Slow Reading

As a follow-up to the post on Nick Carr's  Is Google Making Us Stupid article this summer, here is some additional reading about reading:
In Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind,  Mark Bauerlein (Chronicle of Higher Education, 09/19/08) argues that "advocates of e-learning in higher education pursue a risky policy, striving to unite liberal-arts learning with the very devices of acceleration that hinder it."  I found Bauerlein's article via John Miedema's Slow Reading blog. Miedema will publish a book about slow reading on Litwin Press next spring.

In an article in the 10/17/08 Chronicle Review (Assign Books, and Students Will Read) - available at the CC blog -  Nancy Bunge, a professor of writing at Michigan State,  discusses her experiences of assigning difficult texts (e.g. Kant, Buber) that require a sustained concentration and analysis of the reader that departs dramatically from "web reading."  She concludes that students will rise to the challenge, and even enjoy grappling with such turgid material.

Bunge also cites Caleb Carr's New Yorker article Twilight of the Books (12/24/07) which in turn discusses Maryanne Wolf's book “Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain”