Category: General

The advantages of digital reading

In the past year or so, I am guessing educators have become aware of a controversy related to whether learners are best able to learn from content presented on paper or a screen.  I am certain some researchers will continue to compare the comprehension of content appearing in a book versus on a screen, but whether or not such research reaches a conclusion one way or the other (see reference from recent meta-analysis), we have already switched to heavily relying on information we can access from our devices. It makes more sense to accept that learning with a phone, tablet, or computer will be involved in a significant proportion of our learning experience and consider how best to use the unique capabilities of these devices. What does digital reading look like and what presently neglected skills are being ignored that educators can help learners acquire? 

I do many different kinds of reading and I think this is true of many learners. I read for pleasure and I read to learn. Those who study reading probably can come up with many more meaningful categories, but these two are sufficient for my argument. I like to describe these reading activities as associated with shallow and deep goals. Some who study different reading activities seem to describe deep reading a little differently than I do. My use of the term implies the intent to learn, retain, and apply information gleaned from reading. I also see an opportunity for digital reading when retention and application follow initial exposure to text by longer periods of time than would be involved in the delay until the next examination. A unique advantage of digital reading is the opportunity to externalize immediate insights and personal interpretations in ways that take advantage of storage, organization, and search capabilities of technology. Some describe this as using technology as a second brain. Accept that human memory is far from perfect. If we think about reading a little differently and consider that reading could also involve efforts at external storage, the time invested in reading to learn may have a bigger return on investment in the future.

What follows are four books (linked to the Kindle version from Amazon) that take on the notion of digital reading. Yes, I have included one of my books among them although this book is focused more on how educators can take advantage of technology to facilitate how students learn when they read. All of these sources explain what I mean by the externalization opportunities technology make available. If you want a single recommendation, it would be “How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking”. I find the title a bit misleading as the text is concerned with far more than taking notes. The author considers learning from reading and learning more generally. I make this recommendation because offers both solid theory and concrete suggestions for practice. 

Grabe – Designing Instruction Using Layering Services: Educators and students guiding learning

Cohn – Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading

Kalir & Garcia – Annotation

Ahrens – How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers

My Diigo account should provide me notes on all of these books.

Reference:

Furenes, M. I., Kucirkova, N., & Bus, A. G. (2021). A comparison of children’s reading on paper versus screen: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 0034654321998074.

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Social bookmarking

I have not written about social bookmarking for some time and like technology in general this category of apps continues to apps. Some of these advances have included the opportunity to store highlights and notes from digital books and to share this information with a specified group or with any interested party.

For the unfamiliar, here is how I see this evolution. When we started with web browsers, we were initially provided the opportunity to store links we wanted to revisit within the browser. Improvements included the opportunity to organize bookmarks into folders and to add tags and descriptions to allow a larger and larger collection to be searched. Eventually, it was possible to store such collections online providing the opportunity to work from different locations with different devices. Eventually, it became possible to share this information or at least designated subset with others. Why not share useful resources? Recent innovations include the addition of advanced note taking capabilities and automatic storage of digital book notes.

My long term favorite has been Diigo. You can explore the public potential of Diigo by examining my notes.

For those interested in sharing insights from books, my recommendation would be Goodreads. I have had a Goodreads account for several years, but I had not paid much attention. Recently, I learned that Goodreads allows for the storage and sharing of annotations. These annotations can be shared. I have not made the effort to download the highlights for all of my books – this is a security measure to allow individuals to decide what they want to offer as a social service. Try “How to take smart notes” to see what the sharing of notes looks like.

Applications for educators? Social bookmarking sites offer a great opportunity to share resources with others having similar interests (e.g., history teachers) or to offer a collection of resources to students.

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Writing to learn and more

I have a long term interest in student note-taking and how it might be improved. A somewhat shorter fascination has been the role of writing in content area learning and this is a topic I consider with a focus on the role of technology in a graduate course I teach. Recently, I read a book by Sonke Ahrens with the rather lengthy title – How to take smart notes: One simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking – for students, academics and nonfiction book writers (reference included at the end of this post). I don’t think the title adequately conveys the breadth of what the book covers. I see it as a book about what learning is and the role writing can play in facilitating the process of learning. By including a consideration of several technology tools, the author brings together many of my interests.

I decided I would try to write several posts on this topic based on my own experiences and interests. These posts may not appear here sequentially, but I promise to offer several posts I will link in some way. My intent is to describe several digital tools I use or have used in what some might describe as a reading to writing workflow. Most academics have related experiences on this process. My focus on digital tools is more in keeping with the core focus of this blog. 

A little history

Several of the authors I have read recently mention what I consider historical perspectives on the role of technology that were already familiar to me and that I have found intriguing. 

In 1945 (no I did not read it immediately upon its publication), Vannevar Bush wrote an article for The Atlantic titled “As we may think”. Bush advocated for the importance of scientific research in the war effort and was partly responsible for what we now recognize as the National Science Foundation. In the Atlantic article, Bush offers early insight into the challenge of processing the enormous about of information that was and continues to be available. He lamented that … For years inventions have extended man’s physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. His solution was the memex – a hypothetical contraption based in the mass storage method of the time (microfilm). This device allowed a user to link together elements of information as a trail that would provide associative insights (as we may think – associative memory). The notion of links among elements of information is often recognized as very similar to the “world wide web” (internet) and the reason many tech folks recognize Bush and the fanaticized memex. The key idea here – technology be a tool for learning through the external representation of ideas and their connections.

Steve Jobs offered what became a famous analogy describing how he saw the potential of the personal computer. He described the efficiency of human movement as far inferior to other animals, but with the assistance of an external device (the bicycle) human movement was far more efficient. This is how he saw the potential benefit of the PC – a bicycle for the mind. At this point in time, the question might be how well does the present use of technology in education match with this goal? Does it facilitate the process of learning and the application of what has been learned?

Ahrens book – https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebook/dp/B06WVYW33Y

Bush’s As we may think – https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/

Steve Jobs Bicycle for the mind – https://youtu.be/ob_GX50Za6c

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Adobe Spark Video

Note: Adobe has replaced Spark tools with Adobe Express. Spark Video is part of Adobe Express.

Adobe Spark Video is a great tool for students to use to create videos. Adobe Spark is especially useful because it works through a web browser and hence is a great application for use with Chromebooks.

The following is the page you will encounter when you connect. You are going to want to create an account.

You can create various types of projects with Adobe Spark. My tutorial describes the slideshow.

The following video takes you through the basics of creating with Adobe Spark

Here is the final product from the project described above.

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The day the good internet died

“The day the good Internet died” is the title of a post by Katie Ringer lamenting what she sees as the decline of the Internet. She associates the date with the end of Google Reader which she argues was not even a great RSS reader, but easy and free and functional. RSS readers allowed users to select content sources (mostly blogs) that a user sometimes has found useful and then check the reader to determine when new content has been posted to these sources. A quick scan would indicate whether the new additions focused on anything of interest and the user can then open the promising content and read further. No doom scrolling through a feed of content from folks you might know or sources you sometimes find interesting but prioritized for your viewing by algorithms not explained to you and now assumed to increase your viewing time to offer the social media service the opportunity to show you more targeted ads and make more money. 

Ringer’s observation is not unique (e.g., Wired story). RSS readers still exist and are better than Google Reader, but too few people use them. The decline of use has a secondary negative impact. Blogs are receiving less attention resulting in bloggers abandoning their independent outlets and focusing on social media aggregators (e.g., Facebook) to find an audience. Again, the reader ends up with less control of their content exploration experience. 

Things may be changing. Google is exploring adding a “Follow” button within Google Chrome as a simple type of RSS. At present the button only exists within the android version of chrome, but Google promises they are working on a version for iOS.

For the time being, try the Chrome extension from Inoreader. As an RSS reader, Inoreader can be accessed as a website or from the RSS extension. You can get a free account that will meet the needs of most people at least in getting started.

The web option looks like the following with the list of feeds and controls in the left panel and snippets from unread posts on the right.

Adding a new feed to Inoreader works this way. In the left-hand column, locate the “Add new” listing. Options for the source type will appear. Adding a feed for a blog requires you select the “Feed” option. This will open a text field for pasting the URL for the blog to be added.

The use of the chrome extension works a little differently. If you are examining a blog and want to add the feed for that blog to InoReader, select the Inoreader icon in the menu bar. This will automatically enter the URL for that site in a text box and selecting the + button will complete the process of adding that feed. Selecting the icon from the menubar also provides access to unread links from the feeds you follow. Select a subscription and you can then view any of the unread posts.

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Hotspots with Google Slides

I was a big HyperCard fan and had a great time using the capabilities of that application to create interesting projects. I was interested in creating virtual learning environments and came up with a concept I called Grandma’s Attic. The idea was that an attic contained all kinds of content that might be regarded as historical artifacts. One could create a virtual attic and have learners explore this attic to collect information to respond to specific requests.

HyperCard offered some capabilities I cannot find in the multimedia tools now available. It had a scripting language and it made use of an object-oriented approach with some interesting capabilities. You could stack objects on top of each other and on top of a card. An object you clicked on would respond to the click if a handler existed or the click would fall through to the next layer (background, card, stack, HyperCard). So, for example, a click on an object on a card might trigger movement to a different card showing that object in a different state (say a closed book to an open book revealing text).

I was reminded of this capability and wanted to see how closely I could mimic some of these capabilities in Google Slides. If so, there would seem to be interesting capabilities for the creation of something like the virtual environments I created in HyperCard.

I actually found a screen capture of one of the displays from the HyperCard activity I created many years ago. One of the objects in one of the attics was a trunk containing stuff – a diary, bundle of letters, photo album, etc. It was easy to bring this image into Google Slides and then use a text box to offer some context about the image.

Slides has the capability of attaching links to objects. I used the square object from Objects and covered the diary.

Objects can be filled with various colors. Grey seems to be the default. I wanted the square object to be invisible and found you can set the fill to transparent. A thin line does mark the location of the “invisible button”, but this seemed fine.

This is the tricky part because it is not obvious from the menu bars that this capability exists. If you right-click (control-click) on an object, this list of options appears. You can use the “Link” option to create an action when the shape is clicked. In this case, I wanted to sent the user to a different slide. Note that the idea would be to have multiple objects used as hotspots to send users to different slides.

So, imagine clicking on the diary and you end up viewing a diary page (just a text field on another slide).

You do need to understand some other features of Slides to approximate what I used to do with HyperCard. First, images, shapes, text boxes appear on slides in layers. You might not notice this unless one object overlaps another. Obviously, you need the invisible button on top of the image of the diary/trunk. Use the “Order” option available in the same menu used to connect a link to an object to manipulate the order in which different objects are layered on the slide.

When you force a tool to do things the designers of that tool did not anticipate, you often have to use creative hacks to get what you want done. Here is an example. Slides is designed to advance slide to slide and not necessarily to jump around using linked buttons. You really want to disable the card to card progression if you can. In the example of the trunk, you don’t want mouse clicks on surfaces other than those covered by invisible buttons to move the experience to the next card. The next card would not necessarily make sense to the user. Here is a kludgy remedy. Start with an invisible button that covers the entire slide and link this button to the same slide. Instead of moving to the next card, clicking elsewhere on the slide will result in no change. The clicks trigges a link that takes the user to the same slide.

This is not a perfect solution as clicks on other objects that cover the all slide invisible button still move the experience to the next slide. This seems a problem that would be very tedious to fix. Perhaps changing the outline of the invisible button to something more visible would encourage willing users to click where their actions would take anticipated consequences. Not exactly the kind of expectation good designers tend to make.

This project was intended mostly as a proof of concept encouraging others to explore with slide-based systems (e.g, Google slides, PowerPoint) and see what atypical applications are possible. The example I use here is unusual, but this technique of using multiple objects to control links to multiple slides is a technique suited to many applications.

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Top 40

Back in the day when you had to purchase records and listen to music on the radio, there used to be stations that carried a weekly top 40 show during which the program host would count down (play) the most popular songs of the week from the bottom to the top. Thinking about the title now I would have to guess at why 40 was the magical number. I asked Google and speculation was that 40 was the number of 45s a jukebox held or the number of songs that could be played during the most popular shows.

I came across an annual top 40 that lists the popularity of EdTech Top 40.

Learn Platform makes an extension available that allows the use of applications to be quantified. The company can then provide data on use at a national level, but individual districts can also collect data on use within a district. The company proposes that it may be helpful to identify whether intended applications are actually being used and to identify applications that just show up.

The company collected data from more than 250,000 educators and 2,000,000 students during this past year. The composite data allow an interested party to consider the most popular edtech services used by educators or students across 10 different categories. The voluntary nature of participation (at least at the level of a district) could easily bias the data collected as far as what typical use might be, but the relative rank of different applications and changes from one year to the next could be useful especially to those of us who from time to time comment on trends and perhaps make decisions about the preparation of future educators.

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