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Do iPads Affect Reading Comprehension and Learning?: The Jury Remains Out | Tomorrow's Professor Blog
A critical review of an interesting study (linked in the review) that claims to show little difference in comprehension for users of iPads compared with those of paper books, but higher transfer learning scores for iPad users than book users.
The critique is a good one that shows the potential flaws in the research and is especially damning of over-zealous claims made by the author. However, as the critic agrees, this does none-the-less provide good supporting evidence (not generalizable as it stands) that there are probably no ill effects on learning caused by use of iPads for reading as opposed to paper books, and slightly more equivocal evidence that there may be some interesting positive gains. Of course, this is just about reading: there may be lots of other positive gains that are not examined closely here as well as potential losses. iPads are flexible tools with many more uses than simply reading books.
- Conway, Kyle. How To Read Like You Mean It (AU Press, 2023)
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Jon Dron
Comments
Hi Jon,
You might be interested in this:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/
Indeed - a good overview of the issues, thanks Shawn. Like all technologies, it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it, and context makes a huge difference. It is not possible to generalize too conclusively because, for any given design (of either paper or electonic books), you could always imagine a different one (e.g I have possible solutions to some of the issues).
Both the electronic technologies themselves and our abilities to deal with them are rapidly evolving - in fact, that's part of the problem, because we keep having to learn new ways of reading - while paper books have, for the most part, changed little in several hundred years and there are only a relatively few limited ways our use of one differs from our use of another. E-texts are far less limited, which is both a blessing and a curse. At the very least, it makes comparisons meaningless. For instance (just to take a couple of very trivial examples) the same ebook could be read on an old cellphone or an e-ink display or an iPad or a new smartphone, or could be presented as a DRM-limited PDF on a computer screen or an open e-pub book on a Kindle Paperwhite. These are radically different experiences, far greater than those between a badly typeset, fuzzily printed book on straw paper and a coffee-table book created by a designer. I think it is fairly clear that, in the grand scheme of things, e-texts have a massive edge that will only increase, for most but not all uses. Paper books will not ever vanish, but are diminishing in importance very rapidly. But we are still at a phase where the benefits and disadvantages are in balance. For some uses and ways of reading or learning, e-texts are better, for some, p-texts rule. And it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. We can learn why and how p-texts can be better, and we can adapt e-texts to work better. It is much harder the other way round.
In part, I think, it is a transitional issue. We have not quite got the hang of either creating or reading e-books yet, any more than creators of the first folios quite understood how they differed from scrolls. Our best current solutions tend to be skeumorphic, like horseless carriages. I do absolutely agree that the physicality of traditional books is a very important thing - my physical bookshelf is way more salient than my virtual one, though both contain similar numbers of books (I got rid of many thousands of paper books a while back!). It helps me to remember simply by glancing at the shelf. On the other hand, I find it quite frustrating that I cannot do a full text search on those books, or transfer notes to a repository I can access anywhere, or share my notes with others, or change the display to suit my eyes or the time of day, or have them read to me. E-books change the rules of cognition - they are not just simple substitutes that perform the same cognitive role.
In part, the value of paper books occurs because we continue to write as though for paper, without taking enough advantage of the new possibilities. For most of us, it is deeply ingrained that writing is something that occurs on paper and that is how we think of the process. Indeed, for many people of my generation, writing with a pen and paper remains the norm. Which raises the interesting issue that medium and message are deeply intertwingled. At least in my experience, writing with a pen is very different from writing with a typewriter, which is very different again from writing with a word processor. But all of these media work on the assumption that the end result is a piece of paper, virtual or otherwise. Writing for paper is very different from, say, writing for a website. When we finally figure out things like how to write 'books' that take proper advantage of multimedia, that are adaptive/adaptable and remixable, that apply what we know about memory and cognition to make their contents more easily memorable, that are native to the medium, I think paper books will feel as quaint as writing with a quill. But, for now, that's not how it is. The jury is and must remain out, because the game has only just begun.
It seems to me that, where e-books and p-books are genuinely equivalent, it is incredibly simple to choose one or the other. Publication on demand is dead simple and very cheap. The only obstacles are legal (and that's a massive problem that we have to solve - many publishers are fighting to retain control that they no longer deserve).
I wrote a comparison of the benefits and weaknesses of each last year that I should probably turn into a paper at some point, if I can find the time to write a proper literature review.