Online Reading Destroys Brain Cells?

While perusing the latest Political Animal posts, I ran across in which Kevin suggests that online reading might be bad for off-line reading.

It’s not just that I spend less time reading books, it’s that I find my mind wandering when I do read. After a few paragraphs, or maybe a page or two, I’ll run into a sentence that suddenly reminds me of something — and then spend the next minute staring into space thinking of something entirely unrelated to the book at hand. Eventually I snap back, but obviously this behavior reduces both my reading rate and my reading comprehension.

Now Anna routinely teases me because I’ll read, re-read, re-re-read, re-re-re — but you get the picture — books that I’ve read many times before. Some of my Terry Pratchett boks have be read dozens of times. No. Really.

Is this perhaps because my brain cells have been dumbed down to the point that I can’t follow a new story? There might be some evidence to this: whenever I buy a sequel a long time after reading the original book, I’m forced to re-read the original before reading the sequel. Otherwise I’ll never pick up the threads of the original story.

Does this happen to anyone else? Or am I alone in my reading comprehension dungeon?

Running WordPress

We’re now running WordPress version 2.0 Beta 2. I know better than to run a public Web site on Beta software, but things seem pretty stable.

However, if you run into any links that don’t work or other strange behaviours, I’d really like to know.

Hundred Dollar Laptop

There’s recently been a lot of hoopla surrounding the $100 laptop initiative from the gang over at MIT’s MediaLab. While I think it’s really great that peole have been thinking about how to reach out to developing countries and foster education, I think laptops are completely the wrong route.

Sid Steward, in his blog at O’Reilly Network, writes:

I hate to be a negative nancy, but all this press over the $100 laptop gets me thinking… and doubting. It is supposed to help schoolchildren, but where is the content? Where is the curriculum? What is it actually supposed to teach?

– Negroponte as The Music Man

I’ve surprised a number of people by standing against computer use in education. I don’t really think computers have any place in schools as part of the regular curriculum. At the extreme, I worry that schools will become like McDonalds where the Teacher is only there to act as a robot handing out materials leaving all the thinking to the “magic machine”. (If you haven’t been to a modern fastfood joint where you can enter your order and pay all from a little terminal while a drowntrodden human being whips up your culinary delight, you’re really missing out.)

I completely agree with Sid’s closing question:

Finally, what is the advantage of ‘one laptop per child’ over ‘$100 in books per child,’ or rather ‘$100 of school supplies per child.’

Indeed, what additional value do we think a $100 laptop will provide that quality books wouldn’t?