perhaps a reading rosary? your cell phone

Laurence,

Thinking about your article it occurred to me that people seem to have a very time fractured life nowadays, and many have no real culture of carrying books with them.

I while ago I came across http://www.booksinmyphone.com where you can get many great old classics to read on a cell phone (gratis). The experience is not quite like reading a book, but it does have the intimacy and the immersed feeling of being in the text. There is also something compelling about the ‘always thereness’ of a book in a phone.

It seems this might be a useful tool for building a relationship with reading. People are never without their phones, so students shuck their texts and take off for R&R — but still have a few things they are reading with them.

The booksinmyphone reader is pretty stripped down, it’s really no good for poetry, and awkward to jump around — but for flowing through a text or hitting particular chapters it’s fine.

nick, at 8:00 am EST on December 3, 2007

Thank you, Professor Musgrove. Your students might even understand my allusions, as they’ve taken time to read and savor the texts.

Judith, at 9:55 am EST on December 3, 2007

The medium is not the message.

What’s different about reading a story on a clay tablet, a parchment scroll, or a bound paper book? Perhaps one would have to handle the media differently. Perhaps they must be stored differently. But are they read differently? No. That’s cognitive.

Surely students have problems reading. My greatest problem teaching math is that students cannot interpret even simple written material.

IMHO, students are inadequately prepared to read clay tablets, parchment scrolls, bound paper books —- and Kindles.

Jeff, at 10:25 am EST on December 3, 2007

No Rewrite Necessary

What, Grover, do you find so disrespectful about the essay? I find the author’s style to be a rather nice break from the rather dull seriousness of most IHE articles. Certain ideas may contain such content that the very act of stating them plainly and simply is in itself disrespectful in that this very plainness strips the idea of the subtle complexity that made them worth considering in the first place. Richard Feynman was once asked by a reporter to give his Nobel prize-winning theory in a form understandable to the average person. He replied “If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.” (Wikiquote)

Also, I have always been annoyed by posters who ask the given author to write what amount to separate papers regarding any subject of the reader’s choosing, as if the author has nothing better to do than to service the private cottage industries of everyone who reads their work.

Joseph C, at 11:00 am EST on December 3, 2007

Students Read and Write More Than Ever

Actually, students are reading and writing more than ever—just different things, in different ways. They are already reading far more text in electronic media than on paper. Outside of textbooks, they encounter _our_ writing primarily in electronic form.

In fact, a Kindle-style delivery system will probably take off initially as an economical substitute for $150 textbooks. The more interesting question here is how electronic media will change our standards of what constitutes “good writing"—not just for ourselves, but for our students.

The electronic mediation of writing (like this conversation) is nearly universal. I suppose there are things to mourn about that. But there are lots of things to celebrate as well.http://marcbousquet.net

Marc Bousquet, author, How the University Works, at Santa Clara University, at 11:30 am EST on December 3, 2007

When you’re blind, deaf, or dumb ... yeah, it’s disrespectful

Joseph C,

I hope that you don’t ever have to go through what I have. Through some odd fate of genetics I wound up with a disease called cholesteatoma that wiped out my bones of hearing — it’s a noncancerous growth that secretes bone dissolving enzymes. I’m lucky ... I only have to deal with moderate hearing loss, but it still has a major impact on my communicative ability. In spite of that I (and many others like me) soldier on. We put up with health insurance that won’t cover hearing aids, judges that chide us about wanting to get out of jury duty (and then fail to use the microphones that they promised to use), and unreasonable expectations when we finally do come up with the money for our hearing aids.

Please refrain from adding to the chorus and recognize when getting too cute really does detract from one’s message.

... and to the author of this article. Please be more considerate with the words you choose.

Matt

Matt, at 2:15 pm EST on December 3, 2007

An essay both beautiful and ridiculous

Beautiful because, yes, reading literature is something to be savored and enjoyed sensually. I have no doubt Dr. Musgrove is a marvelous teacher.

Ridiculous because, as so often happens in the academe, a straw horse of technology is set up as some kind of “opponent.” Despite the absurd claims of the NEA studies and the constant whining I hear among faculties — students today indeed do read more than ever. The challenge among educators is to reach each individual student with the text delivery system that lets them interact most deeply with the tale — be it the sixteenth century technology of ink on paper (who is selling you that technology Dr. Musgrove? Are you blind to the profit motives of printers and paper mills?), or audiotext, or digital text (delivered via Kindle or computer or mobile phone). It is also essential to teach “reading” as an art, no matter what the technology.

So I have mixed feelings — had Dr. Musgrove concluded by arguing for fewer (and perhaps more meaningful) reading assignments throughout the undergraduate curricula, in order to allow more more time, interaction, and reflection, I would have found the whole column enchanting. But instead it morphs into a celebration of one type of capitalist technology (the printed book) at the expense of others, and so I am left wondering why this was written at all...

Ira Socol, Michigan State University, at 6:00 pm EST on December 3, 2007

The Quality of Attention

One recent study appears to show that workers on the night shift are much more vulnerable to cancer and some other problems than other workers are. Perhaps the implications of this study should be applied to our thinking about teaching and the long-term consequences of high-volume, low-contact (depersonalized), mass-market-style instruction. Perhaps they should also be applied to the analysis of the epidemic among our students of diminished attention capacity.

Clearly, we can’t go backward, but surely we can go forward more wisely than we are doing. We can only do so much about the meretricious meatheads who control our state universities, but on a local level we can endeavor to clarify what these malicious bunglers are trying to do, and in our classrooms we can do what we can to make wisdom seem worth achieving.

Hnaef, *** at ***, at 3:40 am EST on December 5, 2007

Slowing Down

I read the beginning of this article with great interest. I also feel that too much of our lives is sped up too much, and that this also applies to higher education. Students often have little time to truly engage with their reading materials, to read deliberately, thoroughly, and widely. They often feel compelled, when doing research for a research paper, for example, to use tables of contents and indices to find only what they feel is immediately relevant to their argument. This obviously leaves them open to taking things out of context. It also makes for an impoverished reading and learning experience.

I think I understand Musgrove’s point when discussing certain students’ inability to relate to the text—to see, hear and speak about the text meaningfully. But that is, I think, little different from the blank stare and incoherent stammer exhibited by some (generally older) people when confronted with a computer, cellphone, or iPod. It has to do with familiarity and literacy. His choice of words were, however, rather unfortunate.

Though I also have a certain attachment to the physical book, I think we must be open to new media. The book was, after all, a new medium just a few hundred years ago. What we need to do is to continue tinkering with the medium to make it as useful as we can (electronic paper makes it more so), and make enough use of it to forget the medium and engage the text. Who gives any thought to the physical book when truly engrossed in the text it contains?

Abram Bergen, at 10:20 pm EST on December 6, 2007