Digital Reading Vs. Reading In Print
In most countries all over the world, people may not have experienced reading a paper version of a newspaper since the arrival of the internet. People nowadays can freely open their PCs and type a certain website immediately. This is an advantage of digital reading. As years go by, things become modernized and different inventions and techniques are discovered to help improve people with their day to day activities. Most of these discoveries require the use of gadgets and the internet. In this generation, most people; even elders, are depending on gadgets in almost everything they do. An example is online or digital reading. People rely on this since according to most people, online or digital reading is much easier than reading texts in print. According to some studies, main findings show that students who read texts in print scored significantly better on the reading comprehension test than students who read the texts digitally. With that being said, reading texts in print is much more convenient and the topics are more straightforward and easily understood by the readers. Also, pieces of information uploaded in websites are not 100% trusted since these are not yet published.
Before gadgets and the internet, paper reading was the only easy form or type of reading that existed. This was true until about 2007 to 2009 when the first Kindles and smartphones came into the commercial market. People started using these devices to read books digitally. As per scientific research, your brain tends to remember more of what you have read on paper, as compared to digital reading. Due to the rapid pace of development and innovation in information technology, the dedicated electronic book (e‐book) reader has become a new trend in reading. However, at present, there is only a limited understanding of what factors drive user attitudes/willingness to use this new device for reading. University students are increasingly choosing to purchase e-textbooks for their mobile devices as an alternative to traditional textbooks. This study examines the relationship between textbook format and 538 university students' grades and perceived learning scores. Results demonstrate that there was no difference in cognitive learning and grades between the two groups, suggesting that the electronic textbook is as effective for learning as the traditional textbook. The mean scores indicated that students who chose e-textbooks for their education courses had significantly higher perceived affective learning and psychomotor learning than students who chose to use traditional print textbooks.
The findings outline and describe how the dominant factors affect users' attitudes towards adoption of the dedicated e‐book readers for reading. By considering factors such as ease‐of‐use, usefulness, convenience, compatibility, media richness, etc. , in the stage of product development, practitioners can provide dedicated e‐book readers that customers will readily accept. These findings will enable development of a more robust understanding of attitudes toward dedicated e‐book readers and will be helpful to developers researching e‐book hardware and software as well as to researchers interested in testing related theories.
In the rapidly changing circumstances of our increasingly digital world, reading is also becoming an increasingly digital experience: electronic books (e-books) are now outselling print books in the United States and the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, many readers still view e-books as less readable than print books. The present study thus used combined EEG and eye tracking measures in order to test whether reading from digital media requires higher cognitive effort than reading conventional books. Young and elderly adults read short texts on three different reading devices: a paper page, an e-reader and a tablet computer and answered comprehension questions about them while their eye movements and EEG were recorded. The results of a debriefing questionnaire replicated previous findings in that participants overwhelmingly chose the paper page over the two electronic devices as their preferred reading medium.
According to Julie Coiro, who studies digital reading comprehension in elementary and middle-school students at the University of Rhode Island, has observed that reading in print doesn’t differ from digital reading at all. He also stated that this may only depend on a person’s intellectual abilities and how a person comprehends what he or she is reading. E-books are becoming common in our community. However, great challenges remain in terms of making e-book content more available and in enabling improved comprehension and reducing eye fatigue. Overall, the responses from students suggest that there was general satisfaction with reading e-books on screen. However, researchers also found a discordance in the students' perceptions of e-books. Most students grew tired of reading on the screen; in which this tiredness could have an adverse effect on both reading comprehension and the perception of e-books.
The mass digitization of books is changing the way information is created, disseminated and displayed. Electronic book readers (e-readers) generally refer to two main display technologies: the electronic ink (E-ink) and the liquid crystal display (LCD). Both technologies have advantages and disadvantages, but the question whether one or the other triggers less visual fatigue is still open. Reading digitally may have a lot of disadvantages to readers, and visual fatigue is the main reason. People’s eyes get tired and because of this, our brain might have a hard time in comprehending the information they are reading.
Sing (2013), one of the authors of “The Journal of Experimental Education” stated that students typically predicted better comprehension when reading digitally. However, performance was not consistent with students' preferences and outcome predictions. While there were no differences across mediums when students identified the main idea of the text, students recalled key points linked to the main idea and other relevant information better when engaged with print. There has been an assumption that digital reading is just going to be digital, and there's no reason to compare it to print. A lot of the studies on digital literacy just looked at the digital environment, not the consequences of that, it depends on how people specifically students process text.
If all the people care about is the gist, generally speaking, format it doesn't matter; people can read it fast and get it. But it seems that when people go into more detailed types of comprehension questions that demand careful attention to things — like issues of accuracy and justification — people see the effect coming in, where they now find it more complicated and hard to understand. One problem, people reported, was that the term "digital literacy" itself tends to confuse more than enlighten. People use it to mean everything from merely sticking print text online without a lot of modification, to online text that requires students to sort through all manners of hyperlinks, multimedia, and other sensory enrichment (or distraction, depending on your point of view).
With an increasing amount of time spent reading electronic documents, a screen‐based reading behavior is emerging. The screen‐based reading behavior is characterized by more time spent on browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one‐time reading, non‐linear reading, and reading more selectively, while less time is spent on in‐depth reading, and concentrated reading. Decreasing sustained attention is also noted. Annotating and highlighting while reading is a common activity in the printed environment. However, this “traditional” pattern has not yet migrated to the digital environment when people read electronic documents. Digital education is essentially a product of the past several years, although in different forms it already existed slightly earlier. It is evident, however, that modern devices and means of information transfer are necessary for its development. This type of education would not be therefore possible without rapid development of computers and the Internet. In fact, it can be concluded that they were primary in relation to digital education and somehow they forced its emergence because the prevalence of computers and broadband Internet has given a very strong impulse to use them also in the educational activity. As a consequence, today 'virtual lectures, modern e-learning courses, educational games, electronic tests, portals with educational resources as well as digital school registers and monitoring systems of the learning process have entered everyday reality.
Researchers suggest that by using digital reading devices (such as the Amazon Kindle) people especially students tend to promote new literacies practices and extend connections between readers and text as engagement with and manipulation of text is made possible through electronic tools and features that also considers how such devices can advance e‐book readership among primary people by offering new avenues for accessing and interacting with a wide array of texts. According to some research, today's young people are using technology in ways you could never imagine. Instead of passively watching television, the “Net Geners” are actively participating in the distribution of entertainment and information. For the first time in history, youth are the authorities on something really important. And they are the ones changing every aspect of our society from the workplace to the marketplace, from the classroom to the living room, from the voting booth to the Oval Office. In short, nowadays, young people are the ones manipulating technology. New digital media can no longer be regarded simply as a matter of ‘information’ or of ‘technology’. With the growing convergence of media, the boundaries between ‘information’ and other media have become increasingly blurred. In most young people’s leisure-time experiences, computers are much more than devices for information retrieval: they convey images and fantasies, provide opportunities for imaginative self-expression and play, and serve as a medium through which intimate personal relationships are conducted. These media cannot be adequately understood if people persist in regarding them simply as a matter of machines and techniques, or as ‘hardware’ and ‘software’. The internet, computer games, digital video, mobile phones and other contemporary technologies provide new ways of mediating and representing the world, and of communicating. Outside school, children are engaging with these media, not as technologies but as cultural forms: they are not seeing them primarily as technical tools, but on the contrary as part of their popular culture, and of their everyday lived experience. If educators wish to use these media in schools, they cannot afford to neglect these experiences: on the contrary, they need to provide students with means of understanding them.
Digital literacy, in some point, is about these means of cultural understanding. Digital describes electronic technology that generates, stores, and processes data in terms of two states: positive and non-positive. Positive is expressed or represented by the number 1 and non-positive by the number 0. Thus, data transmitted or stored with digital technology is expressed as a string of 0's and 1's. Each of these state digits is referred to as a bit (and a string of bits that a computer can address individually as a group is a byte).
Prior to digital technology, electronic transmission was limited to analog technology, which conveys data as electronic signals of varying frequency or amplitude that are added to carrier waves of a given frequency. Broadcast and phone transmission has conventionally used analog technology. Digital technology is primarily used with new physical communications media, such as satellite and fiber optic transmission. A modem is used to convert the digital information in your computer to analog signals for your phone line and to convert analog phone signals to digital information for your computer. Reading is defined as a cognitive process that involves decoding symbols to arrive at meaning. Reading is an active process of constructing meanings of words. Reading with a purpose helps the reader to direct information towards a goal and focuses their attention. Although the reasons for reading may vary, the primary purpose of reading is to understand the text. Reading is a thinking process. It allows the reader to use what he or she may already know, also called prior knowledge. During this processing of information, the reader uses strategies to understand what they are reading, uses themes to organize ideas, and uses textual clues to find the meanings of new words. Each of the three components of reading is equally important.
Digital reading may have its disadvantages, but let us not forget its contribution to our generation today. Digital reading is relevant and is an important factor in our day to day lives. Without this, we may not be able to connect or communicate with people all around the globe. Using the internet is a form of digital reading for everything that comes out of gadgets is read digitally, therefore there isn’t a day where we aren’t using these. However, reading in print is still also an important factor. There are times when we do not have electronic devices with us, or it is not necessary to use them. An alternative to this is books, newspapers, magazines, etc. These are still relevant in many different ways. They carry out useful and legit information. These can also be carried easily and are good sources of information. We frequently use these in school, which proves that these are better tools for comprehension. Reading in print must still also be given importance since digital reading can never be born without print reading. Both are significant in their own ways because they are used differently. With all these citations cited above, people clearly have different opinions regarding digital reading that is why we should preserve these useful factors in our lives for us to be able to do work comfortably and with ease.
