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articles that get a lot of tweets don’t necessarily get read very deeply.

The mainstay of book publishing is the extended narrative, either fictional or factual and almost always shaped by a single authorial consciousness and expressed in a single authorial voice. It is, in other words, a work of art.

Count me as a member of the set who prefers my non-fiction in eBook format

If this is right, then the twilight of the printed book will proceed on a schedule disconnected to the growth or stagnation of e-books — what the internet portends is not the end of the paper container of the book, but rather the way paper organized our assumptions about writing altogether.

Clay Shirky

the book, a creation of human beings, turned out not only to be a terrific container for distributing speech and then writing; it also, through an intertwined, mutually reinforcing, and unique combination of the mode of reading it encouraged (deep, attentive, immersive) and the modes of expression it inspired (deep, thoughtful, eloquent, emotionally resonant, experimental), actually heightened the potential of human expression, experience, and life.

Already the presses have stopped for phone books and encyclopedias, are stopping for textbooks and newspapers, and will increasingly stop for books of all kinds. And I think as that happens, the experience of reading books will be displaced by other experiences.

I don’t believe in ‘narrative obsolescence’ — on the contrary, I think that stories, unlike books, are a fundamental unit of human thought, which is to say that in most cultures we know of, there were no books, but there were stories.

forms of aesthetic expression co-evolve with their modes of production, and often don’t survive large-scale reconfiguration of those modes.

I have several reasons for thinking that the current round of destruction is clearing the decks for something better, but the main one is that historically, media that increase the amount of arguing people do has been a long-term positive for society, even at the cost of short-term destruction of familiar patterns, and the disorientation of the people comfortable with those patterns. I think we’ll get extended narrative online — I just doubt the format of most of those narratives will look enough like a book to merit the name.

Where nihilism enters the picture is when you say, sneeringly, that although “half a millenium of rehearsed reverence have taught us to regard [the book] as a semantic unit, [it] may in fact be a production unit: the book is what you get when writers have access to printing presses, just as the album is what you get when musicians have access to LP-pressing machines.” People’s love of books in general and serious novels and poetry in particular is not just a numb act of “rehearsed reverence” (a phrase that is incredibly insulting and demeaning) to an accidental production unit.

Reducing aesthetic choices to “rehearsed reverence” is a form of nihilism.

Some things — emphasis on “things” — are actually worthy of respect.

today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.

it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed - and are different from ours - as a result of how they grew up.  But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed.

our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.  

Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast.  They like to parallel process and multi-task.  They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked.  They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards.  They prefer games to "serious" work. 

They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and "tell-test" instruction. 

Often from the Natives' point of view their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying attention to compared to everything else they experience - and then they blame them for not paying attention! 

Smart adult immigrants accept that they don’t know about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help them learn and integrate.  Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time grousing about how good things were in the "old country."

As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives.  The first involves a major translation and change of methodology; the second involves all that PLUS new content and thinking.  It's not actually clear to me which is harder - "learning new stuff" or "learning new ways to do old stuff."  I suspect it's the latter.  

My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content.