Lilly, David. mvc-007.jpg. "Nov. 11, 1999". Pics4Learning. 19 Feb 2010

In doing my homework for this I stumbled upon a fascinating debate in the New York Times Opinion section called “Does the brain like e-books?” There were short, well written opnions from five “experts” who weighed in on this question.  In particular I found Marianne Wolf’s piece most interesting.  Her proposition is that the human brain can only process so much information in a finite amount of time and the distractive allure to “read on” or “”click on” of ebooks will draw young readers onward before they have been able to process the information in at the refelctive layer of comprehension within the time allotted by young readers between clicks.  Many of the experts wrote about the medium of ebooks potentially allowing readers to move more quickly through the material than they are able to process at the deeper layers….similar to how Socarates feared for the loss of the oral tradition to the written medium as preferred by Aristotle, this new medium presents both exciting and potentially scary propositions.  It is a good reminder for us as educators, that as we make more content available to students, we must be even more diligent to teaching comprehension and synthesis regardless of the medium.