We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society. Linton Weeks, in the article, “We are Just Not Digging the Whole Anymore”

Like Chris Fox, I, too, am going to be picking a new textbook for next year, and like him, I  have already decided to use a combination of digital and print textbooks. Unfortunately, only the large publishers can offer these, so our choices are limited.

Clearly, education is trending toward more use of online resources, which begs the question, is it better? Will our students learn more, or learn better, with the online tools available to them, compared to the older print-media textbooks?

I have never used an online textbook before, although I have had my students using a large variety of online resources, from simple webpages (Wikipedia, for example) to interactive games and puzzles. In my experience, the new generation is not very good at reading for understanding. Too often, they seem to see the words without actually absorbing them, and I do wonder whether the shift away from linear reading of text-heavy paper books is one reason. When I grew up, the choice of material was very limited, and my job was to read it from start to finish. In today’s world, the choices are vast, and we rarely read from start to finish, as the article quoted above points out. As Google’s websearch studies have shown, our eyes do scan the entire page, but almost never from top to bottom. So this implies to me that my students are not absorbing information as well as they used to.

On the other hand, I suspect that our students are learning better because they have the ability to engage with text and material through the use of better visuals, more interactivity, and highly-targeted searches. When they want to know how large the Japan earthquake was, they search for that and that alone, rather than reading an entire chapter to find the piece of information they are looking for. But when they look up the Japan earthquake, they also see maps, videos, interactive graphics, links to aid organizations, diagrams of a nuclear plant, etc, all of which contribute to the broad comprehension of the topic.

So it seems that our students are able to access so much more material in so many better ways. On the other hand, I’m not sure whether they do that very well. Scanning a diagram of a nuclear power plant is not the same as learning it. So in the end, it seems, the teacher’s role in the new media is exactly this: to teach our students how to use the new visual media for better learning so that they can acquire and use knowledge, rather than just skimming across it.