This article was published in '99, but it predicts the future of online reading and e-readers astonishingly well. The entire roster of Tampa Bay Buccaneers use Ipads before games. Textbooks are now offered in E-reader forms. It's only a matter of time before it becomes the standard way to read texts.
All of Sosnoski's pointz about skimming and lack of focus while online hit home for me. In many instances we have the ability to scroll through an article faster than we could ever flip through a book. Hell, there might be some students that use the Ctrl+F function to search through an article for key words.
For me, I read articles fully when I know that skimming them will not do them justice. in some cases, the author has to have an engaging voice or style to suck me in. Otherwise, my brain instantly recognizes an academic article and a "rhetorical voice" and locks down into "find the key statements mode".
Firstly, I'm glad that you check things like publication date -- for pieces like these it makes quite a bit of difference. As for skimming, I'm right there with you. I know that there are texts that will be really important to know the details on, every detail you can absorb, and others that you can "get the gist" of and still understand the contribution the text makes to a specific conversation. (I don't know if that is what you experience exactly) -- And I love students who have those tablet things and can key-word search in the middle of class discussion -- they make life so much easier for me!
ReplyDeleteI found it really interesting too how he was able to be so right on about the future of reading even back then. i didn't know what year it was exactly, but he did mention dial up internet so i figured it was a few years back. i thought it was amazing how well he predicted it though.
ReplyDeletethe whole skimming thing for me though was an area that i could not relate to...i'm not a skimmer, which can make things difficult being writing major and having so much to read. but i feel like i do not know what to look for going in to the article that it would be hard to skim to find what is important. i feel as if i would miss something that was a key part of the article.