Filed under: Books, College, College Students, Digital Learning, Professors, Technology, University
Tomorrow’s Professor has a guest post up by Sarah Scrafford in which she lays out the pros and cons of the imminent shift to the digital realm that academia will someday make:
The term education is no longer bound by the traditional concepts that shackled it for so long – we don’t have to rely on the traditional methods of information access and content delivery that formed our staple learning diet all these years. Thanks to the Internet and associated technology, there have been rapid advances in the way we access and assimilate information.
Digitizing information and knowledge is so simple and helpful in some ways; the severe reduction in the usage of physical space is a huge bonus. The downside of course being (all romantic notions of books and libraries aside) every aspect of copyrights, royalties, and the validity of digital versus traditionally published and printed information is just a big fat new ball of wax that has been dumped into a squirming bucket of worms. It’s an effing mess, but like most painful evolutions, it’s inevitable. The best thing to do is take a deep breath and get on with it.
Scrafford makes an interesting point about the younger students’ ability to accept and adapt to this change, and the older educators’ trepidation after decades of printed and bound knowledge:
Students, with the advantage of youth and the capacity to embrace new technology on their side, are likely to adapt to innovations with an ease that their professors and teachers, who are steeped in tradition, cannot manage. This throws up an irony of sorts, as those who are meant to be taught end up grasping the medium of education (if not the content that must be taught) at a faster rate than those who are meant to teach.
For an excellent dousing of intense information regarding the current quandaries academe is facing due to the impossible-to-ignore technological advancement of mankind, may I suggest reading Scholarship in the Digital Age by Christine L. Borgman. I’ve read it, and found it simultaneously fascinating (it’s a complicated damn issue) and disturbing (I fear change and love dust-collecting, physical-space-wasting books).
Posted by Alexa Harrington
Confluence of timing. But this is not just a plug for my blog.
I hear all sorts of prophesies of the demise of the book. The ones about electronic forms replacing are the least credible. Humans change biologically over periods of order hundreds of years but socially much faster. That is at root the argument for eBooks.
I would offer however that the printed book is something of order 6 KY old and as such represents a considerable chain of mutation and change all driven to make it optimal (in some sense) for humans. How old is electronics?
I believe the education apparat today divides learners into four (approximately independent) categories of which one is those who learn visually, and there is some further data to indicate that those who make change in society are disproportionately visual learners. There is also data that indicates that for visual learners, maybe for all or most, the higher resolution the image, the better it is stored in memory and the more it contributes to knowledge.
The resolution of books is approximately 1200 dpi, and increasing as we go to older books (differences in printing technology). Current eBook technology does good to support 166 dpi (approximately) and text only, no pictures, no figures, no drawings or diagrams, no equations.
There are lots of other factors and measures. There is a quite good Future Tense podcast on this, http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/2009/02/why-ebooks-have.html, that is the best list of problems: technological financial; and organizational; that I have heard/seen although it does miss almost all of the biological/physiological/physical.
I am not ready to abandon the book for numerous reasons including the ones you cite. Nor do I damn the electronic revolution. But I do advance that it is something of order a century old and has a lot of growing up to rival the ergonomic maturity of the book.
Comment by Simple Country Physicist 03.10.09 @ 9:13 am@SCP–Oddly, I find your numbers with regard to the maturity of paper vs. digital knowledge to be quite comforting. If there is maturing to be done on the part of digitized knowledge and information, then I will have time to get used to the idea. And thanks, also, for the podcast tip. Take care,
Alexa
Comment by admin 03.10.09 @ 11:07 amAlexa, I think the video on your own blog post from back in February speaks to this issue exactly!
http://www.educatednation.com/2009/02/13/21st-century-learners/
It is wrong, though probably unavoidable, that older teachers cling to older methods of teaching and shy away from utilizing new technology. You can’t deny the direction things are going and it doesn’t make sense to limit exposure to these technologies when today’s children will have to use them in order to be competitive in the real world.
Thanks, Lynn! You’re right, that video is applicable to this. I have much sympathy for the teachers and the professors out there; technology is moving forward so fast and it must be overwhelming for anyone (I include myself, as I was in the fourth grade the first time I touched a computer) not born into an already computerized world. At the same time, I do think it’s important for kids to have access to the technology and to learn to think as global citizens. And (and and and), I still maintain that understanding how to access non-digital information is still not obsolete. I know they don’t have card catalogues at most libraries these days, but one should still understand how a repository of printed and bound material is organized, and how to go about finding the book you need in said repository.
–Alexa
Comment by admin 03.11.09 @ 11:24 am