Lucie Berjoan - Blog Post 6

 I found this text incredibly interesting as this topic seems to be popping up everywhere lately (in other classes, with my partner). It's interesting to me as well to begin to notice the more practical reasons for decline in things like reading comprehension. For example, I'm sure the fact that students likely read a large number of their texts on pdf readers or their laptops inhibits their ability to quickly jot notes in the margins. I know that when I read on a screen, I only take notes when I see something I know I will use in a paper rather than as a more general engagement with the text. This is in part because I am terrible with technology, but I couldn't help but wonder about the students who read on screens. I loved Bean's suggestion to assign marginalia as a way of coaxing good reading habits out of students. I will definitely use several of the strategies suggested at the end of the Bean text with one of my students in the writing center who primarily asks for help reading through texts. While I think she struggles with writing, it is also apparent that summarizing texts and engaging with them critically is difficult. I asked her about her relationship to writing through the self-as-writer activity when we first started, but now I am curious to do a similar exercise with self-as-reader. It might be a good way to engage with how she is reading texts and an opportunity to begin pointing out ways she could improve her reading skills. 

Comments

  1. Sean TylerOctober 5, 2020 at 11:23 AM

    Your comment about the proliferation of screen reading is such an interesting point I hadn't considered. I realized that when I read digital documents the best I can approximate marginalia is highlighting a PDF, but not all documents even allow that. I do wonder if I absorb the material as well. Most students also don't have personal printers and access to school facilities is harder during the pandemic so printing articles or scanning book chapters is harder than ever. I wonder if there are apps or plug ins that allow students to comment on an article or PDF. Have you heard of any strategies for students commenting or taking reading notes digitally?

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    1. Lucie BerjoanOctober 5, 2020 at 3:57 PM

      I haven't heard of any strategies in particular, but today in my discussion with my student I suggested that she use the different colors of highlighting to distinguish between things has a positive reaction to (green), things that she finds confusing or has a question about (yellow), or things she disagrees with or has a negative reaction to (red). That way she can at least have SOME idea about what she was thinking when she highlighted it. This requires a PDF reader that offers color choice, however, which is also not fully straightforward. I found read&write PDF Reader through the disability services on the University of Iowa website (my student has cerebral palsy so I was looking for something that could do voice to text) which I think can operate as a Chrome extension and access both Google Drive and downloaded PDFs directly. https://pdf.texthelp.com/dashboard/ <- I'm still playing around with it, but it seems like it could be a great resource for taking notes/highlighting PDFs!

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  2. ConorOctober 5, 2020 at 3:07 PM

    A quick note: I know that reading online has WAY worse comprehension than reading a physical/print text (and that specifically the more hyperlinks in a document the worse the comprehension is).

    I'm unsure if that extends to digital screen reading (or if there are differences between reading a PDF on a laptop vs your phone vs a designated e-reader, like a kindle).

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