So, might just be me, but I hadn’t run across the “tl;dr” thing until I was reading a Mark Pesce’s “What Ever Happened to the Book?” post from a few weeks ago. As usual, it’s a totally great piece about “connective reading,” one that explores the motivations of following links and the pressures that linked environments put on the act of reading. As a former English teacher, I love that conversation, and I see myself all over it:
The lure of the link has a two-fold effect on our behavior. With its centrifugal force, it is constantly pulling us away from wherever we are. It also presents us with an opportunity cost. When we load that 10,000-word essay from the New York Times Magazine into our browser window, we’re making a conscious decision to dedicate time and effort to digesting that article. That’s a big commitment. If we’re lucky – if there are no emergencies or calls on the mobile or other interruptions – we’ll finish it. Otherwise, it might stay open in a browser tab for days, silently pleading for completion or closure. Every time we come across something substantial, something lengthy and dense, we run an internal calculation: Do I have time for this? Does my need and interest outweigh all of the other demands upon my attention? Can I focus?
Not sure why, but I love thinking about this stuff. It’s fascinating to step back from time to time and go all meta on my own reading and writing. For instance, the process I’ve got down for using Google Reader and Twitter to lead me to lots (too much?) good stuff to read, then to save it to Delicious, or to read it later with Instapaper, or to snip it into Evernote, or to throw it up on Posterous, or even mix it into a blog post here (or there.) Looks a little different from what I did ten or five or even two years ago. The public nature of it all is a big enough shift for most, but my brain just operates totally differently now when reading and writing. Both are a participatory sports these days.
And I know I keep coming around to how my kids aren’t getting any of this in schools, and my frustrations as a parent that most of the good souls in the schools where my kids are don’t create links on a regular basis. Or that they’re not teaching “connective reading” in any real sense. That there not helping my kids with the challenges of this changed reading space, which, continuing from the snip above, Pesce makes pretty clear:
In most circumstances, we will decline the challenge. Whatever it is, it is not salient enough, not alluring enough. It is not so much that we fear commitment as we feel the pressing weight of our other commitments. We have other places to spend our limited attention. This calculation and decision has recently been codified into an acronym: “tl;drâ€, for “too long; didn’t readâ€.  It may be weighty and important and meaningful, but hey, I’ve got to get caught up on my Twitter feed and my blogs.
So, it begs the question, I think, what do we do? Just like I alluded to a changed reality in the Facebook post yesterday, there is a changed reality here, too. The act of reading and writing is different. The habits are different. And it’s still changing and evolving, just like reading and writing always have, but with what feels like, to me at least, more speed. No one is teaching our kids.
Assuming you didn’t go “tl;dr” to this post, what ways are you thinking about or actually implementing change around reading and writing instruction in your classrooms? How are you helping your kids read and write differently? What’s different about the way you read and write today compared to ten years ago, and what are the implications? Reflect away.
tl;stc
too long: skipped to comments
One issue I see is there is a ton of debate on what kids should be reading now (dead white men or other stuff?) are there any examples of great connective writing?
I think it might be a zero sum game, unfortunately. Most of the old school will say “what do I cut out?”. Do we say “cut everything out”?
Examples of great connective writing abound on blogs. danah boyd, Doug Noon, even Frank Rich in the Times on Sundays…tons of others. I don’t think there is a dearth of great hypertext to share with kids these days.
Well said, as usual. You begin with a perfect example, saying that you went back to a post from a few weeks ago. I think the ADHD in all of us needs some guidance in how to focus and manage all of what we find (and what finds us) online. I usually don’t even bother to tag my bookmarks on delicious; tb;dt (too busy; didn’t tag).
As my boys wrap up their school years, I’ve been considering the value of teaching them “skimming skills” versus “reading comprehension skills”. I find that skimming can be a higher level of thinking and reading. It requires time and practice, but it helps me take in more information faster and avoid wasting time on what I don’t need, no matter if it’s online or on paper.
Thanks for the comment. I wonder how we teach when not to skim, however. Sometimes every sentence is important even in a lengthy piece. I find myself looking at how long something is and then going into various modes of reading based on that…hard thing to stop, and not the best approach, I would suspect.
Tatiana,
You’ve given me something to think of… thanks for your comments regarding “skimming” vs. “comprehension”.
It’s not “different”… it’s “back to normal”.
What we’re doing is saving and glossing text, creating palimpsests, and sharing among Tribes. That’s exactly what the literate classes did back in the Middle Ages.
The big difference isn’t the way we read (the printed book “don’t write in the margins” mentality is actually a bit of an anomaly in our history as humans); rather the big difference is the democratization of literacy that the Net can provide. The texts themselves — all marked up and glossed — are no longer only accessible to the monks tucked away in Medieval abbeys. Those texts, those mark-ups, and those glosses now belong to all of us.
Shelly
Agreed, but who’s teaching my kids to mark up and gloss the texts for a public readership? That kinda goes back to my Kindle post last week…if we are truly reading publicly, does that change what we define as effective or literate interaction with the text? I think it does. We have more of a responsibility to participate in the reading, to gloss and share well. Right?
“who’s teaching my kids to mark up and gloss the texts for a public readership?”
This gets at the heart of a deeper problem long institutionalized in schools: the concept that school is separate from “real” life and therefore any interaction with the “real” public is potentially hazardous.
If we want to teach kids how to interact and engage with a public world (and readership), then we have to break down the bureaucratic and legal stranglehold that still treats issues of private and public as though we’re living in a pre-Internet world. It’s the stuff that scares admins and teachers alike to death and it’s the root cause of so many of the problems schools are having moving authentically into the digital realm.
Shelly
Step one: getting teachers to embrace the fact that this type of reading IS reading and that it’s also one of those valuable “21st century skills” that Tony Wagner (and countless others) implore us to teach. It’s tough to do, considering that a majority of teachers do not read and link in this way as a part of their own daily experiences. But it is having an effect of the way those of us who do engage in the behavior think. For me, it’s that state of continuous partial attention that I’ve had to come to grips with. Yes it’s different than curling up in a quiet room with Gatsby and Daisy, but it’s still reading. The key is knowing how to and having the ability to code switch between the two different types of reading behaviors (another skill to teach). When I do PD with teachers I liken it to skimming the newspaper headlines — same thing. Am I interested enough in this story to commit the time, or am I satisfied with reading the lead. The only difference is also having the discipline (See the Marshmallow Study http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html ) to avoid the allure of the click — following the links before we’ve finished with piece. Thanks for post — great stuff!
“The key is knowing how to and having the ability to code switch between the two different types of reading behaviors.”
Exactly. Who’s teaching that?
I do most of my reading online now. I find most of the things I read from links posted on Twitter, and my feeds on Google Reader. When I hit something I’m interested in, but it’s tl;dr, I email the link to myself, even from Twitter. When I do have time, I give those links a closer look. Some I keep and pass on, some I bookmark, and some I dump.
I’m trying to teach my students to use tools like news aggregators and Delicious, but it’s a struggle. There are a number of reasons for that struggle, but at least when I do mention something like Delicious, they know what I’m speaking of.
Lee — why do you think your students resist these apps? I’m putting togther a unit in which I hope to introduce tools like Delicious.
Lee, you need Instapaper. ;0)
For the ultimate in the paradox of connective reading, take a look at George Church’s “Sorry, John, No Time To Think About…”:
http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_2.html#church
Yeah…at what point distraction?
I’ve often wondered, never publicly mind you, about the future of reading. As technologies have advanced, we have moved to new forms of media to publish information. It used to be that the only way information could be passed from one to another (without the spoken word) was by reading. Then the radio only asked us to listen as consumers. TV and movies require us to watch and listen. And with all of the different forms of producing and consuming information on the web (audio, video, digital photography, mashups, etc) reading is becoming a skill that may be needed less – or at least informational reading – to consume information.
How many of us when we blog embed a video, podcast or image with our written text? When we do that, are we minimizing the importance of our writing? Are we assuming that our “readers” would rather watch/look/listen than read? Are we saying that our comments are not valid and/or complete without the embedded media?
If reading is meant to be an avenue to consume information, are there not other modes by which this can occur now? Moreover, if those modes stimulate different senses and different parts of the brain, thus triggering different perspectives, is that not a good thing?
Just thinking…
Interesting thinking… ;0)
I think reading is reading, whether it’s text or multimedia. And I think we need to look at pictures and links as enhancements to writing, not distractions.
The two reasons I like text over every other medium is skimability and searchability. That doesn’t mean I don’t like other media, but it’s why in many cases I prefer text at this point (as well as my long sordid history with it.)
So we are really redefining what it means to be “literate”… whether reading, watching, listening, etc.
Reading information instead of getting it by word of mouth is relatively juvenile as innovations go: we’ve been hearing stories and news through our ears and through pictures far longer than we ever have through the written word.
When books were printed en masse it was impossible to print those pictures, hence we “put up” with a technological outcome that made communication harder. Comics and picture books brought image back into the masses after this hiatus, but had prices to match – it’s still true that beautifully illustrated books or full colour photography costs a LOT more in print than text only.
It’s only been in the last 10 years that internet connections have become fast enough and wide enough to comfortably cope with good quality graphic and illustration to match our text, taking us into an era where text and image can coexist at a price that we can all afford.
We’ve only realised that potential in the last five years or so, adding video to the equation. If anything, we’re getting back to the heritage of oral storytelling that was so common in all our cultures 300, 500, 600+ years ago.
I keep coming back to: what is the impact to our brain’s neural pathways? It has been suggested that they are being changed / broken down to accommodate this new, multi-tasking style of reading, consuming, processing. But are we successful in embracing this new style of consumption (if we consider ourselves successful) because we had our brains’ original neural pathways formed through linear, focused consumption? Is it important those neural pathways be formed in that way to create the ability for deeper comprehension? Surely we will continue to need deepe comprehension even in the digital age. Pondering this as I consider which K-5 school to send my children to (“innovative” or traditional).
I find this discussion exhilarating and exasperating. As a public school teacher, I find it increasingly difficult to teach 21st century skills in the economic and ignorant climate we function in. I want to challenge myself and my students to maneuver through the web 2.0 world. However, it is all too often that I find tools and blogs blocked before they ever reach our server. I feel strongly that we are doing our youth a grave disservice when we barricade their access to the “real” world. If we are professional educators, why then are we not trusted to be capable navigational guides? Why is there such an enormous amount of distrust? I find myself reading your comments and becoming very excited about the concepts possible in connected reading. I have taught skimming and scanning as part of traditional study skills for more than a decade. Discovering a way to assist students to determine when to use which reading type is not any different than teaching them when to use a different problem solving strategy in math. It can be relatively simple, if and only if, we are trusted with the technology to make it happen. It is yet another rip in our professional esteem. I am not saying that educators are not partially to blame for the situation we find ourselves in; on the contrary, I think the minority controls the majority. We find incoming teachers that are of the tl;dr mindset, and the veteran teachers are of the idk;idwk (I don’t know and I don’t wanna know) frame. It is exhilarating to think about the possibilities and phenomenal ramifications the “new” world has to offer, but in the same breath it is exasperating to feel stuck in the middle between two walls without a rope.