Greetings, Colleagues.
Please join me in a discussion of issues that pertain to the College of Arts & Sciences. On this page, I’ll be providing a link to another page where I will be blogging or providing resources for these issues on a regular basis. I would like to encourage readers to comment freely so we can generate ideas that may lead to best practices for our college. Below please see an introduction and link to this week’s blog:
Reading, Liberal Arts and the Internet
Go to the blog page to find a link to Mark Bauerlein’s recent Chronicle article entitled, “Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind: Slow Reading Counterbalances Web Skimming.”
This is a highly relevant issue and I would love to see some discussion get started on it.
1 Comment
October 21, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Mark Bauerlein has two distinct and important arguments running through this article and through his book. First is the argument that technologically enhanced classrooms don’t improve education. In terms of educational performance all the studies conducted so far demonstrate that there is no statistically significant difference in educational performance between those students who are educated in technologically enhanced classrooms and those who are not. This means massive expenditures of money for no measurable gains. Some of the secondary institutions that overhauled their classrooms to make room for the new technology are now pulling it out in order to save money. But the second argument is even more interesting–namely, that what students do online is so different in kind from ordinary reading that we almost need a new word for it. This is telling. Students read material online in a way that inhibits rather than promotes comprehension. The way online material is scanned (in the F pattern) works for commercial applications such as advertising and purchasing goods but is quite contary to reading in a way that promotes meaningful intellectual formation. This means that as institutions of higher education, we must be apprehensive about bringing new technologies into the classroom and into our courses. For the cognitive apprehension of concepts is our goal. What Bauerlein shows is that if we cater to the technological tendencies of students rather than resist them, then we will fail to educate them. That is, the technological world of the young runs contrary to the sort of tendencies that are essential to learning and to intellectual formation. Because of this, if we hope to educate, then we must frame our educational methodologies in ways that are quite contrary to the ways in which the young interact with technology. Indeed, I think we must encourage them to unplug. Being plugged into technology is not always bad. But there is such a thing as being excessively plugged in–and this excess comes at a price. One such price is the ability to reflect and to deliberate in a careful manner. In short, the young today are too plugged in for their own good when it comes to their own intellectual and spiritual formation. In the name of those goods, we must challenge them to unplug. To read for the sake of comprehension and reflection. And, therefore, at least arguably, to read books rather than failing to read or to “read” in the way most of the young do online.
In sum, I maintain that the cause of Christian higher education today turns on our willingness to resist the wants of our students in the name of their needs. Intellectual formation and technological immersion are at odds. I submit that in becoming more and more technologically oriented in higher education we become less and less able to educate, for in so doing we capitulate to tendencies that are at odds with deep and meaningful learning. For their own good, we must resist fostering and encouraging the tendencies that detract from their good. You might say that we must be countercultural. And that’s not always a bad thing.