TEDtalk Tuesday...on Thursday.

Sorry guys.

I know it's not Tuesday.  It's not even Thursday anymore, as far as many of you are concerned.
Most of my excuses pertain to the recent PNW snowfall, and an onset of recklessness, laziness, procrastination, and a simple willingness to just be outside.

What was I saying about general recklessness?

I DID mean to post on Tuesday.  In fact, I watched several TEDtalks that day; videos ranging from a cool statistics program with a speaker who is like a sports commentator, to a pair of hilarious jugglers, a man who nearly died from healthy living, and a slew of videos about the brain and how it works, and how that will change computing.

So...I've been busy.  I just haven't blogged.





I gave you a bunch of links to my recent escapades through TEDland, and since I know 99% of you DIDN'T watch my last TED video, I figure I'll just skip to my thoughts and let you explore as you want this week.

The reason I watched so many TEDtalks on the brain was because I was looking for one talk in particular that I can't seem to find, though I feel like it should be part of the conversation (and slew of research that is involved in neuroscience).

The particular idea I'm interested in is the difference between reading on a screen versus reading in a book (other than the preposition used).

People do more than 50% of their reading online these days.  Probably way more than that, but I try to play it safe because I like reading books.  I want to know if there's a difference in the way we learn what we read--particularly how we retain the information that our eyes have just read? And if retention is better one way or another.

It seems to me that it's a fairly relevant question, considering that WWU has lowered the free print quota, and will be eliminating it completely by the time I graduate.  I've begun to read all my long documents for class online, as opposed to printing them out, and I no longer print out lecture notes for GURs (yeah, I still have one).

I anticipate this is what WWU's print usage will
 look like when they take the free quota away for good.

I had a conversation with Margi Fox, my technical writing instructor, about the difference between the Kindle and the iPad.  She said she greatly preferred the readability of a book on an iPad as opposed to a Kindle, and I proceeded to figure out why.  I couldn't help it.  The first thing my brain is trained to do is ask "why".
It's probably a remnant of my rebellious days when I'd receive a punishment, and immediately ask my parent "but why?" out of spite and delight at watching them sputter.  I escaped many minutes in my room because Dad couldn't properly rationalize his punishment.  "Why?" never really affected Mom at all.  I still ended up on time-out.

So I rationalized that Margi liked reading on the iPad better because it has that nice, tactile way of turning the page.  Swiping a finger across the screen and seeing the corner of the page feels MUCH more satisfying than clicking a button on the Kindle and watching letters disappear and reappear in a different order.

It's true, with every new reader out there, they try to make it a little more like a book. (personally, I'd rather have the book.  There's nothing more satisfying that seeing your progress in terms of how much you have left!)

But then Margi said she disliked reading on the Kindle because it felt "awkward".  And for those of us who are abstaining from readers in favor of books, we all know what she means.  You just don't feel as accomplished after reading a whole textbook on a screen, than seeing the physical abuse you put your book through while you were studying.  You can't throw an iPad across the room and feel better.  You'll probably feel worse.

whoops.  Book reaction.

And when I try to remember what I've learned on a screen versus what I've learned in a book, there's a huge difference in what facts I can recall from my long-term memory.  If you asked me for my favorite quote from The Once and Future King, I could flip open the book, rifle the pages a little, and show you exactly where that quote was.
If you asked me for my favorite quote that I've found and posted online, I doubt I'd be able to remember it.  I could click around my tumblr to see if that was where I put it, and if it wasn't there, I'd have to attempt to remember part of it to aid me in a google search.

It makes me wonder if our poor retention of digital spaces has to do with location.  (Now, I'm talking purely in the context of reading text.  Videos, movies, games and music also exist in digital spaces, but they're a different kind of learning altogether)  You've heard of locational memory, right?--when they tell you to study in the same classroom you'll take the test in, so that you can use visual cues to trigger your memory of learning the content?  I wonder if reading is something like that. You have visual cues that lead you to remember what you read. (probably why the "fill in the blank" quotation questions were the easiest, since you've "seen" the sentence before.)
Jeff Hawkins has a TEDtalk on how intelligence is based on our brain's ability to predict the future based on what it has encountered in the past, and I think that last comment is extremely relevant to that idea.

(Skip to 10:22 to see what I'm talking about)

I can recall my quote in a book more easily than I can online because I can visually see whereabouts I was in the story when I came across the quote, or perhaps the spine is bent a little more at that particular page, or it was dog-eared, or marked up...there was something special there that made that particular page different from the rest.

I thought perhaps that the screen worked the same way...that we remember things on the screen because there's something special about the webpage we're on that's different than some other webpage from the same parent site.  Maybe an ad off to the side made me laugh, and now that ad is what triggers the memory of the quote I read. But the trouble is---we do SO MUCH while we're online.  How is it that all our triggers aren't getting crossed and confused?
To find that same quote online, the fastest way would be to run a search for it.  (and to be honest, that is the quicker way...if you can remember enough of the quote).

Now, I don't know if I'm a good model for this question, as I've come to distrust my own memory over the last few years.  (Either I don't record the important things, or my memory really is just failing.)

So I turned to a long-time friend of mine and posed the same question.

He came up with a completely different conclusion, that I hadn't even considered (as he usually does).  He said that perhaps it's not the retention that is affected by the medium in which we chose to do our reading, but the way we learn to reference things.
For example, I was taught from an early age to learn through reading, so it's only natural for me to "feel awkward" learning from a digital device.  I intuitively know all the ways to most easily reference the information in a book, whereas reading from a Kindle or iPad is not as familiar.

I see what his point is, and I think:
they're just different ways of learning...

When we read from books, we internalize the information as a focused whole, at least in comparison to how we digest digital material.  The information I get from a book exists, physically, between two covers.  The information I get from a reader, or the internet, doesn't have physical boundaries.  And so we learn how to navigate each learning tool differently:  I'm exceedingly good at remembering what's written in a book because I know I'll need to remember it.  I don't put as much effort into remembering what I learn online because I know it'll be there.  I use the internet as a reference tool, not as a teaching tool that I need to internalize.


Which do you remember better?
Those things you read in books, or those things you read digitally?