There's this thing that happens to me a lot, and I wonder if it happens to other people who are interested in digital literacies, too.
A scenario:
[Location: super-fancy party where Bethany doesn't know anyone.]
Current Friend: This is Bethany. She studies digital literacies.
New Friend: Oh! Did you know that people shouldn't use computers in the classroom because students don't remember things as well with them?
[End scene.]
I'm often stymied by these sorts of comments because of the capital V 'Vs.' that's implied. As in, Digital Vs.* Analog; Paper Vs. Screen; Alphanumeric Vs. Multimodal.
For me, the word in the middle is 'and' rather than 'Vs.', and the next part of that fancy party is me trying to explain my take on some of the research that New Friend just shared. Because the argument usually happens in person, I tend to blunder my way through. However, since I'm writing right now and have glorious access to the undo button, I'm going to use this week's blog post to try to (super-eloquently) unpack two pieces of research that people often use in the Vs. argument so I'm ready for the next fancy party.
Taking Notes
You might have heard the argument that, when students take notes by hand, they remember more information. In their Who Needs Handwriting? episode, Freakonomics spent quite a while breaking down Mueller & Oppenheimer's (2014) research on how well students remember information when they take notes by hand versus when they take notes on a computer.It's a really cool piece of research. Students watched a TED-talk and either took notes by hand or on a computer. The students who took notes by hand did better on conceptual questions. The researchers theorized that, in taking notes by hand, a learner has to select what's important, and in doing so, makes some important cognitive jumps that help her to learn.
I would argue that New Friend's interpretation oversteps the research's data, especially because the research engages with a very specific type of teaching style, the lecture, and a very specific demonstration of learning, written analysis of differences.
Other ways of teaching, like Connected Learning or Decentralized Learning, focus on having students' engage in actions as ways to both learn and demonstrate learning. For example, a student in a classroom that uses a connected learning style might create a podcast about bird migration in cooperation with a local Audubon society.
The two demonstrations of learning, a short written response and a podcast, are very different. Because of that, they require very different tools, both for intake and for output.
I think what Mueller & Oppenheimer's research really shows, for fancy-party purposes, is that there are times when using a computer in the classroom makes sense, and there are times when it doesn't. When I was teaching middle school, there was no way I was going to ask students to open their computers while I lectured at them. Because shopping, social networks, instant messaging, and cat memes.
Reading
The scenario continues...
[Location: One minute later.]
New Friend: Hey, Other Friend! Come over here! This is Bethany. She studies digital literacies.
Other Friend: Oh! Because reading on paper is so much better for kids than reading online, right?
[End scene.]
There are also articles that talk about reading comprehension and digital texts. This one by Alexander & Singer (2017) talks about research where college students were asked to read text that was in print and text that was online. The text was entirely alphanumeric, so there were no images on the paper version, and the online version did not have images, video, audio, hyperlinks, or any of the other affordances of digital texts. Alexander and Singer found that, with the exception of students who read more slowly online, students understood the main idea of both the print and online texts, but they had a harder time recalling details when they read digital texts.
Once again jumping back to the fancy party, you might remember that Other Friend was clear that reading on paper was better than reading online.
In this case, I would argue that Other Friend was thinking of reading as only including letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, and in that case, Alexander & Singer's research implies that paper might be a better medium for that. I know that my comprehension is pretty high when I curl up with a paper-bound book and a cup of coffee next to a roaring fire on a snowy day.
That said, the problem with Vs. in this case is that it's impossible to compare the ways that people read & understand online with the ways that people read & understand on paper because of the different things that online and paper do.
For example, the Marginal Syllabus brings together educators to talk about equity in education. Participants read a digital text. They participate in a Google Hangout, often with the author of a piece, where they mark up the text using hypothes.is. They comment and respond to each other's textual notes. If a new participant wants to engage with the topic after the Google Hangout is over, she can, and past participants get emails notifying them when a new comment has been made on their textual notes.
So, although Alexander & Singer found that students remember more details of texts that they read on paper, the differences in what a digital environment and a print environment can do mean that it would be incredibly difficult to compare the two.
Which is good. Because cocoa and novels and snowy days are good. And annotating and cat memes are good, too.
* Side note. The first time I ever saw Vs. written down was when I 'borrowed' my uncle's old Mad Magazines, and I read the comic as Spy vees Spy for years. I assumed that to 'vee' someone was to try to hurt them.
Alexander, P., & Singer, L. (2017, October 3). The enduring power of print for learning in a digital world. Retrieved from The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/the-enduring-power-of-print-for-learning-in-a-digital-world-84352?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20October%203%202017%20-%2084756999&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20October%203%202017%20-%2084756999+CID_34d995772fba3cde98f57cc9cd2bcf76&utm_source=campaign_monitor_us&utm_term=The%20enduring%20power%20of%20print%20for%20learning%20in%20a%20digital%20world
Mueller, P., & Oppenheimer, D. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168.
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