Sean Sharp’s ITRT Blog

This is a reflective post today as I have ideas bouncing around my head after reading two colleagues’ posts on this topic. The start of this conversation is from John Hendron about his chat with a fellow teacher about books. The second is from Karen Richardson’s reflections on that conversation. I must admit, it is a bit circular and feels a bit strange to “talk about the talking,” going on in terms of this conversation. But, here goes:

I like books. I read books, sometimes more than one at a time and sometimes only one at a time. Recently I was invited to our school board office’s book group to talk about the book by Sherman Alexie titled, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. I was invited partly because when I lived in Seattle I had the opportunity to go to many of his readings and on occasion meet him and talk. Plus I’m a pretty big fan of his. The upshot of this is that now I’m the newest member of this book group, which I’m quite excited about. I’ve never been in a book group before, so this should be fun.

In addition to reading books and enjoying books, I read stuff on the computer. I use an RSS aggregator to pull information in from sites that interest me. I annotate, bookmark, share, blog and generally hang onto articles or pieces of information that I find online that I might want to access at a later time. In addition, I even use the Avantgo service to have websites downloaded to my Palm device for reading as well. It’s all pretty good, overall.

I also subscribe to a few magazines that I can toss in my backpack as I head out the door, or leave in the car for times when I’ll be waiting somewhere.

In reading these thoughts by John and Karen, I see that in a sense, they are both correct when it comes to text and how we interact with it on a daily basis. It seems to me that there is room for all of the above. We are in an estuary if you will, a zone where text-in-a-book and text-on-a-screen are both legitimate ways to access information. Both formats have advantages disadvantages, too. For example, I’ve never tossed my laptop, lid open, across the front seats of my car and have it bounce around and land on the floor which I then pick up and use with no problem. I’ve also never opened up a book and found one of my favorite websites available for me to bookmark and/or share with others on sites like del.icio.us or diigo.

Both of these blog posts caused me to go back and look at an article that was written in The New Republic magazine three years ago in May, 2005 by David A. Bell about the emerging technologies that were in the pipeline at that time. It is a several page article that is well worth reading, in my opinion. Some of the highlites are how reading really is an unnatural act and how Johannes Gutenberg’s revolution was more a revolution of production rather than “in the product itself.”

Finally, I thought about a conference that I attended years ago in Portland, Oregon. The speaker talked briefly-very briefly-about our experience as readers. He said something to the effect that reading a book is a process where the eye receives reflected light off of the page, which is different and far easier on the eye than reading from a computer screen as this light is projected light. I found a short piece on that phenomenon at the website, Writing For The Web. I’m sure if I searched more I could find more information on this topic.

So thanks John and Karen. Good posts from both of you have helped me realize that I will still read my books and enjoy them and also read from my computer and enjoy what I read there. Now, back to some more reading . . . . . . .

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