True story…
I pull into a parking space yesterday morning at the county park where I plan on running my first 5K in about a year, and of course, since it’s race day, it’s like 85 degrees and 95% humidity. So I roll down the windows in my car and pull out my computer so I can get a few moments of writing in since I’m about 45 minutes early (gotta get the t-shirt, ya know) and notice that there’s a woman in the car next to me who appears to be reading a handout of some type. She’s talking to one of her young teenage kids in the back seat, something about keeping it down ’cause she has to do this reading for a paper that’s due tomorrow. Every minute or so she offers up a little tidbit of the reading to her kid…it’s about the recent issues with the Pope and offending Muslims and world reaction. The kid is non plussed, but at one point finally says, “Whadda ya reading anyway, mom? The New York Times?”
“Nope,” says the woman. “It’s from Wikipedia.”
Color me surprised. Who ever thought of printing out a Wikipedia article for the road?
technorati tags:Wikipedia, weblogg-ed
Makes it a little more difficult to edit.
Yeah. 95% of Wikipedia users read it. 5% edit it. 5% of Wikipedia gets all the negative attention.
Not sure if this right or wrong, just very interesting.
This woman’s story is representative of something that many teachers have to do – print out material from the Internet and use paper with their students since they don’t have access to computers. I bet this lady enjoyed the reading.
Andrew Pass
http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.html
I think that this is another example of why print-based reading won’t go away. I have Internet access at home and work, both computers I use have large, good quality monitors, and yet if I have to edit something I still print it off.
Sure, she could have downloaded it to her laptop and been reading it on that in the car – but not everyone has a laptop computer. She did what was practical – she had to get her work done, she had to get her kid to the race. She did both.
And sometimes it’s just easier on the eyes to read a printout.
With currently one computer in the classroom I print out wikipedia and other material for my class. As the reading is often quite difficult for younger children a printout and a highlighter pen can be a great way of extracting information that they would skip if reading on a screen.
I very often print out Wikipedia articles to read and take with me to class even when the classroom has technology because I want to remember what I plan to refer to and I can make notes on the paper version. As Susan says, it is much easier (for my old fashioned eyes) to read a print out.