Like A Book Elegantly Bound, In a Language We Can't Read Just Yet
On Reading Print vs. Reading Digitally
I’ve been online most of my life.1 Some of my most formative years happened during the advent of the internet. The above video, capturing the sound of AOL’s dial up sign-on process is firmly imprinted on my brain, given its ubiquity of my early adolescent years. So too have I been surrounded by books. I’ve been a reader since as long as I could read. Perhaps even before.2 As a child, every time we’d be even remotely near a bookstore, my Mom would allow me to pop in and pick up a new book. I frequently share a story about how transformative it was for me and how I think it’s lead me to my current role, where learning is at the core of what I do each day. I read constantly. And in multiple formats. This is not a post about the value of reading. My own kids have heard me say some version of the phrase, “Reading is a cheat code,” approximately 3 million times in the last ten years. So too do I think a great deal about reading in educational settings—both the promises and perils of our current landscape as they pertain to student learning. Which is why this recent post from Adam Grant caught my eye.
Grant is citing a recent meta-analysis comparing comprehension levels when reading printed texts versus reading digitally. The research is quite robust about the benefits of reading printed texts rather than reading digitally.3 But a question I find myself asking of late is, “So what?” That’s intentionally provocative (perhaps overly so) but there’s a point here. I’m getting to that point now.
You Gotta Spend Some Time—Reading Online In the Wild
Previously I taught a course on American Studies. After years of being frustrated with traditional textbooks, I switched to an Open Educational Resource (OER) digital text, The American Yawp.4 I was well aware of the inherent issues of reading on print versus reading digitally, so I wanted to counteract this potential hiccup at the outset. To do so, I integrated Hypothesis, a plug-in to add a layer of collaborative annotation on top of the digital text. Doing so allowed me to tailor the students’ reading experience with specific questions, as well as terms and concepts to look out for. So too could I see them annotate, and converse with one another, almost in real time each night during assigned homework. I frequently entered into these discussions as well. Further, it allowed me to tweak class the next day, based on what they were picking up, or in many instances, missing. We didn’t need to create a contrived discussion board post in our Learning Management System to make students engage with one another’s ideas and the text. It happened each night in the actual text. Their thinking was made visible in ways that couldn’t have been replicated with a traditional, printed textbook. As the usage increased over the years, we also integrated something called ‘CrowdLaaers’ from my friend Dr. Remi Kalir5, to further amplify and understand the kinds of interactions taking place in the text.
And you know what? The students who consistently made the most thoughtful annotations always performed the best in my classes.
So too did this process give voice to students who tended to not participate regularly in class. For more introverted students, reading digitally with Hypothesis gave them a new outlet to make their thinking visible beyond simply saying a bunch in class.6 I was having a conversation with a highly regarded cognitive scientist and educational researcher about this exact thing in the spring of 2024. We were engaging in respectful intellectual ping pong about the print versus digital divide. And then I described my process above, and he paused, thoughtfully, before responding with something to the effect of, “…hmm, that’s interesting. You might really have something there.”7 I think I do have something here. And it’s something I am going to investigate in the near future.8
You Reject My Advances—Reading and Change Over Time
I could go really, really long on this answer. I’ll keep it short: There are countless different ways to write, and things and ideas to write about. And the Internet offers a kaleidoscope of different formats, media, tools, sights, and sounds to tell your stories. And most of us are not even trying to scrape the surface of any of it. We’ve got to start thinking of the Internet as something more than a glow-in-the-dark newspaper.—Jon Bois, SBNation
A big part of being terminally online means reading lots of obscure stuff. But it also means lots of reading stuff online. Back in 2017 SB Nation blogger Jon Bois wrote a sprawling longform multimedia piece called 17776 (also known as What Future Will Look Like in the Future). It won a National Magazine Award for Digital Innovation and was up for a number of other accolades. The point here ultimately relates to the bolded portion of the above quote—“We’ve got to start thinking about the internet as something more than a glow-in-the-dark newspaper.” I think that’s very correct. And I also think the fact that we view reading digitally as doing so via a ‘glow-in-the-dark newspaper’ is at the core of the print-digital comprehension divide. I am raising three kids in a vastly different media and information landscape than the one I grew up in, even thought I came of age at the dawn of the internet. My 9-year-old is obsessed with History.9 However, he consumes history via YouTube videos and audio podcasts mostly, with the occasional book sprinkled in, particularly after I’ve shoved it into his hands. It’s clear that he knows far more about History than I did as a 9-year-old. Is it bad that the bulk of his knowledge has come via audio and visual mediums? I’m not sure there’s a clear answer here. He’s a competent reader, not great, but he knows way more stuff than I ever did at his age. That seems like a good thing.
To that end, the book didn’t become the dominant means of communicating information because of the cognitive benefits, but instead, because it was the most efficient way to convey large swaths of information at scale. Technology changed allowing society to compartmentalize and spread information more efficiently than it had in the past. Print culture became dominant over time, literacy increased, and the flywheel sped up. But isn’t this what the web is, now? There are intersections between technological and cultural forces at play here. If we’re assessing comprehension levels related to print versus digital reading, than shouldn’t we acknowledge this and design reading experiences to leverage constituent parts of digital reading that we perhaps haven’t, yet?
How I Wish We Could See the Potential—Pulling Back the Curtain and Ways to Read Better Online
Full disclosure: I started to read the meta-analysis linked at the outset digitally. I marked it up and annotated in Hypothesis. I will admit that I then realized I wasn’t as focused as I wanted to be. I was checking Twitter, BlueSky, LinkedIN, and email in between passages.
So I printed out the article and sat down and read it in print form, away from my computer.
After reading it in print form, I then took the article and ran it through NotebookLM to engage in dialogue with the text. I even listened to the Deep Dive Audio Overview to see if I there were any other insights I might glean.
This is to say I read (or consumed it) in multiple ways. I often tell my own kids, “There is a world that exists as it is. And there’s a world that exists as you’d like it to be. Only one of these things is true, no matter how much you might dislike that.” There are tools out there which improved my experience of reading the article. These tools are new in many instances. These tools have also merely amplified my reading experience. My friend and very tall person Rod Naquin writes often about this stuff, particularly the intersection of reading and the age of AI. He and I are fairly aligned on this front.
I particularly like his phrase “dialogic computing” and the accompanying ‘Three Part Model’ he espouses, essentially putting the reader in dialogue with the text (see image below). In many ways, this is merely an extension of my foray into Hypothesis and social annotation. Reading digitally in the age of AI allows us to put readers in dialogue with one another and in a kind of dialogue with the text. While I'm not suggesting these tools replace traditional reading—which remains a powerful tool in our modern society, especially since so few engage deeply with it—I do believe they should reshape our understanding, teaching, and evaluation of reading in digital contexts. This is the reality of how we consume information today; it reflects the world as it exists.10
Note: I always pull blog titles from song titles or lyrics. It’s a thing. It’s fine. Just go with it. I named the blog ‘The Academic DJ’ after all. Today’s title comes from Death Cab for Cutie’s song, I Will Possess Your Heart. This is mostly a love song (albeit creepy and stalkerish at times), but the lyrics, often referencing books, are eerily perfect. Plus, books—and print in general—possess my heart. So here we are.
I remain far too online. But I will never log off.
Is that possible? I don’t know. Let’s not let facts get in the way of a good story. The point remains—I’ve been around books for as long as I could hold them.
The cited study—and meta-analyses in general—are fairly complex. Again, however, the research is clear on the benefits for comprehension when reading printed texts. One of my spicier takes relates to meta-analysis of educational research, which I think are more like Astrology (respectfully). But that’s a different post for a different day.
There were many reasons for this. “Digital is superior” wasn’t one of them. I just wanted something more flexible. And something cheaper (in this case, free). This also allowed me to share portions of monographs, really great journal articles, and other interesting and robust digital media to reflect the diverse nature of American Studies. Digital Humanities, FTW.
Remi is now the Associate Director of Faculty Development and Applied Research at Duke University's Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education (LILE). Remi is great and one of my favorite people on the planet. Put Remi in your orbit if he isn’t already there.
This had the added benefit of giving students from different cultural backgrounds an opportunity to share their thinking in a space that was often more intellectually rigorous than class discussion. (Or vigorous. Vigorous is better. I hate “rigor” as some kind of meaningful descriptor)
Reader…when this person paused and said that? I knew I had something there.
Pedagogical Research and/or SoTL, again, FTW!
And this History teacher is not upset by this at all.
Especially for students in higher grades. I remain all-in on print for the youngest learners for as long as possible. Heck, I’m all-in on books for everyone. I love books. I’ve gotten rid of too many books (stupid move). I have too many books that I’ve read and even more that I haven’t (yet). Books are my love language. What I’m saying, is that I love books. This is not an anti-book screed. It is an acknowledgment that perhaps we’re living through a transformative period and maybe we should think about what future we want, rather than grasping at a past that seems increasingly unaccessible.
I love this-- more reading is more reading. Who cares if the text appears in the sky or amongst the trees and forever has dubious provenance and authorship? Really?