This is an excerpt from Chapter Eight of The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease (Penguin, 2006, 6th edition). For a list of all topics covered here and in the print edition see Chapter Eight list

CHAPTER 8: Lessons from Oprah, Harry,
and the Internet — continued

Two Lessons from the Internet

ith the firm arrival of the Internet to most homes, offices, and schools, many educators are wrestling with how to squeeze both books and bytes into their budget, and parents are wrestling with dosage-time questions? The technocrats say the world’s children can be turned into millions of hitchhikers on the “information highway” who surf their way to achievement heights beyond anyone’s estimation. The traditionalists point out books are more permanent, portable, and far more verifiable than computer bytes. Somewhere there's a rational land of comfort between the doomsayers and irrepressible optimists.

If doomsayers had a patron saint I think it would be Plato who warned in his Dialogues that if people turned to reading and writing, it would spell the end of memorization. (See David Brooks below)

The optimists would be represented by Thomas Edison who predicted in 1922 that "the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our education system and . . . in a few years will supplant, largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks." (See "End of Books" here.)

So let's see if we can find a happy medium. For what it's worth, I confess my biases right up front: By some people's standards, I'm, a media freak; I own five Apple Macs, built my Web site myself, and I use the Internet all day long for research, news, entertainment, and shopping (mostly books). I just clicked on the folder containing the pdf research files I've downloaded for this edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook: there were 111 documents totaling 3.4 gigabytes of space—and those are just the pdf's. This morning I downloaded 35 minutes of a radio readings from the BBC and 50 minutes from NPR, both of which I'll listen to either on my iPod or in the car. (More on that at AUDIO.) Google could be the best thing to happen to the inquisitive mind since Gutenberg, or as one writer put it: "Historians will have a common term for the period prior to the appearance of Google: the Dark Ages."⁹ So I'm a fan. But not a blind one.

Does a computer in the home or classroom improve students' scores?

One can play at a computer as well as work at it. What you do with it determines the size of the benefits, if any.

Nate Stulman was a sophomore at Swarthmore College when he decided to monitor how his classmates were using their computers.¹⁰ Despite the fact that Swarthmore is one of the top-ranked five small colleges and universities in the U.S., Stulman discovered its students were using their computers in the same way millions of others do at lesser schools: they were playing games, emailing boy friends and girl friends, killing time in chat rooms, and uploading and downloading music. Endlessly. Writing for The New York Times op-ed page, Stulman concluded that many students are too immature to handle the distractions and temptations of the Internet, a fact largely unaddressed by those who think the “goof-off machines” will make books obsolete. This is reassuring to me when I look back on my own immature behavior in college. Kids are kids, and sophomores behave sophomorically, even when there is DSL or Wi-Fi.

RESEARCH FINDING:
Eight hours a week of computer use does not damage children's school achievements.

In a 2003 study of 1,680 school-aged children's time diaries and home computer use, researchers found "moderation" to be a key factor in students' scores.¹¹ Those who used computers for less than eight hours weekly had scores that were a few points higher "on measures of letter-word recognition, reading comprehension, and mathematics calculation problems than children without computer use." They also found this amount of use did not reduce those students' reading time (whereas the same amount of TV use lowered reading time). Indeed, the computer users had more reading time than did non-computer users. This doesn't mean the computer use caused the high scores; the cause could easily be from all the reading they were doing. What it does show, however, is that eight hours a week of computer use does not damage children's school achievements.

Conversely, those with more than eight hours home use had scores that were no different from non-computer users but they weighed an average of 12 pounds more than their non-user peers.

How the computer is used and how often it is used often determines students' scores. An international study of 15-year-olds in 32 countries found achievement negatives connected to excessive computer access. With home usage, researchers found the more computers in the home, the lower the math and reading scores. This suggests multiple computers become more of a distraction or hindrance than help for the student. When the study moved to classroom use, there was no negative impact as long as usage was for educational or communication purposes. Over-use or lower use in school were associated with lower scores, while moderate use showed no negatives.¹²

Simply put, the presence of something that can be used as a toy will be used as a toy when it is more readily available. Adults need to moderate the usage to prevent it from becoming a distraction to other kinds of learning and physical well being. In Chapter Nine you'll find useful information about an inexpensive commercial product that can limit child use of computers to X-hours a week.

Lesson No. 1: Wiring the home or school is a long way from wiring the brain. Kids will be kids.

"What about all the reading the kids do online and their PowerPoint Projects?

Reading and comprehension are more difficult when done from a monitor than from a book. Screen reading is 25 percent slower because computer screens use a technology that renders lettering at a resolution of 72 dpi (dots per inch), compared to 600 dpi for most books. This makes the computer screen six times less clear than book text.¹³ In a comparative study of college undergraduates reading from both a computer screen and printed material, the comprehension level was significantly lower from the computer screen.¹⁴ Students admitted to printing out Web material because of the difficulty both in reading it and comprehending text on the screen. No less an authority than Microsoft’s Bill Gates has stated, “Reading off a screen is still vastly inferior to reading off of paper. . . When it comes to something over four or five pages, I print it out and I like to have it to carry around with me and annotate.”¹⁵

When PowerPoint comes to the classroom,
it brings bells and whistles but not
necessarily good writing skills.

While educators and critics decry the state of student writing, many schools are busy adopting a computer program almost designed to hide writing deficits: PowerPoint, a favorite for corporate presentations (no wonder we’re using it in the schools as we try to make them more business-like). These presentations contain slides with built-in charts, animated graphics, and sound effects—just like video games. Needless to say, classmates and parents are quite impressed. In suburbia, PowerPoint is replacing the traditional book report and diorama as the presentation of choice.

The downside is that content often takes a backseat to bells and whistles. As one principal told The Wall St. Journal, “You can make a pretty crappy presentation look good.” Writing becomes sentence fragments with bullets and sound effects, without much depth. Still, the program has its advocates who argue that this is a new age and the computer will bring out skills in children who might not be adept at making a shoebox diorama. Another principal extolled PowerPoint's virtues, saying it requires teamwork, technology know-how, and public speaking—the skills required in today’s job market.¹⁶

Another skill the principal might have mentioned is counting, which is what someone did while one district's superintendent was being mesmerized. “When I was working in a school technology department, I watched eighth-grade students present PowerPoint projects to an obviously proud superintendent. Curious, I counted the number of words that each student had actually written. On average, each eighth-grade student had spent two weeks writing 77 words.”¹⁷

(This is not to say that all charts or visuals are distractions. Where we could really use an occasional chart or visual is the notoriously dull Presidential address to the nation. Be he Democrat or Republican, none seems to have grasped the visual concepts of the business world and applied it to the citizenry. Remember: visual receptors in the brain outnumber auditory receptors by a ratio of thirty to one.¹⁸)

Lesson No. 2: a) Reading from a computer screen is slower and less efficient than reading from paper; and b) Bells and whistles are godsends for camouflaging shallow content.

INTERNET READING — some good news (finally)

INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGY ABUSES

As the Internet grows, so, too, do its abuses. "I saw it on the Internet," therefore it must be true—at least that's how the axiom goes. But sometimes that's a long way from the truth, as NY Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman explains in "When Integrity Goes Missing."

ALSO:

		Press 1 for Distractions. Press 2 for Memory. Press 3 for Help. Press 4 to Give Up.
		Within a few weeks of each other in 2007, two of The New York Times' most most respected writers (David Brooks of the Op-ed page and Samuel G. Freedman its education writer) devoted columns to the learning impediments of the new technology. Brooks' comments came after he bought a car with G.P.S. and began to think of how many other gadgets he had (like an iPod or Internet purchasing account) that memorized items for him and left him (and the next generation) less and less to remember: "Memory? I've externalized it. I am one of those baby boomers who are making this the 'It's on the Tip of My Tongue Decade.' But now I no longer need to have a memory, for I have Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Now if I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind. "Personal information? I've externalized it. I'm no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins. When I want to look up my passwords or contact my friends I just hit a name on my directory. I read in a piece by Clive Thompson in Wired that a third of the people under 30 can't remember their own phone number. Their smartphones are smart, so they don’t need to be. Today’s young people are forgoing memory before they even have a chance to lose it." —Excerpted from "The Outsourced Brain," by David Brooks, Op-ed columnist, The New York Times, Oct. 26, 2007 Freedman's column was devoted to the developing storm of tension in the classroom and lecture hall brought on by IT proliferation enticing students into multitasking instead of focusing on what is being taught in the front of the room. All the advances schools and colleges have made to supposedly enhance learning — supplying students with laptops, equipping computer labs, creating wireless networks — have instead enabled distraction. Perhaps attendance records should include a new category: present but otherwise engaged. —Excerpted from "New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology," by Samuel G. Freedman, The New York Times, Nov. 7, 2007
		For coverage of PBS-Frontline's study of how the Internet is affecting teenagers in America, see The Rough-and-Tumble Online Universe Traversed by Young Cybernauts.

Topics covered in Chapter 8 of print and Web editions of The Read-Aloud Handbook:

NEXT: TV, Audio, and Technology—helping or hurting literacy?

Chapter Eight — p. 1   p. 2   p. 3   Footnotes