 Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's creator. I'm your host. I'm your catherter. And I'm your guide to the next hour of conversation. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a fantastic guest on a very important subject. We're talking about a subject that has vexed people for quite some time. And by quite some time, I don't mean last year. I mean the first e-book arguably dates back to 1979. People have been reading on screens as long as we've had screens. And so what we've always had the question is digital reading better or worse? Is it different in a way that we find powerful or in a way that we find harms the intellect? Is it an evil force or is it something good and beneficial or something in between or something more complicated? There are oceans of ink, both physical and digital spilled on this, all kinds of research. And it's an important topic when we're thinking about higher education, especially in our time right now when so much is invested online. Now, Dr. Jeanette Cohen has published a wonderful, powerful new book, which I recommend absolutely to everybody. If you haven't read this, it's really, really, really good because not only does it give you a deep dive into how, forgive the pond based on the title, on how to teach practically, but it also grounds this by looking at the research into reading, everything from literary criticism to neurology, and it looks back at the history and practice of reading and what it means to have a book or to read. And all of this in an incredibly accessible format with a great bunch of wit and the funniest, most sarcastic opening painting I've ever seen in a scholarly book. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Jeanette Cohen. And let me just bring her up on stage so you can say, welcome, Dr. Cohen. Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me and thanks for that introduction. I'm a fan of all puns and extended metaphors. That's the title is just one big metaphor. So any metaphors are welcome, I guess is what I'm really saying here. Oh, good. Thanks to everyone for being here. Appreciate it. Well, I have to say I went last month, I had my first scuba diving lesson. So I appreciate your title even more. Wonderful. You know, we have all kinds of things to talk about and all kinds of ways to introduce you. But the way I'd like to introduce you is to ask you, what you're going to be working on for the next year? What kind of projects are you going to be doing? What kind of ideas are going to be top of mind as you wrestle with the next academic year? Gosh, there's a huge buffet of things I'm thinking about for the next year. I'll name a few of them. One real top of mind project right now that I'm working on is really kind of think in an even sort of broader capacity about how we design for learning. Something that this book got me really interested in thinking about are the ways in which we leverage media, materiality, and the affordances and limitations of interface design to construct different kinds of learning experiences. Reading is one kind of learning experience that I've been deeply interested in for quite some time. I think there's still more we could do to kind of expand the line of inquiry from this book to be thinking even more broadly about how we really have very aligned conversations that bring together students' lived experiences with materiality, interface design, and learning processes and purposes to have a really holistic conversation about effective learning in digital spaces. So that's one project I've been thinking about. I've been working with my colleague Michael Greer who's here today on some of that thinking, so it's nice to see a colleague in the crowd here. The other big project I'm still thinking about is something I'm calling online learning with low-tech tools. I feel like the past year there's been a lot of discussion about video conferencing. We're using a really kind of high bandwidth video conferencing tool here, which is wonderful, but there's so much really low-tech, low-bandwidth online learning we could be doing and leveraging even more that we still haven't taken full advantage of, and text is a perfect example of that. So I'm still really interested in thinking about ways that we talk about text and reading-based experiences in ways that are still sort of functioning in the high-tech environment, so to speak. Those are the two projects that are really top of mind for next year. All of us are grappling with the big, I mean, future-facing question. What you specialize in, Brian, about what the future of higher education is going to look like, what role online digital learning is really going to play in the future of higher education. And so, of course, I'm invested in thinking through those conversations, how we articulate really the next phases of online learning for campuses nationwide, and, well, internationally really. I know of an international crowd here. Indeed, and our audience broadly over time is international as well. What kind of, I mean, how does this play out in your day-to-day work at Cal State? I mean, you support faculty, you teach classes, you do research. How should we look forward to some crazed workshops from you and some really exciting new articles? How does it play out? Well, it's right now, it's been playing out largely at the level of supporting faculty, really. I think that after the past 17 months of emergency remote instruction, a big part of the work I've been doing on a day-to-day basis is really helping faculty think about that last kind of project I'm considering that next phase. So how do we take the lessons that we've learned throughout the 17 months or prior and really make those continue to feel accessible and operational in many ways in whatever sort of, I don't even want to call a post-pandemic future because that suggests a linear end and I'm not sure that's going to be how our future is going to play out. But perhaps in, I'll just call this a kind of a post-trauma moment for the world. How do we move forward with using educational technology with grace, with equity, with access issues at the forefront? So there's always a writing project in me somewhere that'll come out of this. My job is largely, it's administrative job that I drive through research and teaching. So on a day-to-day basis, I'm really thinking about the operations and how we keep things, people feel supported and moving at the core. But the way that I think through and come up with new ideas is through writing. So we'll just kind of have to see what things emerge from our grounded and lived experiences here and I'd be eager to hear from others what kinds of things they're doing at their campuses too to help leverage some of this transitional inflection point moment that we're all in. Well, I'm sure people here won't be shy and have all kinds of things. Good. If you, and friends, I'm going to ask about one or two more questions and then I'm going to get out of the way and let you take over. Remember that this is a forum that you get to make. The forum is kind of like Soil and Green. It's made out of people. So please feel free to share your questions and your thoughts. One question I'd like to ask, in your book, you offer these five C's, which is a nice way of thinking about this, a guide for teachers to think about how to structure a digital reading. And one of them is curation and helping students make, you know, curate their reading and selection, assembling and connecting them, which I think is very, very powerful. And you begin with a great anecdote of making mixtapes and CDs, which I really appreciate. I'm curious, what are some of the great practices you want to encourage instructors to do in helping students curate their reading now? I mean, students often have preexisting tools that might not work so well for that. There'll be an LMS, which doesn't really do that. They'll have various forms of social media, some of which can do it, but usually they don't see them for class. I mean, what kind of digital practice are you suggesting? So I think there's a range of practices that can support curatorial thinking, some of which are very low-tech and some of it, which might have some more bells and whistles, so to speak. So one curatorial practice I'd really encourage instructors to help their students with doing is, frankly, note-taking. It's a curatorial practice. And it's one of these academic skills that I feel like a lot of faculty, myself included, have lamented in the past, that is challenging for students to learn how to take notes. And that's because the process of learning to take notes is really a process of being able to have some heuristics and frameworks to discern what matters to think about, okay, what am I looking for? What's the purpose of what I'm trying to read or do? And what am I trying to accomplish? You can't curate anything very successfully until you kind of know or have some sense of what you're trying to curate for. So if we're talking tools, there are, again, some very low-tech tools you can do to kind of create effective note-taking practice. That might mean creating in a collaborative document-building tool, a Google doc or online Office 365 doc, little tables or graphic organizers to help students with note-taking. You could do the old Cornell note-taking approach, but bring that to an online space so that you're sort of bridging that ability to process that tremendous amount of information you find when you're doing research or reading online and build them into heuristics that allow you to, in again, something like a Google docs or a Microsoft Word doc, see what other people are bringing into that space as well. So you could do some collaborative note-taking or you could keep it individual task but help students see how they can add in things like simple stuff, Web 2.0 stuff, like links, right, literal links to things that they're reading and commenting on. So they have that kind of organized curatorial space and that can sync up with a learning management system pretty easily. You could go higher tech, of course. There are lots of examples of, I think, collaborative annotation tools that engage, that can activate curation in some really powerful ways. So I know social annotation tools are probably something someone's going to ask about at some point during this forum. So I'll seed that now by saying social annotation tools are a fabulous way to help students practice curatorial thinking because they allow students to comment, to highlight, to see what other people have commented upon and highlighted, and that's a kind of curatorial thinking to crowdsource in that way, which makes, I think, the practice of bringing together lots of knowledge, identifying where other people are seeing key points really visible in ways that the learning management system certainly doesn't do. And even, again, social media is designed to kind of promote conversation, not necessarily to aggregate or see responses and aggregate. I think that's really a benefit to social annotations. You can kind of see these clustered sets of ideas together. So those are just a few ideas. I mean, we could talk about specific tools if people want kind of brand names for tools, but I'm talking at a high level here so that we can kind of keep things open. And your appendix has a whole really, really good list of them. And just, friends, if you're new to the forum, we have some of our previous sessions have worked with these. We've had a couple of sessions on social annotation with people from Hypothesis, as well as the awesome Bob Stein from New York. We've also had more than a few sessions on learning management systems or virtual learning environments. So if you'd like to go back, we can find some more about that. In the chat, we've had a couple of some more praise for this. Tom Berkl, who teaches writing, also on the West Coast, praises social annotation for teaching and learning. And your old Petra Zella mentions wikis are a great way of thinking about this as well. And before I can pursue this, before I can ask more questions, we've got a question here from our awesome friend, Tom Haynes, coming to us from the Houston area. And he has a typically deep question. How can we separate reading from information exchange and therefore the medium? Digital allows us to chunk information differently than dead tree texts. How do we separate reading from information exchange and therefore the medium? That's a great question, Tom. Thank you for asking that. I think my first shot is to invite anyone who's imagining a reading task to be thinking about the purpose of that reading task, right? So information exchange is of course one really core purpose of the reading task. But it may not be the sole purpose of the reading task at hand. We tend to think of reading, you know, information exchange, perhaps suggested it's two-way, right? That you're gleaning knowledge from someone, and perhaps by responding or annotating, you're participating in the exchange. But of course, there are also reading experiences where perhaps you are remixing that text, right? Maybe you're taking and imagining how the author's words, literal words or ideas can spin up into something creative of your own. That might mean thinking of text and perhaps, and I'm thinking of context like, excuse me, like in some literary or humanities-based context, perhaps you're using certain poems or novels, for example, as ways to look at and investigate language as a kind of object to be manipulated, an object to be thinking about in its own particular way. So that might be another kind of purpose of reading that might change depending upon media as well. So I think once we kind of interrogate what we're actually doing with reading, like literally, what are we doing with that text? Then we can start to think about, okay, well, then how does media play a role in helping us advance that purpose or accomplish that purpose for reading in particular? I think most of the time reading is exactly what you say, Tom, that it is at its core information exchange. But it also might be a way to understand a certain positionality perspective, that reading is a window into another subjectivity. It's a way for us to recognize a moment in time or a person's perspective. I think online this is perhaps especially true, that our concerns of misinformation or disinformation largely come from a kind of like decontextualization of what we're seeing online. And so part of the reading task might also be recontextualizing disinformation that might get spread in ways that remove that context. So I don't know, that's a long way of maybe answering your question, Tom, to say, hey, as long as we start identifying that purpose, you can start aligning and seeing where media and materiality helps us do different things when we're trying to accomplish that purpose. Well, I warned you it would be a deep question, and it was, and that was a splendid, splendid answer. Thank you. Friends, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of the Q&A box at work. You see how easy it was to type and flash it on the screen. So now is the time for you to share your questions and thoughts. We have a few more coming up, one in the chat that I want to share, one that came in from someone who can't make it. The one from the chat comes from our friend in Ohio, Donny Sandelbach. He says, there has been press that reading online is not as effective for attention and comprehension as reading printed text. I'm not convinced this is true. How do we help build the skill online beyond taking notes and annotation? Yeah, Donny, thanks. Yeah, I've seen that press too. And I'll have to say that my frustration with that press was a lot of what fueled this book as well. Because I started writing this book pre-pandemic. And so we've heard this narrative for a very long time. So I will say a couple of things. Because I too am not convinced it's true. And my working sort of argument on this, and this is an argument I make in the book as well, is that it's really challenging to assess the efficacy of reading on screen for comprehension-based outcomes if we have not taught or framed metacognitive strategies that are attentive to media and materiality. That is, if the strategies we've taught for reading, which is a social behavior, where it's not something we are born with the ability to do, if we've been socialized within a certain media's constraints, that's how we're going to think about the task at hand. And I'll admit that's how I learned how to read in academic context. I learned to highlight and to dog ear and to use index cards to catalog my research ideas. These are successful strategies. They still work really, really well, but they're inherently tied to the media and materiality of print. So I think one way to answer your question, Donnie, that we build that skill beyond taking notes and annotation, which are really digitized versions of analog-based practices, is that we also start to think about skills that are beneficial to particular kinds of practices that are aligned with the screen. Let me give an example of this. For example, if you're teaching a research-based task, a reading skill you need to learn actually is the ability to skim a bunch of different texts to figure out what you need. You cannot read and focus and annotate every single thing you read deeply for a research task. I'm sure many of you who are researchers here in this forum know that. You have to look through a lot of different things to find what's going to work for your project. So I think a skill we could be more attentive to in a digital space where it's really an affordance of the spaces, the ability to access lots of different voices all at once is the ability to use, I'm going to use Mike Colfield's language here to read laterally, to employ tabs effectively, to be able to look for and use an understanding of the scholarly written genre or the online text-based genre to look for keywords or patterns and ideas to allow you to synthesize quickly. That's a way to leverage the benefit of on-screen reading for certain kinds of behavior. That's just one example we could probably get into more if we want to talk about more. But I just want to make sure we hear other questions. That's kind of where my brain goes initially with that question. Well, Donnie, thank you. Spasibo Bolshoi, Spasibo for that great question. Sorry for lapsing into Russian. Donnie is a wonderful Russianist, among other things. And that's a terrific answer, Jeanette. There's a lot to be said about this. And, in fact, we have another question that build or comment from Kay Purowski at Southwest Minnesota State. And she wants to share this thought. This adds another tool, the toolbox to help faculty help students engage with content. Beyond engagement is horizontal reading. Reading multiple sources, part of the dive. Yes. Absolutely. I mean, I think that that lot of reading, it happens at different speeds. So I'm just saying, I see this a few other questions in the chat too, but Donnie is an add-on. So that sounds a bit like speed reading. And in some cases, it might be, right? It might be that you're kind of looking across, trying to quickly assess. And in other cases, right, once you've maybe winnowed down, okay, these are the multiple sources I need to read or think across or imagine in conversation with each other. That's when we started to do that deeper dive, right? And that's when we might use some other information literacy techniques, trying to identify the fuller context for this particular reading. Sort of reading beyond the text itself to do a little bit of that research on where does the text come from? Who wrote this? I'll cite my Colfield's work again. He recommends using even Wikipedia to look up things about the source that the articles publish in, et cetera. These kinds of techniques, they're uniquely possible to do on screen. You could probably do these things in a library. In fact, I know you can. It will just take you a lot longer and be a lot less accessible from where you are. So to really draw attention to the mobility, the portability, the flexibilities on these kinds of skills. I just feel like a real missed opportunity when we get into that kind of screed about, screens are making us stupid or whatever has been claimed for over a decade, which is always a claim that just, again, it kind of grates at me because it makes an assumption about media itself dictating certain kinds of behaviors, which is not going to be the case if we're mindful. Quite true. Quite true. That's a wonderful response. Kate, good to see you. And thank you for that thoughtful comment. And friends, if you're just joining us now, we have Dr. Jeanette Cohn. We were still talking to us about her wonderful new book. And we have a whole bunch of questions. One came in from someone who couldn't make it today. And this was from the splendid Michael Johnson. He wanted to ask for you to speak to the question of accessibility. So not financial accessibility, but accessibility for people with different forms of disability. And how does that play out in digital reading now? Yeah, thanks for that question. I think there's a number of ways in which digital reading has really transformed and opened up potential for reading to be more accessible for people for whom reading is not a visual medium. Something that kind of blew my mind in researching this book is that our current definition of literacy, of print-based literacy, as really being focused on the visual and ocular capacity is a super new definition. And by new context of history, it's like a couple of centuries old. But in the context of history millennia that we've lived through, we've had a blip in the literacy radar that really literacy for just hundreds of thousands of years was about oral practice, was about memorization. I mean, there's the famous, probably many of you are familiar with Socrates' old concern about writing, that writing would inherently like destroy our memories because it would degrade our abilities to speak with each other. And that's sort of proven to be true, right? And so that's all to say that what digital reading really provides us is this ability to actually open up the potential to think about reading is happening in multiple modalities at once, which is really great for accessibility, right? So if you are working with a reader, if you are a reader who wants to or benefit from hearing text rather than seeing it, pretty much every device has an instant accessibility feature of a text-to-speech tool. You could have anything narrated to you that is written in text. That's extraordinary. And you could toggle between audio and visual mediums easily, which is great for readers who might need that kind of accommodation. I think the other component of digital reading that's really powerful is for things like illustrations too. Again, if you're reading a printed book with a picture, an illustration, a graphic, an image in it, that's completely inaccessible to you. There's Braille, of course, which can be a way to access those images, but on screen you have this capacity to, again, have alt text descriptions, screen readers that can kind of help navigate through some of those pieces that are inherently an important part of a reading experience, but that we might not really think about. So kind of my first shot at that accessibility question, that's all to say, oh, I will say one more thing about it, which is that reading on screen is also great for accessibility in terms of color contrast, in terms of thinking about text size and spacing. So digital text is customizable, which can, again, really open up the accessibility for people who might not necessarily benefit from white on black who might need or who might need those colors inverted or something. There's a lot of great research out there on digital readability and the ways that can really improve reading speed, comprehension, efficacy, all from accessibility-based lens. Well, that's a fantastic answer, a very optimistic answer. And I love the way that you shifted from text only, not just to images, but to sound. In the chat we've had questions about people dictating as well as listening. It makes me think not only of the podcast Second Wave we're enjoying right now, but also audio books and how popular they are. I mean, it really may be that we shouldn't think about reading as a silent endeavor any longer. We have more questions coming in. I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to ask. And one builds on that question, I think, of accessibility to an extent. This is from Janet at British Columbia. Hello. Are physical effects like eye strain, neck back issues, decreased cortisol, a digital reading different from paper reading? I'm going to keep, I'm going to flash down the screen again because that's a really rich question. I'll make sure everyone can see it again. Physical effects of digital reading, how are they different from paper based? Yeah, thanks, Janet. I appreciate that. Yeah, I think that what you've listed in the question, eye strain, neck strain, back strain. Yeah, those are all huge concerns with reading on a screen. I'm sure all of us who've had a lot more time on screens in the last 17 months than maybe we ever have before have felt these impacts firsthand. So I recognize that a screen for certain kinds of bodies, maybe for all bodies, is not always going to work all the time. Reading from a paperback book may also have effects, negative effects on our bodies. I don't know if you've ever had the experience of reading on an airplane and trying to like hunch your body into the tiny seat. I've gotten like the worst neck and back aches from trying to read in tiny spaces. Yep, exactly. Yes, good demo. So I think the point is, I think, mindfulness really here is key. And thinking about hacks and ways they can customize our experiences can really help with some of those embodied limitations. So right off the top of my head with screens, there are lots of applications you can download to reduce the blue light glare on your screen, because it's the blue light from your screens that causes that eye strain. So there's red light filters and just different kinds of filters you can use to adjust the visual appearance of screens that can help. There's ergonomics to kind of help lift up monitors to put them at eye level. Phones are trickier because that's a really good way to kind of hunch and have your neck forever in a crick. But you're right, you're taking breaks. Yeah, I think that we just have to acknowledge that all technologies are going to have embodied constraints and concerns with them and that the more we can kind of encourage opportunities to recognize where we can hack or we can find ways to make it more comfortable for our own bodies, maybe accepting those audio options as an excellent alternative because if you're listening, you can read while taking a walk. For example, a read while lying on your back with your eyes closed. These might all be ways to just accept these sorts of alternatives. That's a really good point. I mean, reading anything humans do can really hurt us and injure us. We're very good at that kind of thing. Janet, by the way, thank you for making this an international discussion. Always good to see Canada represented, especially the West Coast, which is wonderful. If you're new to the forum, you've just seen a whole series of questions there in the Q&A box. If you'd like to join us on stage, you see that Jeanne and I are both pretty friendly. So just press the raise hand button if you'd like to continue to make our reading an oral matter. We have a great question from the author, consultant, and all-around wonderful person, Stephen Ehrman, who asks us to think about digital writing. I didn't analyze digital writing. How does that relate to digital reading? And he specifies, writing that better achieves its purpose through digital tools and media. Yeah, thank you, Stephen. I'm glad that question got moved here because I saw it was in the chat. Anyway, I'm glad it made its way and I think there's a really strong and clear relationship between digital reading and writing because reading is a way of thinking, processing other people's thoughts, and of course, writing is thinking too. So I do think that when it comes to certain kinds of writing projects and practices, yes. I've thought a lot about how tools for digital writing might be well aligned with where we encounter tools as well. So I guess I'll use a research example again because I think that's such a rich example for illustrating this connection that so much of research-based writing is building out and finding connections between lots of different voices and people. And we've seen a lot of academics really play around with the form of the scholarly research monograph and digital spaces to do some really interesting things that highlight and amplify those voices that they might be encountering on a web that might be through using hypertext and multimodality, bringing in audio samples of people talking by illustrating the research experience that might be bringing in certain kinds of images or infographics that show connections between different scholarly voices. So these are all kind of examples I think of digital writing production that branch really well from the digital reading process of encountering webs of voices and ideas and customizing how those sort of appear or communicate and understood. Stephen, thank you for the great question and what a wonderful answer, a very pro-web question which I really appreciate. The chat box, by the way is just blowing up. People are sharing thoughts and ideas like mad, which is great. Everybody else, please feel free to hit the Q&A box. And those of you who are tweeting, like the awesome Roxanne, the equally splendid Joe, just keep tweeting out. Great to hear all this. Mikiiewicz on Twitter I tweeted out my rumination about the audio and silent reading and someone just threw in over the last 18 months I've listened to many more books than I have read. That is new. So it may be that the pandemic has become an age of oral textuality. We also have a really practical question from Michelle and the quick answer to Michelle is just to read this new book but I'll let her ask this anyway. The question is, are there annotation practices that we typically focus toward print text that are available for digital reading and are some more effective than others? Seriously, Michelle, it's a really good question. Yeah, thank you, Michelle. Yeah, I'll give a brief answer but I will also echo Brian's plug for the book because the sort of part two of the book really focuses on like concrete class activities and there are a number of activities that are related to annotation in particular. So you might just find it helpful to see like here's how you could do this step by step in your class. But I will say that there's a couple different kinds of annotation practices that I think are especially well suited for the screen. Again, one is that social piece again. So the benefit of us reading and being online is, hey, we get to interact and see how other people are responding in real time to what we're encountering in text, right? So annotation and print is usually just, it's a one way exchange. You're just responding to the author but online you can see a whole community of people responding to that author at the same time. So I think that's a real, a really beneficial kind of component and Brian mentioned hypothesis Parizal is another very popular example of this kind of tool that sort of accomplishes this sort of real-time social work. Also, there's another kind of newer player in the game, Power Notes I think is doing this really well too and what's sort of different I think about Power Notes is an annotation practice and I think what it reinforces a little different is not only is it social but another annotation practice just to be thinking about is the practice of being able to kind of clip and move text around, right? So when you're annotating a book in the margins, the text is static, right? You can't manipulate where one paragraph goes or another but online, theoretically what you could do is careful to avoid plagiarism, talk to your students about this but you can like screenshot portions of the text, you can copy and paste portions, you can move them into your notes and annotate them in different configurations, you can see where different arguments might be laying in different kinds of ways and I mentioned Power Notes because they have kind of this cool tool where you can highlight part of the text and aggregates into like what they call an outline view and you can move things around the outline once you've clipped different things from the web it's pretty neat so you can do that in Word document too of course like you could just copy and paste off it there or Google Doc, you know this is a lot of different ways you can kind of emulate that sort of thinking but I hope that answers that question fully, there's a lot of different ways you could take that. Michelle it's a great question and by the way you mentioned Power Notes, we have up to four members of the Power Notes team who might be here today, I haven't checked yet but who have been in different sessions. Okay, yeah awesome and Michelle thank you again and good luck with this. We have another question coming in from Gerald Petruzzella Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and he asks, building on the last do you think it's possible for us to expand reading to include more than words, image reading etc and how big a challenge to post in current academia? So we've addressed this to an extent but I do want to focus on the last part how do we encompass this in academia since as you point out in the first few chapters of your book so much of our knowledge and model of knowledge is focused on the printed text. Yes it is a big challenge I think to be expansive and inclusive in our definitions of reading and this has been I think I owe this kind of thinking about imagining literacy as being expansive and beyond alphabetic text to generations of literacy scholars before me, multimodal literacy is a huge field that's what really my training is in so it's a question near and dear to my heart so I guess the answer first part of your question is to underscore yes I think we do need to be more expansive and generous and inclusive in our understanding of reading if for no other reason than to avoid some of the frankly inadvertently ableist assumptions that go with the kinds of skills that it means to read specifically by focusing so much on visual capacity we're excluding again a number of people for whom access to visual information is just simply not an option so I think that we have an imperative from a kind of inclusion perspective to be mindful and cognizant of the multimodal capacities for reading in general I mean academia kind of depends on who you're talking about right in terms of this willingness to kind of accept more inclusive definitions of reading and I think where it can start is in the classroom and being prepared to practice universal design for learning ideology you know for those who aren't familiar universal design for learning really advocates for instructors adding multiple ways of representing engaging and helping students participate in their class experience and so reading is a great example where if you kind of imagined ways that you could read that aren't just with text but you could just even a simple saying hey student did you know you can listen to this it's as simple as that a lot of students will be surprised wow really I can listen to my reading and that counts I think we need to kind of get rid of language like I had a lot of people ask me earlier in this book like well I was listening to my podcast reading does that count as a book yeah of course it does because you can read the podcast too you can read a transcript these are all kind of ideas that relate to and I think it comes back to Tom's question from the start here about this is information exchange and accessing other modes of interiority and subjectivity and I just see no harm in trying to get more inclusive and generous in our understanding but sometimes academia is not inclusive and generous as much as we'd like it to be so that culture change I think can just happen with all of you who are here the more we can encourage it and share the better agreed agreed and if I could put in a plug for the past couple of years ago just to the truly wonderful writer Kathleen Fitzpatrick who has one of her many books is called generous thinking and it's about rethinking higher education in that way in the chat we've had a few different comments about people who are scholars who read images first both in PolySci and the Sciences which is very interesting and but we have more questions coming in and again if anyone wants to join us on stage we'll be nice I promise this time so just hit the raise hand button and we have two very practical questions very material questions want us to do with eye tracking Brent our timer I believe mentions that there's much data from eye tracking for reading and paper and online and how those are different how does eye tracking relate to your work yeah thanks Brent and hello from the Cal State system Brent and I are colleagues in the CSUs so it's nice to see a Cal State colleague here so yes there's overlaps I think with eye tracking research in terms of understanding reading behaviors on screen so I didn't have a chance to click your link but it looks like that's from the Nielsen group which does a lot of great user experience research yeah yeah yeah it's a Nielsen group I might even cite this one in my book I can't remember I cite a lot of things I don't have the book next to me right now Socrates is right you don't have to remember it exactly just to refer to what I wrote down many moons ago so I'll just say that eye tracking research can kind of help us understand patterns and behaviors that may give us a sense of how design and interface might be impacting behavior so a lot of eye tracking research has sort of demonstrated that on websites there's certain kinds of patterns that people always follow the most common one that folks refer to as the F shaped pattern where you sort of look at the headline and you look a little at the sub headline below and everything else kind of gets skimmed below that that is a common pattern but there's been a lot of research that has sort of debunked that everyone is reading a website in an F shaped pattern I've heard some behaviors refer to as a layer cake pattern where people might be kind of scanning and skipping text by text or I've also seen like a U shaped pattern where you kind of read a lot at the front and then read a lot at the end and nothing in the middle and the point is that everything can give us some senses of how certain genres get navigated and I think the important conclusion for me there is that people's engagements and ways they move their eyes is not going to be universally applicable across all websites that it's going to depend largely on what people are on that website for what their reasoning is and what their previous encounters with that genre might be so that F shaped formation comes up a lot because we're used to reading for example things like news websites where it's like a very linear headline text body etc. kind of format but again not all websites are designed that way so it's interesting I think just to understand the interaction between human behavior across these sites but also again how that aligns with the motivational purposes and interface design This is one of the real strings of your book by the way that I haven't mentioned yet is that again and again you emphasize that instructors need to pay careful attention to students to students where they are, to students' habits to try to find out how and where students read I mean in the chat earlier Tracy was asking about this I think that's just I'm really glad to see that not all people do this when they write about writing The other practical question comes from John Henry Stites who is a colleague of mine and he asks when researching deep within a discipline there are often texts many historical available in print only to limit some digitization economic or intellectual property restrict the range of digital sources Yeah absolutely they do thank you for the question John that's a real that's a perfect example of a material constraint that I think a lot of historians and archivists in particular librarians I'll say are really grappling with there's been a lot of controversy too over digitization projects right so of course Google books tried to digitize every book in the world and that didn't perhaps end in the way that they were expecting namely they didn't digitize every book in the world and the ways that they were digitizing things were not always responsible the text itself or preservation practices around those books I guess my main advice would be talk to your librarians right and because your librarians are awesome they're superstars and I love librarians and they're going to know for example if there are any particular historical societies or archival societies or digital preservation groups there's a lot of non-profits digital preservation non-profits that are working to digitize certain collections of course places like Akati Trust are I think doing really well as starting to create better and more robust archives of historical texts as well but recognize that for things like medieval manuscripts heck I mean this is maybe a different field but you know Sumerian tablets if you're studying those sometimes you just kind of got to see in person because the materiality of that object actually does depend on being able to feel it and touch it and see it so I also don't want to discount that digitization it may not be the best way to study certain kinds of texts depending on what you're trying to analyze or depending what you're trying to do so there's a case to be made for really appreciating the unique material affordance of a text that was produced in a pre-digital era and analyzing the understanding it as material object to kind of embody the readerly experience to the extent that you can of someone in that time Do you think we'll see more of that in terms of using more advanced digitization I mean thinking for example about I'm thinking someone with happy accidents like when I look at an archive.org scan and you can see someone's hand just caught off the side of it but also if we could use tools like photogrammetry to be able to give you know a three-dimensional sense of a manuscript or a book or a tablet or a journal I mean that might be a way of making the experience a little bit deeper absolutely well because it gets at it kind of simulates the the material conditions in some capacity I saw in the chat someone at some point mentioned a VR in some capacity you know so I can imagine some pretty interesting like VR experiences of like going into the archives and looking at some rare books collections and kind of getting a feel for it that way and maybe some universe at some point that might happen but again I think it depends on what you're trying to study what you're trying to do with that text that the touch, the smell this is a thing people love people love to smell books and in my book I treat that with some amount of affection well right like if you're a reader identify that way that's a motion that's evoked there and that's powerful and sometimes you do want to evoke that emotion and other times you may not need to and it's all good no matter what it's not like the digitization of text means you have to like don't get rid of all your print books just because you can digitize them just except there might be different ways to appreciate and approach them well said we have another question coming in from Roxanne Riskin the delightful person and a great great friend and supporter of the program and Roxanne asks about lexile ranges and how can higher-red digital online reading assignments take that into account or is that even possible so I maybe I'm not totally sure what the term lexile range means does that mean um let me bring her up on stage Roxanne is drafting you right now you're going to have to come up on stage hello oh I'm sorry I just I lost you well you're right there we can hear you Roxanne give me a second I kind of lost my screen hi thank you so much thanks Brian and thank you for taking my question the lexile score is the difficulty of the text reading and yeah and that's usually seen in K through 12 but it's also in higher ed it's given scores of the difficulty of the text got it okay thank you I had a feeling it was about yeah search that I put a link in the chat about this okay I'll have to check out your link um you know in all honesty um I haven't directly oh I see the lexile framework for reading 2012 okay I'll have to go check that out Roxanne really it's really I think maybe that's in your next book there we go next project there's always a next project you can build upon right um yeah I mean I think that you know in some ways so my background's in reticent composition so when I think about kind of difficulty right with vocabulary or with word length or with um sentence structure you know a lot of it is very genre and discourse community specific um and so I think a lot of ways faculty can help students respond to that challenge is by sort of exposure to norms and conventions in the discourse community you know making visible what kinds of moves writers are making in those kinds of texts can kind of reduce that barrier to entry and that would be true I think regardless of of media and in some ways in digital spaces it could be easier to um to make those moves visible you could have you know create visual patterns or outlines of how a scholarly text is moving in the discipline for example in scientific texts they follow a formula anyway you know they follow that IMRAD format intro methods etc so you could kind of just make those conventions transparent which might reduce some of that barrier to difficulty and with challenging vocabulary for example again the ability to easily use you know find a dictionary online to define words you know I saw in the chat a little bit I'm apologize I'm good at keeping up with the chat we just had a lot of good questions to dig into um but I saw kind of a someone mentioned they love reading on their Kindle you know a lot of these dedicated e-readers do have you know features built in where you can tap a word and look up a definition on the spot um there's accessibility tools called was one called Kurzweil that maybe some folks are familiar with yeah that kind of also reduces some of maybe what you're thinking about Roxanne with this lexile um indicator so I don't know just taking a few quick thoughts off the top of my head um does it kind of answer your question uh yeah it it starts to discuss it starts to dig into what it really means and I think that when a lot of professor issues I'm going to use an example of text the STEM fields highly technical books that college as a sign so bringing in that um into online reading with um research papers and journals and articles and things like that if that reading level is really taxing to the students how much can we load cognitively load students with that type of information before more anxiety more stress and they're just turned off I mean the attention focus is just not there no matter how many mindful practices you're doing I'm a mindfulness educator as well but and a learning designer but we have to really dig deep into what faculty are doing in that space and how much is how much stress are we should we put in the mix modality in the universal learning design sure that's fine but how many professors are really doing this how are we measuring that that's not my thoughts and I'm always thinking out on the fringe and on the perimeter of what is in the best interest for the students to maximize their capacities for learning experiences and and how we design these things. Yeah, that's a good point absolutely. Thank you Roxanne that's fantastic always good to see you. Thank you we have a couple of notes in the in the chat about this David furlough mentions lexile scores and some of the learning assessments are an example of unrealized potential educators could use this to differentiate students making more agile providing students with appropriate challenges I mentioned a bit more sarcastically but realistically there have been lexile studies of politicians speeches which are very depressing because they usually find people speaking at a fifth grade level we are almost at the very end of the session and since there are no other questions outstanding I'm going to seize the moderators privilege and ask a question of my own what do you think happens to digital reading say about 10 years from now I mean thinking about the impact of everything we've discussed about VR audio about the pandemic about accessibility what does it look like to read and e-text in say 2030 hmm I think it'll continue to take on really diverse forms I think by 2030 we'll have lots of options and choices about how to engage with text and I think it's going to become increasingly handheld right I think the fact that we are ubiquitously I think it's safe to say we're ubiquitously on mobile as a technology and so I do think that the future of kind of reading is going to be um in imagining how to optimize kind of engagement interaction with text through mobile that by 2030 it's not going to seem so weird anymore to be reading a long piece or a book on a phone it already isn't that weird but I think it's really going to be widely accepted by 2030 and that perhaps we'll have increased optimization to customize on mobile in particular it'll be even easier to kind of find and see connections between text and image and audio there'll be a lot more integration between all these media which I think will make really visible these kinds of expanded opportunities and options I've been struck by the amount of reading available in computer games right now um that not attached to computer games like strategy guides which is that within a lot of computer games there are slabs of reading to be done which we don't often think about I do want to grab something from the chat here and lift it out this is from Joe Murphy who mentions that for him he finds the human voice really returns his attention in a way that nothing else does and I want to grab that to say that's good insight but also to say that I wanted to thank you Jenae for sharing your voice with us for this hour you have taught us so much and shared so much just so excessively I just wanted to thank you very very much what's the best way to keep up with you in your work you can keep up with me in a few different ways I'm pretty active on twitter so that's kind of where I'm kind of publicly microblogging I'll put my handle in the chat there one more time I keep an website pretty up to date I haven't been there in too long it's been a year y'all I'm sure you felt that so I can hop on my website check it out those are probably the two best ways to find me from here but I hope to stay in touch with all of you and LinkedIn of course is a good way to find me as well thanks for joining everyone well thank you all but don't go away friends yet because I need to tell you about what's happening next forum and let me thank you all for this wonderful wonderful range of questions looking ahead after talking with digital reading today we'll be looking at improving equity for black students looking at the educated underclass next week discussing academic entity mergers open access scholarship and rethinking teaching if you'd like to talk about all these issues if you'd like to add your voice if I can drive that point home further or share your images just use the hashtag ftte especially on twitter or tweet at me Brian Alexander or at chindig events would be glad to hear from you if you'd like to dive into our previous sessions and where this recording will be hopefully in a few hours just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive we've had all kinds of discussions about the digital world of what it means for learning thank you all again for the wonderful gift of your attention your terrific thoughts your sense of humor and above all it's just a pleasure to think with all of you until next time take care be safe and we'll see you online bye bye