Connected Reading: Culture and Tools

I just finished posting a note at Anatomy of an Online Course about the Google Form I am using to gather student feedback about the UnTextbook. That process is going great, but I thought I would say something here for Connected Courses about the need for more/better ways to create social reading experiences. As often with education, it's a question both of culture and technology — and probably much more a question of culture! People are just used to reading privately, even if that culture of private reading was technologically determined by the limited writing technologies at our disposal. For the most part, people read in silence, in physical isolation from one another, consuming an individual copy of a text that is likewise physically separated from all other copies of the text.

Technology, of course, is now poised to change that all of that, but we need to imagine that change; we need a vision of what this new kind of reading will be like. I was thinking about that as I created my weekly UnTextbook report, gathering up the ratings and the feedback that my students provided about what they read. They provided that feedback via a tool (Google Form) that is completely separate from the reading tool (Blogger), and it was up to me, the Queen of Kludge, to make these two tools work in tandem — awkwardly, but good enough for my purposes. There are some rating and feedback options in Blogger, but they are very primitive and are definitely not good for aggregating the ratings and feedback over time, which is what I need to do.

But here's the thing: ratings and feedback are the easy part, a problem we should be able to solve more or less easily — and as Amazon and Netflix have shown, there are big advantages to gathering ratings and feedback. The real question is this: what will it mean to share reading experiences in the future? That is a question I am so curious about, and I am hoping to meet people here at Connected Courses who are working on social reading experiences and the tools that can support them. That is something I would very much like to learn more about!