Reading in a Hyper-Media World

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

This article by Nicholas Carr really struck home for me. I can remember periods in my life where I read for hours on end, literally finishing some books in a few days or even a few hours.

Now I work to get through a chapter a day. Of course, I can imagine other factors that contribute to that decreased reading productivity: I have a zillion other things going on, including many other things I want to read, so any one book has to really jump up and down to get my attention. And these days, I tend to read non-fiction books with more content and less fluff, if you will, so each chapter requires digesting, rather than just zipping through like I might demolish a tasty sci-fi novel.

Nonetheless, I suffer from the same scan and surf behavior Carr describes.

Seems to me that educators would do well to sit up and consider what this might mean for their classroom assignments. They may already have sense this trend, but perhaps some research needs doing.

To avoid the accusation that I have overlooked work already in progress on this, I will do some *surfing* and *skimming* over the weekend to see if I'm the last to learn about this.....