Electronic Text
What is Electronic Text?
According to Wikipedia, electronic or e-text/etext is any text-based information that is available in a digitally encoded human-readable format and read by electronic means.
The Benefits of Electronic Text
Because electronic text is permeable, fluid, responsive, available, and transportable, it can easily bring together people from around the world and it allows for immediate access to information.
How Do You Read Electronic Text
Typically, we all learned to read printed text from left to right and from top to bottom. We actually teach and assess young children's directionality as they learn to read. When reading a book, we usually began on the first page and kept turning pages until we found our way to the back. Reading the printed page has been very sequential. Most of us have accepted the structure offered by the author. We assume that the first paragraph is first for a very good reason. And the same goes for the second paragraph. Sentences, paragraphs and chapters are laid out in a sequence carefully orchestrated by the writer, who, we assume, has a plan in mind for how we might best learn whatever message is being expressed. How many readers began this book, for example, by skimming the final chapter?
In some classrooms we have encouraged students to use scanning and questioning prior to reading (e.g., S3QR strategy). These models are effective but also limited to the human eye as a scanner. The reader could search only as far as the eye could see. The sheer volume of words and pages in informational-type textbooks makes searching for ideas difficult and very time consuming. The linearity of printed text lends itself especially well to student consumption of others' ideas. The job of the student with pre-electronic texts was to "follow" and learn the authors' thinking.
What are the features or benefits of electronic text?
- Electronic text makes it much easier for the student to explore and critique the thinking of others on the way to producing one's own insights.
- Electronic text is extremely easy to penetrate.
- One can probe below the surface to find previously implicit ideas or facts with ease. In other words, electronic text makes it much easier to explore the thoughts of others, maintain an open mind and draw one's own conclusions. Electronic text can help you understand how ideas may fit together and gives you options to choose how to expand your knowledge on a topic. It helps make other people's ideas available to you for your own thinking. Because of this permeability, reading in the Information Age will come to include a more inventive, less sequential approach to exploring the content of a text file.
- Electronic text is extremely easy to move around. Using cut-and-paste functions, the reader can rearrange the information and the idea, combining it with information and ideas learned from other texts. These combinations will often birth new ideas and motivate the reader to research and continue to learn more about the topic. Reading will come to include some form of collecting and storing of thoughts.
- Electronic text almost seems conversant, changing on the screen before our eyes as we ask questions and probe below the surface. Our inquiries can create a kind of electronic dialogue.
- Electronic text is very easy to locate and physically possess.
- Electronic text can be exchanged, shared, and transmitted with great accuracy, speed, and economy. Information resources move around with great rapidity. Because they are transportable, their impact can grow exponentially; however electronic posting does not guarantee reading or comprehending at the other end.
Resources
Strategies for Comprehending Electronic Text in Digitally Mediated Times
http://www.formatex.org/micte2006/pdf/170-174.pdf
Want to learn more about reading electronic text and even more about teaching your students to read it? Check out this in-depth paper dealing with how to use comprehension strategies, searching strategies, and website evaluation in the realm of online text.
