon The original discussion was about a study which claimed that people have been shown to learn better from paper books than other media. The SATs were mentioned as an example of survey design that was not testing what it claimed to test.
I've read papers based on one classroom of kids doing something different for one term. That puts constraints on the findings, and they should be treated as such. The problem is the extrapolation, which does away with the constraints and turns into "all teachers think..."
@eyrea@elysegrasso@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon
I have sympathy with that. My sister, who went a bit faster than the curriculum (her students were bored) was severely reprimanded by the ED dept.
@adritheonly@elysegrasso@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon Yup. I was taught in teachers college that in the 60s in Ontario, if you were on page 72 of your math textbook, you could state with confidence that the vast majority of your peers across the province were also on page 72 that day, and that they were all using the same text as you.
Then people (understandably) said they wanted individual and community circumstances factored in.
@eyrea@elysegrasso@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon
Yes, I finally dealt with our own ridiculous ED system by suggesting my daughter put my grandson into a Waldorf, where education happens at the pace of the student.
@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon That confirms my own feelings. However, as I am blind, I rely in digital reading. When doing research, I tend to use Kindle books, but I make sure I turn digital pages manually rather than let the screen reader read the entire book in one go. That way, I can re-read a page if I find an important passage, or go through the page slowly, line by line. Kindle also allows me to make notes I can refer back to. I need to work at these habits because it is much harder to go back through a digital source than a print one if you are looking for a specific passage.
Digital & audio books are fine for casual reading, but studying takes a lot more effort.
Yes the specific benefits of digital sources were one of the key & important lines of discussion last time, with a number of people raising exactly this important issue - though also good to see that grounded in personal experience, thanks
@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon I did a degree with the OU and was in the cohort where they stopped issuing print textbooks and went pdf only. If you wanted print you had to pay extra.
Despite students objecting and citing the research on this subject which demonstrated learning would be impaired, the OU steamrollered ahead with the change to save money.
I was fortunate to have a visual impairment that meant I got free print on demand textbooks as an accommodation.
Yes, I did my first degree with the OU in the age of print & cassettes, while a later MA (a couple of years ago) was completely digitised... and to be frank I found the latter a much less enjoyable & beneficial experience (although I'm still glad I did it)
@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon I agree, I find when reading on paper I will go back, reread, cross reference, bookmark etc, reading digitally is much more linear, good in a novel, less so in reference/text books.
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