Wired provides a great round-up of some research comparing screen to paper. Perhaps most surprising – it may be less about the distractions we are exposed to on screen, and more about how a medium lets us know where we are in that text, and how that text is structured:
All those cues like what the page looks like, what the book felt like, all those little pieces help you put together the whole thing,” said Marilyn Jager-Adams, a cognitive psychologist and literacy expert at Brown University.
Further concerns surround the problem of how our brains are adapting to digital media – brains require training to remain literate in both shorter texts and longer, in-depth texts; the latter literacy, so far, is not trained through digital media. Tufts university professor and cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf suggests in the Washington Post:
We should be simultaneously reading to children from books, giving them print, helping them learn this slower mode, and at the same time steadily increasing their immersion into the technological, digital age.
As for the classroom, one major concern is that the use of laptops not only lowers the grades of users, but also of those sitting nearby.
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