למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

I’d put it to you that many students are just not certain what a digital text is, or what digital writing is, not really, and yet I feel that the worst thing we can do, as tutors, is attempt an exacting definition.

... are we talking about any written work which appears on a screen? And any screen? Will a television or a mobile phone do? Or must it be a computer? Is a Kindle or an iPad enough of a computer to qualify? And why? Do we really read differently on these things? And once we’ve settled on a carrier medium does a digital text include scans of a paper document? .pdfs? Photographs of existing texts?

But these structures evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world. The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly.

... he (בירקירטס) is defending “the contextual order that books represent” while a new contextual order is developing all around him. For him this new order is insufficient – for me it is just different (if not better). The contextual order that books represent is essentially linear, while the emerging contextual order is weblike. Birkerts clings to an understanding of knowledge and context as rooted in chronology and history, whereas new conceptions of knowledge are understood as networks not lines.

We are, potentially, on a road to no longer needing books, which is why we need to be able to articulate just why we might want them. When we are talking about what they do best, when we are teaching how the words on their pages are different to their words on the screen then we need to fully appreciate aspects of the form that we have often previously taken for granted.

The magic of writing arises not so much from the fact that writing serves as a new mnemonic device, an aid to memory, as from the fact that writing may serve an important epistemological function. Writing not only helps us remember what was thought and said but also invites us to see what was thought and said in a new way. It is a cliché to say that there is more to writing than the abc's and more to literacy than the ability to decode words and sentences. Capturing that "more" is the problem. I have suggested that it is the ability to step into, and on occasion step out again, from this new world, the world on paper.

תוויות: טקסט, כתיבה, קריאה