Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading
Dr. Cohn’s book, Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading was recently released, addressing digital reading and the spectrum of affordances available within digital learning environments. In her discussion of how to read deeply in digital spaces, she calls for readers to embrace a range of reading practices available to them.
Summary:
Smartphones, laptops, tablets: college students are reading on-screen all the time, and digital devices shape students’ understanding of and experiences with reading. In higher education, however, teachers rarely consider how digital reading experiences may have an impact on learning abilities, unless they’re lamenting students’ attention spans or the distractions available to students when they’re learning online.
Skim, Dive, Surface offers a corrective to these conversations—an invitation to focus not on losses to student learning but on the spectrum of affordances available within digital learning environments. It is designed to help college instructors across the curriculum teach digital reading in their classes, whether they teach face-to-face, fully online, or somewhere in between. Placing research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, learning science, and composition in dialogue with insight from the scholarship of teaching and learning, Jenae Cohn shows how teachers can better frame, scaffold, and implement effective digital reading assignments. She positions digital reading as part of a cluster of literacies that students should develop in order to communicate effectively in a digital environment.
About Dr. Jenae Cohn: Jenae Cohn writes and speaks about teaching and learning in digital spaces. She works as the director of academic technology at California State University, Sacramento. Find more at www.jenaecohn.net
