Re: Too many printouts

[cph@wiley.csusb.edu (Carol Haviland)]

Eric and Neal have raised a critical issue, especially for readers/writers
who have "versatile by established" reading practices.  The "savor the
print, insert your own text into the text" practices work very differently
without print, so often we create the print to accommodate those practices.
Hence, any read that isn't "byte-sized" we convert.  Eric is correct when he
observes that the nimble readers of print have to reassess nimbleness just
as they have encouraged "one size fits all" readers in their classrooms.
It's so much easier to teach/extol than to practice!
Carol
>On Sun, 21 Jan 1996, Eric Crump wrote, in part:
>> Really, though, it's important these days to be a nimble reader, writer, 
>> rhetor--to be able to shift from one medium to the next without too much 
>> cognitive disorientation or physical discomfort. I don't mind emphasizing 
>> net-based reading and writing skills because I think those are going to 
>> serve folks well in the long term. But I don't exclude print-based 
>> skills. They are still important for the moment. 
>
>I'm trying to figure out what disturbs me on some level about "net-based 
>reading and writing skills."  I suppose one reason is that I feel I have 
>lousy net-based reading skills.  When I fire up my web browser and start 
>clicking on links, I lose patience incredibly quickly.  If I have enough 
>attention span to identify something that looks interesting (and keep in 
>mind that most of this browsing is related to homebrewing beer, my 
>all-consuming hobby), I'll print it out or save it as a file to be 
>printed later.  I just don't have patience to read screenful after 
>screenful of text, graphics, song, and/or dance.
>
>So I'm wondering just what it is about the medium that disturbs me so, 
>and I'm wondering if I'm alone in such feelings.  How many of you folks 
>will zap messages that require you to hit the space bar or whatever 
>mechanism is required to advance one screen full of text?  And I'm 
>wondering simply what the skills might be that allows someone to deal 
>skillfully with such things (and perhaps how I can learn them?).
>
>	Neal Lerner
>	nlerner@acs.bu.edu
>
>