Blurts

Frontline, a PBS news program, recently offered a two program, two hour documentary entitled “The Facebook Dilemma” [segment1, segment2]. I recommend the documentary to all who use Facebook and to all who use free online services. The program offers a history of Facebook, insights into the business model of such companies, and an analysis of the psychological principles that feed this business and have led to disturbing unintended consequences. Unintended consequences from the perspective of such companies themselves, but well understood by actors who understand how what the services provided can be manipulated to accomplish.

By chance, I recently authored a post on how the collection of personal information enables the business of these free services and I offer some thoughts on alternatives.

Kindle offers an opportunity I find intriguing. You can view the most popular highlights of readers. There is a concept in the highlighting and annotation literature I follow that is referred to as “expert notes/highlights”. This is not exactly the same, but might be considered as crowdsourcing highlighting. As a Kindle author, I pay attention to popular highlights in the books I write. I think it is interesting to see what is most important to those who read my books. 

You may or may not have this Kindle featured enabled. If you do, you will find popular highlights underlined and the highlights you add in the color you have designated. The underlined highlights are kind of difficult to see in this image, but that is by design. The developers did not want the popular highlights to be distracting.

I don’t think turning the public highlights feature on and off is intuitive, so I thought I would explain. I am using the Kindle app as the basis for my example.

This image shows the “library view” within the app and the important icon here is “MORE” located at the bottom of the screen.

“More” reveals multiple settings and you will need to access “OTHER”. Multiple step processes such as this do make things a little vague.

One of the “OTHER” settings allows popular highlights to be turned ON or OFF.

There is a second way to view popular highlights that is kind of interesting and may be more efficient depending how you might use these highlights.

If you get out of full screen mode to access the outline and some other tools associated with the book you are reading, you will find “Popular Highlights”.

This way of access popular highlights shows the list of most popular highlights associated with each chapter and how frequently each segment of text has been highlighted.

To the right of each text segment, you will see the three dot pattern (…) indicating more options. One of these options is “Go-To” and this is how you would then find the popular text segment within the context of the book.

As an advocate for a technology integration, I admit there are two issues that concern me. The first is whether or not exposure to technology (define as you think most appropriate) influences brain function. The second is whether learning from static screen displays (reading or studying online information) is inferior to reading/studying traditional (i.e., paper) content). I regard these topics as still unresolved by science. I also also see them as nuanced questions. For example, reading is different from studying hence questions about whether a paper or digital textbook is best might possibly lead to different decisions depending on whether the question relates to reading or studying.

I think it far too early for recommendations on paper vs screen to claim the support of the research community. I also think some issues will be difficult to address should decisions be made too quickly. It seems very possible that despite widespread use of technology by young people, specific uses such as extended reading/studying are rare meaning research comparing paper-based and screen-based reading/studying cannot be equated for existing experience. It seems very possible that existing patterns of use (some have described as quickly moving from stimulus to stimulus when online) represents a confounding that may generalize to types of desired use (extended reading/studying) triggered by the medium (screen or paper). Inferior performance for screen reading that might exist today would not necessarily be present with greater extended reading/studying screen-based experience.

Anyway, let me describe a specific study. I think it worth the time of advanced students in education to read the study and others interested in the topic of learning from static screen content to at least read the introduction and the discussion. I make this general recommendation because researchers in the introduction provide background on the topic. If you have little background, reading the introductions to relevant research allows you to see how researchers frame the topic without having to understand their research methdology and the statistical analyses applied to their data.

Sidi, Y., Ophir, Y., & Ackerman, R. (2016). Generalizing screen inferiority-does the medium, screen versus paper, affect performance even with brief tasks?. Metacognition and Learning, 11(1), 15-33.

As I understand the core idea of this study, the authors are saying some research with extended reading seems to demonstrate the advantage of paper. This may be because extended reading from a screen is more demanding in some undefined way. Would the same differences be found with shorter material? So, for example, if screen reading is more fatiguing, one might not find the same disadvantage with shorter passages

You don’t see this in the title, but the authors investigate the hypothesis that inferior results from screen-based reading results from a shallower form of processing. In other words, readers jump to faulty conclusions because they are investing less cognitive effort in their reading (they call this cognitive recruitment) and this overconfidence sometimes results in failed comprehension. To come up with reading content that is short, but requires careful thought, the authors used three very short questions that many get wrong. One of these questions follows.

A bat and a  ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1. 00 more than the ball. How much does the  ball cost? _____ cents”.

The answer to the question is .05.  1.05 + .05 = 1.10. The most common, but incorrect response  is .10.

So, unless a reader thinks very carefully about the content, their inclination is to give the wrong answer to such questions. Hence, the researchers were using reading material that was prone to faulty, but quick comprehension and they hypothesized this would be a great way to demonstrate the difference between screen and paper content.

No treatment (screen vs paper) differences were found.

In a second experiment, the researchers asked the learners to offer a confidence estimate for each response. They did another interesting thing – some readers were exposed to the questions in a traditional font and some a font that was difficult to read. The idea was to introduce an experience for some that required the reader to exert additional cognitive effort.

The performance data indicated an interaction, but no main effect for paper vs screen. The traditional font resulted in superior performance for the paper group and the more difficult font resulted in superior performance for the screen group. When the researches examined the confidence ratings, the screen readers made similar confidence ratings to matter the font type. In contrast, the paper readers were more confident with the traditional font.

My conclusion – even though performance difference in the two experients were not there, paper readers had a more accurate perception of the difficulty of the tasks. Because the ratings of confidence seem to run in opposition to performance in experiment 2, this gets difficult to explain. You almost have to conclude that screen readers adjusted automatically to difficulty and paper readers adjusted because of metacognitive insight in order to explain the results. This seems a bit of a stretch and without related overall performance differences I see little reason to question screen learning. Like so many applied studies, the results are interesting, but confusing. As is often the case, the researchers note that additional research is necessary. 

I just finished explaining how easy it is to curate and then share online resources within Wakelet. The way I do this is to search for the resources I want and then use the Wakelet extension I have added to my browser (Chrome) to either just add the site to Wakelet or to an existing collection I have been working on within Wakelet.

The extensions for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox as well as the iOS and Android apps can be downloaded from Wakelet.

Adding an extension may be a skill you have not experienced, so I thought I would take the time to explain the process. What follows is the procedure for Chrome.  

The easiest way to find Chrome extensions is to go to the Chrome store and search. If you do this using the Chrome browser, the extension you download will automatically be added. If the extension is active, you should see an icon in the browser icon bar. This is the icon you select to save a resource to Wakelet.

If you so not see this icon, you will to need to view the Chrome tools that have been added to your browser. The extension may need to be activated or it may not have actually been added.

In the upper right-hand corner of your browser window, you should see three dots arranged vertically. If you click on these dots, you should encounter a drop-down menu that looks like this. You want to select More Tools. You should see a second dialog box and find Extensions listed among the options. 

The extension that have been added to the browser should be listed. You may need to move the slider that appears in the lower, right-hand corner of the extension you are checking on to activate it.