Library…Learning Center…InfoMart
Cushing Academy in New England has decided to get rid of an outdated technology and embrace the future.
Says its Headmaster: “When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books”
Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.
Some good points in this article, especially these two:
Unless every student has a Kindle and an unlimited budget, I don’t see how that need is going to be met,’’ Fiels said. “Books are not a waste of space, and they won’t be until a digital book can tolerate as much sand, survive a coffee spill, and have unlimited power. When that happens, there will be next to no difference between that and a book.
It seems that money may not be an object.
And:
William Powers, author of a forthcoming book based on a paper he published at Harvard called “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal,’’ called the changes at Cushing “radical’’ and “a tremendous loss for students.’’
“There are modes of learning and thinking that at the moment are only available from actual books,’’ he said. “There is a kind of deep-dive, meditative reading that’s almost impossible to do on a screen. Without books, students are more likely to do the grazing or quick reading that screens enable, rather than be by themselves with the author’s ideas.
Center for the Future of the Screen
FROM: Center for the Future of the Screen
DIRECTOR: Danny Bloom
WEBSITE: http://zippy1300.blogspot.com
OFFICE: TAIPEI, TAIWAN
Do we need a new word for the new kind of “reading” we do on screens?
TAIPEI, TAIWAN — Are you reading this press release — or — are you screening this? How you answer this question will determine whether you get to the bottom of this news release.
Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe on June 19, fired the first volley in this now-national discussion. “Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we read on the printed page?” Beam asked rhetorically. His column was headlined by a savvy Globe copyeditor: “I screen, you screen, we all screen.”
The answer to Beam’s question is, of course, yes. From most of the research that has come in so far from academics in North America and Europe, the answer is clear, although not everyone’s in agreement with what it all means.
Yes, screening has multiple meanings. We screen movies, we screen job candidates, we screen patients for medical problems, we do a lot of “screening” in this world of ours. And now, you will be hearing a lot about a new kind of “screening” — so-called reading on plastic, pixelated screens.
Dr. Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger in Norway tells us what she thinks about the word “screening” for reading on a screen: “My first impression is that the term ‘screening’ is adequate in some respects, but not in others. It’s adequate to the extent that it points to certain differences in the reading mode which has to do with the display nature, the central bias of a screen compared to a page of print text (our gaze is naturally oriented towards the center), and the image-like character of modalities (we tend to read a screen spatially, in contrast to the page which we linearly).”
Dr Mangen, in a published academic paper published in Britain last December, listed a few reasons that reading on paper and reading on a screen are two very different animals.
* Reading on a screen is not as rewarding — or effective — as reading printed words on paper.
* The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and appreciate what we’re reading.
* Online text moves up and down the screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of completeness.
* The visual happenings on a compter screen and our physical interaction with the entire device and its set ip can be distracting. All of these things tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book or newspaper or magazine does not.
* The experience of reading a book or a newspaper or a magazine is both a story experience and a tactile one.
The jury’s still out on just how different reading on paper is from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogsphere are getting interesting — and heated. But more and more, top experts in the computer and Internet fields, as well as typeface designers and readability gurus, are in agreement that we need a new word for reading on screens, and that the word should be “screening.” For now. A completely new word might come down the information highway in the future and take the place of screening. But for now, you screen, I screen, we all screen.
We asked Kevin Kelly, the well-respected maverick of Wired magazine, what he felt about this new word for reading on screens, he told us by email in one short sentence: “I would be happy to see screening become a verb (for this).”
Mim Harrison, a book editor in Florida with Levenger Press, said: “I find the distinction between reading and screening to be intriguing, and it certainly gives us all pause to consider just what it is we’re doing with our eyeballs these days.”
“Screening, of course, is not a new term,” a top expert in predicting the future told us in a recent email, but this might just be the time that it catches on in the way you suggest. Screening is a clever and useful term capturing the fact that the experience of reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different.”
And then he added this important note: “It is the right word for the moment in terms of drawing people’s attention to the vast literary shift about to wash over us.”
When we asked technology reporter John Markoff at the New York Times about this idea, he replied in a one-word email note: “Hmmmmmmm.”
We asked David Pogue at the New York Times the same question, and he said: “Very interesting.”