Screen no match for the page in education

Our students have worked and played with computers for years. Educators envision a whole new pedagogy with the tools, but students see only the chance to extend long-established postures towards the screen. They race across the surface, dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking what they already want and shunning the rest. They convert history, philosophy, literature, civics and fine art into information, material to retrieve and pass along.

That's the drift of screen reading. Yes, it's a kind of literacy, but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a modernist poem, a long political tract and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention: in a word, slow reading. Fast scanning doesn't foster flexible minds that can adapt to all kinds of texts and it doesn't translate into academic reading. If it did, then in a 2006 Chronicle of Higher Education survey of college professors, 41 per cent wouldn't have labelled students "not well prepared" in reading (48 per cent rated them "somewhat well prepared").

We would see reading scores inching upwards instead of seeing, for instance, that the percentage of high school students who reached proficiency dropped from 40 per cent to 35 per cent between 1992 and 2005.

And we wouldn't see even the better students struggling with slow-reading tasks. In an Introduction to Poetry class a while back, when I asked students to memorise 20 lines of verse and recite them to the others at the next meeting, a voice blurted, "Why?" The student wasn't being impudent or sullen. She just didn't see any purpose or value in the task. Canny and quick, she judged the plodding process of recording others' words a primitive exercise. Besides, if you can call up the verse any time with a click, why remember it?

Advocates of e-learning in higher education pursue a risky policy, striving to unite liberal-arts learning with the devices of acceleration that hinder it. Professors think they can help students adjust to using tools in a more sophisticated way than scattershot e-reading, but it's a lopsided battle.

What we are seeing is a strange flattening of the act of reading. It equates handheld screens with Madame Bovary, as if they made the same cognitive demands and inculcated the same habits of attention. It casts peeking at a text message and ploughing through Middlemarch as subsets of one general activity. And it treats those quick bursts of words and icons as fully sufficient to sustain the reading culture. The long book may go, according Leah Price, a professor of English at Harvard University, but reading will carry on just as it did before. "The file, the list, the label, the memo: these (genres) will keep reading alive."

We must recognise that screen scanning is but one kind of reading, a lesser one, and that it conspires against certain intellectual habits requisite to liberal-arts learning. The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger's ontic-ontological difference until it breaks through as a transformative insight: those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IM-ing, Twittering, and Facebooking.

The shape and tempo of online texts differ so much from academic texts that e-learning initiatives in university classrooms can't bridge them. Screen reading is a mindset and we should accept its variance from academic thinking.

Nielsen concisely outlines the difference: "I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don't believe the web is optimal for delivering this experience ... We should accept that the web is too fast-paced for big-picture learning. No problem; we have other media, and each has its strengths. At the same time, the web is perfect for narrow, just-in-time learning of information nuggets, so long as the learner has the conceptual framework in place to make sense of the facts."

So let's restrain the digitising of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology, let's frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces. Digital technology has become an imperial force and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged and logged off.

That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitise learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students' minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate and they can't do it by themselves, especially if every inch of the campus is on the grid.