EReading Pilot Project – The iPad and Reading and Writing Practices

Duke CIT/Randy Riddell reporting:
Preliminary findings also indicate that ereading does have some positive impact on scholarly reading practices, but has a negative impact on scholarly writing practices. In my own usage, I found the reading of pdfs and books considerably more efficient on the iPad because it was more portable and I could organize my annotations more easily than in print. Taking quick notes was extremely easy, and this proved incredibly helpful during administrative meetings, conferences, and making notes in class about variety of ideas. Writing, however, in a sustained way, was quite burdensome on the iPad, even with the external keyboard. The features of iPad applications were not yet as sophisticated as word processing capabilities on the computer.
This disjuncture between the iPad’s usefulness for reading and difficulty with writing bring to mind questions about how we define writing. To my mind, writing is all too often conceived of as occurring at a unified moment in time, writing up data findings, or pulling an all nighter to get a term paper done. Writing is also too often defined as long projects. A case could be made, though, that writing happens across long lengths of time, in little pockets of thinking, and that the little notes and ideas one may jot down at random times throughout a day are just as significant as those moments of longer, sustained writing. In a way, then, the iPad encouraged me as a writer to capture my thoughts in a succinct way and let them percolate for a while until I had time to expand, abandon, or adapt them later at my computer.
http://cit.duke.edu/2011/06/ereading-pilot-project-the-ipad-and-reading-and-writing-practices