Different kind of reading

Last week in mid-panic over the fact that I had only read '8'? articles for my piece on multimodality - I read another 3 in a super productive 3 hour session at the library. I realised that my reading strategy just wasn't working. Interestingly then, that I also started to read around the area of literacies and technology - the work of Ilana Snyder in particular - who in the late 1990's started to talk about the shift from 'page to screen' in an attempt to describe how literacy practices were fundamentally changing due to technological innovation and development associated with the computer screen and internet technologies. Basically the suggestion is that screen based technologies are changing how we read, write and interact with information and knowledge. A big part of these shifting literacy practices is surface reading, especially common of reading practices on websites and hypertext-type texts. This got me thinking about my paper privileging reading practices and my insistence on take long written notes as I read each sentence or paragraph of an article, book or chapter. Its a practice I've used more or less successfully all my HE academic life. It takes a seriously long time, is often redundant but it has always worked for me. So why change?

Well I have just so much more 'reading' to do and I really don't have the time; its also so demoralizing when I realise how 'little' I've done within a particular time period and the mountains I still have to get through. This weekend I read through the bulk of the literacy and technology literature I brought along to SA (maybe 8-10 papers)  and I feel I have developed a general sense of the main arguments being articulated and how they might fit into my research agenda. All I have to do now is go back over each paper or article and extract the main points I have highlighted for my details notes. Importantly, I feel more confident about the use of my time and more encouraged to read more rather than being burdened with the thought of seeing my reading activities as a major chore I'd rather not tackle. Maybe this is the start of a new 'learning' strategy? Watch this space!