Posted by alexandra_k on August 23, 2013, at 18:42:54
at the start of the year i decided to go paperless. thought i'd type notes instead of handwriting them. thought i'd follow the ppt. on my computer screen instead of the print out. thought i'd be okay with electronic copies of required texts.
i quit the course before i quit my experiment... but... i'm not entirely persuaded. i get that it is better for the planet etc etc. also a lot cheaper for me since i pay for my own printing these days and textbooks can get heavy etc etc. but i still do need to print out my writing sometimes. and i get something from laying it all out sequentially on the floor in front of me and... doing what people used to do with the scissors for cut and paste.
i know people have talked about the smell of books. and about the feel of turning the page. but i think there might be something more to it. something that makes it less effective study-wise.
when a lecturer closely follows a textbook the textbook becomes... a bit of an extension of myself. i've spent so much time with it, reading it, rereading it, summarizing it, turning the pages. i can often just open it to the bit i want because i know how far through it is... what thickness. i know where it is on the page. i start to develop a 3-d representation of it.
i think... you can do this with e-books. but that it is harder. because it is (yet another!) level of abstraction. keeping track of page numbers instead of feeling the weight of the book and the thickness of the pages. getting a sense of the layout when most readers / computer screens are not able to give a nice full page a4 / letter size view (seriously - what the f*ck is up with that???). there is no left page and then right page there is just page after page after page after page (though i guess some wide-screen viewers let you). perhaps that is part of the problem - different viewers altering it which means you don't get enough consistency to develop a proper representation of it... then resetting the freaking zoom level every time i turn the page... i just...
there is something kinesthetic about my reading, i guess. anyone else?
do people use e-readers / view books etc with a pdf reader? any reccommendations?
i think i would get a kindle-like device if it could:
a - display a whole page of a standard size textbook at a readable level of zoom (Hey! why not make one the size of a standard texbook!)
b - display color. well enough for reading colored graphs / anatomy plates
c - if the screen was matt so it could be viewable in sunny conditionswe aren't there yet, though - are we?
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1049569
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20130811/msgs/1049569.html