Abhi Sharma/Creative Commons 2.0

I was listenting to the podcast “Note to Self” the other day. I really like to download a whole bunch of different podcasts and listen while driving. So much so that I actually look forward to long car trips now. Anyway, enough about me…

This episode was titled “There is Just Something About Paper,” and you can listen to it here. In short, Manoush (the host) discussed how reading online, or on a computer, is just not the same thing as reading on paper. I know we have all heard this, or even thought this same thing before. What was incredibly interesting about this show was the research they used to back it up. It turns out that screen reading is actually changing our brains. Even “veteran” readers admit that they can’t get through a novel or “even a long New Yorker article.” We’ve lost our ability to “slow read,” as our brains adapt to do more skimming.

With on-screen reading, we tend to skip around more often, and not read linearly like we used to. Obviously this is incredibly detrimental for our attention spans. Even Mary Ann Wolfe, the Director for the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University admits she finds she can’t re-read a Herman Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game” straight through anymore.

This makes me wonder if on-line texts are helpful or hurtful. People that have been reading all their lives, now find they can’t read a book anymore. We have to retrain our brains to be able to read in both media. This is a purposeful, and time-intensive task. Are our students (or are we) up to that task? Are we doing our students a disservice by finding free or low-cost textbooks that are online?