Finance strategies for adaptation. Presentation for CANCC
New roles for librarians ver for presentation
1. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO SCARBOROUGH
1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4
New Roles for Librarians in the Online
World
IFLA President’s Meeting
Victoria Owen
Chief Librarian, University of Toronto Scarborough
Toronto, April 7, 2016
2. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO SCARBOROUGH
1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4
MGT105 – Mapping the Curriculum
4. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO SCARBOROUGH
1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4
From Stop the Presses: Is the monograph headed towards
an e-only future. By R. Schonfeld, Ithaka S+R
5. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO SCARBOROUGH
1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4
Selecting for Learning
from Words Onscreen by Naomi Baron
Student preference for
6. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO SCARBOROUGH
1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4
Preference for
The literature that treats the effects of e-books on student learning incorporates the devices on which e-books are available, students’ attitudes towards these devices and their information behaviours. (Glackin, Rodenhiser, & Herzog, 2014) (Mizrachi, 2015) (Weisberg, 2011) Additionally, there is faculty opinion on the effects of electronic collections and the quality of students’ work. (Dilevko & Gottlieb, 2002) (Baron, 2014)
Factors that determine whether e-books and electronic resources will be used by students in higher education include usability and students’ capacity to fully explore the features of electronic resources and utilize their full potential in their learning. (Berg, Hoffmann, & Dawson, 2010, p. 524)
A 2014 UCLA study of undergraduates’ attitudes and behaviors towards electronic resources for course work reveals how students use print and electronic resources. This study took into account learning outcomes such as information retention and active engagement. While 80% of the participant group agreed to highlight their print texts, only one third of them did the same with their electronic textbooks. These results are attributed to the lack of knowledge of how to use these features on the devices on which they accessed the electronic content. Furthermore, some platforms on which the texts were offered did not allow for this type of annotation in the output format of their electronic materials. (Mizrachi, 2015, p. 304)
Students are open to trying new technologies; they understand digital environments could be complex and will look to information professionals, instructors and their institutions of higher education for assistance when initiating their use and manipulation of digital content. (Dahlstrom, Walker, & Dziuban, 2013, pp. 4-5)
The effects e-books have on student learning are debated within the literature. Studies compare print and electronic reading to learning outcomes of small sample groups. One study by Jim Johnson shows no visible differences in the academic performance of the participants. (Indiana State University, 2013) Another study by Anne Niccoli displayed similar results as Johnson’s, but further explored the individual scores of its participants. It found differences in comprehension between those who read the print versus those who read from an iPad. (Niccoli, 2015) Faculty in disciplines that require “deep reading” comment that e-reading leads to a lack of enthusiasm in their students’ academic output and, furthermore, that it is the cause of declining enrollment in disciplines such as the Humanities. (Baron, 2014)
Students’ brains are changing and gravitate to multimedia stimulus to engage them in learning (Caine et al, 2005). E-books are an emerging tool for learning.
Comprehension, intentional thinking that leads to meaning as the reader interacts with the text. This is vital, and a big area of concern. This is where decoding takes place, the student needs to determine text structures, ask questions, and self-monitor and to summarize as they read.
Students tend to copy or print first and read and comprehend later.
In a study of a campus wide textbook initiative at NW Missouri State U (Rickman et al 2009) 60% of students reported that they read more when using print textbooks than when reading e-textbooks. Students preferred e-textbooks only when cost savings was a factor.
Learning is not passive; learners must stop and think about what they have read, make connections to what they already know, and construct their own meaning.
Naomi Baron- Words onscreen
Researchers nearly always go for printed text, they underline, write notes, draw arrows, attach Post-its. They have a spatial relationship to the text, on the page and in the pile, there are physical signposts to find the material afterwards: about halfway through, on the upper right-hand side.
If eReading is less well suited for many longer works or even for short ones requiring serious thought, what happens to reading if we shift from print to screens? Will some of the uses of reading (and, for that matter, writing) fall by the wayside? If so, with what implications for education and learning?
Words Onscreen collected data from three cohorts in the United States, along with a group in Japan and another in Germany. Although the questions evolved over the years, in each case I inquired about habits and preferences when it came to reading in print versus onscreen.
A typical student, a digital native, interacts with digital texts by searching for some key words, reading a few lines above and below, and is finished. The student is short on time and attention span. This snippet approach to reading, enabled by online search tools, is one of the downsides of digital reading’s search affordance. But the snippet frame of mind also pops up in the way students use print sources. The Citation Project, which studies issues relating to the teaching of writing, offers worrisome findings about the way today’s university students are making use of reference sources (books, journals, online materials, and so on) in their research papers. In the student papers the project reviewed,
•46 percent of citations were to the first page of the source
•77 percent were to the first three pages
The meaning of “reading” increasingly becomes “finding information”—and often settling for the first thing that comes to hand—rather than “contemplating and understanding.”
How much did students think they had learned? Among MBA students who largely did their reading onscreen, one out of ten felt they learned more by reading an eTextbook than reading a hardcopy book. But almost two-thirds said they had learned less. By contrast, among the undergraduates, a little more than half reported learning more from eTextbooks, and almost one-quarter felt they had learned less (again, compared with reading a hardcopy text).
And now some data from spring 2012 classes (mostly undergraduate) using
eTextbooks at Cornell, Indiana University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Virginia, and the University of Wisconsin:
•Lower cost and portability were the most important factors for students considering subsequent purchase of an eTextbook.
•Students reported doing a bit less than half the assigned reading in the eTextbooks. At Michigan, faculty found that students now using Textbooks did less reading than those who used print texts in previous semesters.
•At Cornell, Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, students expressed a preference for print textbooks over eTextbooks.
•At Wisconsin, 54 percent said they learned more from print, while 25 percent indicated medium made no difference.66
As the initiative continues, look for updates on the EDUCAUSE and Internet2
websites.67
Do people prefer to read in print or on digital screens? In 2010, I asked students for their preferences by genre. In all cases except academic journal articles and newspapers, the overwhelming choice was hardcopy for both academic and pleasure reading.
For schoolwork, variation across countries probably reflects the written material involved. I’m fairly confident that much of the assigned reading in the United States entailed journal articles or book chapters only available online, hence the relatively high use of digital screens (41 percent). I don’t have information about academic assignments in Japan and Germany. What is unambiguous is that when it comes to pleasure reading, students in all three countries favored print over digital.
Two more relevant notes. In 2010, I asked about students’ reading and printing
habits. If an academic assignment were available online, did students read it on screen, print it and read it, or read it onscreen and then print it out? While 55 percent indicated they only read the piece onscreen, 39 percent printed it out and then read it (a practice common with many professionals). A small but noteworthy 6 percent of the students read the piece onscreen and then printed it out. And so 45 percent wanted a print copy, one way or another.
What happens if you dangle a printed copy in front of students? When I asked students if they were more likely to read an assigned article if it were available online or if they were handed a printed copy, 38 percent said it made no difference and 6 percent indicated they were more likely to do the online reading. But the rest—56 percent—found being handed a paper copy was the better motivator. If faculty want students to do assigned reading, we need to rethink whether blithely saying “You can find it online” is effective.
Does length matter when it comes to choice of reading platform? Absolutely. If the text is short, medium preference is not particularly strong—a mixture of hardcopy, digital screen, or no preference. This pattern held across samples in all three countries and applied to both academic and pleasure reading. Reading longer texts is an entirely different story. Just looking at preference for hardcopy, these are the numbers when the text is long:
United States JapanGermany
Long schoolwork text
Prefer hardcopy
92%77% 95%
Long pleasure reading text
Prefer hardcopy
85% 74% 88%
We’ve spoken about convenience, cost, and the environment being potential advantages of reading onscreen. When it came to what students liked most about reading onscreen, convenience won hands down.
“Cash rules everything around me.” In a 2013 in response to “If the cost were identical, in which medium would you prefer to do reading” for schoolwork or for pleasure? The results reveal a huge mismatch between the idea of going digital to save money and what students themselves seem to want:
United States Japan Germany
If cost were the same,
preferred medium for
schoolwork
Hardcopy
89%77%94%
Digital screen
11% 23% 6%
If cost were the same,
preferred medium for
pleasure reading
Hardcopy
81% 83% 89%
Digital screen
19% 17% 11%
Is it easier to concentrate when reading onscreen or in hardcopy? The answer in the surveys was crystal clear: Hardcopy won out everywhere (United States: 92 percent; Japan: 92 percent; Germany: 98 percent).
As reading goes increasingly onscreen, if we want our students to concentrate, we will need to figure out how to cut down on digital distraction—be it hopping to another digital site or responding to a text message.
Besides specific questions about multitasking and concentration, the open-ended questions generated mounds of useful information about how students approach reading. Many sang the mental or educational praises of reading in hardcopy:
Liked most about reading in hardcopy:
“I can write in it.”
“Necessary for focus.”
Liked least about reading onscreen:
“I hate not being able to dog-ear pages and flip back and forth!!!!!!”
“It’s harder to keep your place online.”
“I don’t absorb as much.”
“I get distracted.”
Or, as a student of mine put it more recently,
“Reading [on] paper is active—I’m engaged and thinking, reacting, marking
up the page. Reading a screen feels passive to me.”
Other responses in my 2013 study pointed up educational or navigational advantages of reading onscreen:
Liked most about reading onscreen:
“You can easily look up words you don’t know.”
“Easy to look up additional information.”
Learners believed that reading on paper enhanced comprehension
Need to work concurrently with other documents
Print article if it is long or complicated
Print if they need to make notes
Meaning is anchored to structure; when trying to locate a piece of written information people often remember where in the text it appeared. Books have a more obvious topography than online text, making it more easily navigated and a more coherent mental map of the text.
Onscreen reading interferes with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibits the mapping of the journey in their minds; digital text readers scroll through a seamless stream of words.
Headers and page numbers disappear, leaving no trace of what came before and not way to see what lies ahead.
The feel of where you are in a book is more important than was realized. Ease of navigability may be a reason for better absorption of a text. In print you can find the beginning, end and everything in between, and are constantly connected to your path and progress through the text; it might be less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension.
Screens and e-readers interfere with 2 other things; serendipity and a sense of control. People enjoy flipping to a previous section of a text when a memory of something they read earlier surfaces, or scanning ahead on a whim. People also like to highlight with chemical ink, write notes to themselves in the margins, and deform the paper. Getting away from multi-purpose screens improves concentration. When people want to dive into a text, for in-depth reading, they do it on paper.
Tactile experiences matter more than they seem. E-text is more intangible than text on paper.
Size of texts, magnum opus or a short story seem the same online, creating a haptic dissonance
People who read on paper learned the material more thoroughly more quickly; they did not have to spend time searching their memories for info from the text,
The physicality, of illumination, glare can cause eyestrain, headaches, etc. and may demand more physical and cognitive resources. Like many cognitive abilities, working memory is a finite resource that diminishes with exertion.
Attitude: screens may be taxing people’s attention more than paper, and people do not always bring as much mental effort to the screen in the first place. It is thought to be a less serious affair than reading on paper. They spend more time browsing, scanning and hunting for keywords compared to readers on paper, and are more likely to read a document once and only once. People are also less inclined to engage in metacognitive learning regulation, strategies, such as setting specific goals, rereading difficulty sections, and checking out how much one has understood along the way.
Using an e-book – never owning the book; people love curating, organizing and sharing e-resources.
For intensive reading of long texts, print still has the advantage.
Comprehension and use of materials, cost and ease of printing.
Role as partner in learning, collector and curators of collections