This post originally appeared as a reply to a post on the NYCIST email chain for technologists working in independent schools in the Greater-NYC area.
As an English-teacher-turned-
- Research: I try to keep up on the cognitive research comparing retention and engagement on etexts versus paper, and my sense is that it's still favoring paper, though perhaps we're not sure why.
- Anecdotal experience: This turns up in the research, but I'll call it anecdotal because it factors so heavily into my own experience reading extensively in both forms. When reading electronically, unless I'm reading .pdfs, which reproduce static, printed pages, I find it much harder to recall where in a given text a moment occurred. Search can help, but the point is about memory. There is a visual component to how we remember printed pages: we tend to remember where on the page text appeared, and we may even remember how far into the book it was (how thick the pages were on either side).
- Industry woes: Though some digital platforms (e.g. Notability) have achieved "best of both worlds" annotation functionality, combining functions for freehand drawing/underlining/symbols with typing, the mess over copyright in the publishing industry means that most texts can only be accessed in highly limited e-reader apps like Kindle, which, for instance, can't do freehand annotation, and won't show your annotations and the text simultaneously.
Of course there are marvelous benefits to e-texts as well. Interactivity and dynamism can better illustrate certain concepts than mere static text. Searchable text is a dream, as is collecting all of my annotations in one place.
I used to envision an all-digital future. Now, with the advent of increasingly creative hybrids like the Rocketbook notebook, I’m not so sure. If there are unique advantages to both print and digital media, why should we have to limit ourselves to one or the other?
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