Introduction

Introduction

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Motivation

SKRIVE NOEN ORD HER

With the popularization of tablet computer devices, this trend does not seem to stop, with teachers highly endorsing the use of such devices in school.

At the time of writing there are multiple initiatives that aims to digitize the world's information to make it accessible to the human population in both time and space, with notable projects including Project Gutenberg and Google Books. With the introduction of new technologies such as the tablet computer and designated reading tablets making reading digital text no longer as painful as it used to be, we seem to be headed towards a future where text is consumed predominantly digitally. Yet there has been little conclusive research on how text is consumed and reflected upon when read digitally.

Studies shows that information gathered online is skimmed rather than read thoroughly, and indicates that there are fundamental differences in how texts are read digitally.

On the other hand, the continued success of the Amazon Kindle and Apple iBooks store shows that people are both able and willing to read books digitally. Apple reports that there are 2.500 classrooms in the US with iBooks textbooks and that 80% of the US high school curriculum are avaiable as iBooks textbooks.

With the tremendous developments in computer and especially screen technologies the last few years, could it be that the studies nigh dooming digital consumption are invalidated by being outdated? Could it be that the findings are not valid with today's high resolution, high contrast, high refresh rate hand held tablet computers?

While there is an ongoing increase in the use of computers in education, there has been little research on how to best format the content for the new setting and emerging usage patterns for optimal legibility. There has been little research on how students reads and processes texts from digital screens, and what studies that do exists are slowly showing their age by having been performed in a time without the iPad and Kindle.

This study aims to find how students reading digital texts feels about the experience and research the xxxxxxx for using digital texts extensively in education.

To conduct the study, a digital text using high quality content and new typographic techinques and technologies afforded by modern web browsers are to be produced. Below, the main typography techinques that are to be implemented are discussed.

Pagination

Introduced with the proposed Generated Content for Paged Media Module web standard, the possibility to dynamically paginate web pages are being introduced to web browsers.

Note that at the time of the writing of this document, only the latest versions of the Opera and Chrome browsers have some implementation of this proposed standard in place, with the Opera browser implementation being the most complete.

Metaphors

Dette er ikke bra. Prøv igjen i en litt mer våken tilstand. Traditional web pages are read from top to bottom in a way reminicient of the ancient papyrus roll. What is then lost is thousands of years of development and evolution of the book.

Studies show that the form of the text are greatly influencing how users feel about the readability and something about the text.

Web typography revived and stuff. A wish to present the web in a more modern and readable (legible?) format?

The web has long been stagnated in the idea of the long scrolling text. Previous studies showing that "people won't" scroll. Paginated content, where the content is split into more surmountable "chunks". Also, older browsers not showing content before everything is loaded. Today regarded as useless. Long loadning times. Browsers showing content as soon as it is ready. Newer studies showing that people do indeed scroll. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, whathaveyounot, offering the new UI concept of endless scrolling. Actually paginating in a way, but dynamically loading the next page, providing an endless page. Shorter loading times. Does not solve the problem of skimming text, the benefits of chunking content.

Pagination should solve this, maybe.

This technique makes it possible for a web author to stylize content in a way that resembles the classic book look and feel, as seen in virtually all other ebook reader software and hardware.

With the ongoing evolution of web standards, the ability to use custom fonts, paginated and columnize content has been introduced, among other stuff.

While it has been possible to dynamically paginate web pages in the past, this has required JavaScript. This JavaScript being implemented slightly different in all browser rendering engines, creating bugs and incompatibilities. (case in point – Treesaver, a JavaScript library enabling pagination of web articles, not being available in all browsers). * limits who can create, as JavaScript is harder than CSS

The introduction of the pagination module in CSS makes it possible for web authors to implement paginated web pages with comparative ease – one line of CSS (overflow: paged-x;), instead of hundreds of lines of JavaScript.

With this in mind, there seems to be a generally accepted view that a paginated view is the best way to consume long form textual content. This study will examine the validity of this statement by examining relevant literature, and by testing a functional prototype against alternatives to assess the validity/accuracy of this stuff.

This thesis aims to see the pedagogical merits of this type of navigation to explore the feasability and to create better digital learning experience.

Mindre ting, tror ikke jeg skal bruke dette.

The growth of the web as a platform, and the revived interest in creating an open web standard that is available to all has together ... .... provided designers tools for creating a beautiful reading experience with standardized methods for embedding custom fonts, column based layouts, paginated navigation and more. The web is gradually gaining the tools and techniques needed to provide a truly beautiful reading experience.

Marc Prensky notes that children today, haven grown up alongside the new technologies are so-called digital natives, and that most if not all research today has been done with a digital immigrant mind frame, using traditional psychology standards that might* be invalid. (dette er tynt)

Primary goal

A multitude of studies has been conducted exploring the effects of how text is presented on the retention and comprehension of said text.

Dyson and Haselgrov (2000, 2001) points to how digital text is traditionally laid out as a long continuous scrolling page might affect how readers comprehend the text, In physical books, a reader is able to keep a mental map of where important information is located, in reltaion to the physical book and page itself (approximations to where in the book a chapter is, where on a page an important chunk of information is) This is lost in

STUDY X has found that the students who spent more time in between navigaion , as in instead of continually scrolling, they read an entire screen worth of text and then scrolled to reveal a new screen of text resulted in better retention.

Reflection FTW!

This can be related to STUDY Y, where rats where shown to remember better if they had time in between stimuli, providing them time to reflect on what was learned. (ohoy, dette er tynt).

Most academic texts available on the Internet today are available in PDF format, a format time and time again deemed unsatisfactory when consuming text digitally.

To illustrate how bad PDF documents are for digital consumption, famous user experience guru Jacob Nielsen provides us with the following analogy on his professional blog.

PDF is great for one thing and one thing only: printing documents. Paper is superior to computer screens in many ways, and users often prefer to print documents that are too long to easily read online.

For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon. It puts its clammy hands all over people with a cruel grip that doesn't let go.

Jacob Nielsen

While studies continue to show that people prefer to print and read long form texts, the success of devices such as the Kindle show us that text can in fact be presented in a format that users would like to use. In other words: can be consumed digitally if the text presented fits the format. With increasingly sophisticated web browsers and web standards, and better screens, is it possible to create texts that are pleasing and usable for digital consumption? What effects on the user, in terms of retention and recollection has texts created using new technologies compared to the "old" way of presenting digitally? What effects do such texts have in comparison to the "traditional" printed page?

Another hurdle to digital consumption is that SOMEONE, while investigating how people learn from texts, points to how digital texts are missing an easy way to take notes, compared to physical texts. On printed pages a reader is able to take notes in margins of the text and highlight text if deemed important. There are tools available for digital texts, but compared to pen and paper they are cumbersome.

How does a text laid out with new hypertext typography techbnologies and techniques compare with equivalent texts laid out with traditional means?

Secondary goals

Since the late 2000's the popularity of ebooks has soared, much thanks to the Amazon Kindle ebook reader and accompanying store. These books are however released in a locked down format (DRM), where a user is forced to use the formats, devices and in some cases even bookstores owned by the content provider. While controlling the entrire experience from start to finish can make for a great user experience (as well as being economically lucrative for a manufacturer and content provider), this may create problems when a user wants to switch content provicer. New books may not work the old reading device (forcing a user to buy a new reading device), and/or the old content store's books may not work with a new device (rendering previously bought books useless). A secondary goal of this study is thus to explore the feasability to deliver content in an open format which is readable wherever a modern web browser is available.

Academic papers are in most cases delivered in PDF documents, which are designed for printing. From a usability perspective, such formates can be cumbersome. See chapter X for a discussion on usability. Another secondary goal of this thesis is to explore the increased usability resulting from use of a text responsively formatted compared to their equivalents formatted as paged PDF documents.

Context

The context in which this thesis is done

The thesis is done in cooperation with Opera Software.

Research questions

What are the questions you are answering with your project? Normally, you specify a main question and related sub-questions. Remember that at the end you have to demonstrate you have answered to the stated questions. It is not uncommon that the questions are changed during the project, but it is important to be as explicit as possible and as early as possible with research questions since they help you to focus.

The litterature in general suggests that physical texts are preferred to digital counterparts, but both the amount and ratio of text read digitally are rapidly rising. There are some hypotheseses and theories on why this muight be the case, this thesis is to examine these to see if students respond positively to this by measuring the usability of a text produced based on best practices and centuries of ...

The text will be compared to text stylized in a more traditional manner, to see what format the respondents prefer. The respondents will be interviewed to unveil

The usability is to be assessed using the System Usability Scale(SUS) developed by John Brooke.

What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.

Motoko Rich (The New York Times)

The prototype

To assess the usability, a working prototype text is to be produced. The creation of this prototype constitutes a secondary part of the thesis. This is to get an indication of how hard it is to create a text using the new standards, either from scratch or converting an existing text. This will help assess difficulties and the feasability of the conversion in future projects.

Furthermore, this thesis will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using HTML as a publishing platform for long form textual content, both from the respondents' perspecitives gathered through the user tesing and perspecitves gathered from available litterature.

The content of this prototype is to be a compendium of articles to be read as part of the course IT1301 – Datastøttet læring at the IDI faculty of NTNU. A set of articles are to be converted inot

Compared to competing products, especially the Apple iBooks Author, the tools for creating web pages are more intended for developers and programmers, making the process harder for non-programmers to do.

There does exist so-called What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors that makes it possible for people with no programming experience to create web pages. These editors lets a user desing a web page by writing text directly on a canvas, dragging and dropping pictures to where they want them to be – the code required to actually render the web page is automatically generated by the tool. This compared to the rather intimidating plain text editors and command line tools present in "regular" web developers' tool boxes, where the design of the page is reduced to lines of code. Examples of popular WYSIWYG editors available for use at the time of the writing of this is Adobe's Dreamweaver and Museand Realmac Software's RapidWeaver.

The WYSIWYG editors in use today might not be up to the task, as there might be a different set of best-practices that designers need to adhere to compared to traditional web pages that the "standard" WYSIWYG editors catering to tradtional web masters are simply unable to do.

Additionally, by not iterating as fast as the HTML standard is today, these editors might not have the features needed to create the experience that we wish to create in this thesis.

It is plausible that there will exist specialized applications capable of creating beautiful book styled web pages in the future, making it possible for non-programmers to create books in the same way that iBooks Author does.

Primary Research Questions

  • How does a text created using HTML technologies compare to a text using traditional typography techniques?
  • How does the user experience of using HTML technolgies compare to the user experience from using competing epublishing formats?
  • What does students feel about prolonged use of a digital text authored using new HTML typographic techniques?

Secondary Research Questions

  • How hard is it to create a digital text using HTML technologies?
  • What advantages and disadvantages exists in the creation, compared to relevant alternatives?

Advantages

  • Linking to external sources
  • Embedding of external media
  • Ease of sharing (potentially just a link)
  • Portability
  • Longevity

Research Method

The research to be done for this thesis

A digital text is to be produced to gauge ...

As this thesis aims to answer questions regarding how a digital HTML documents formatted with modern typography

Additionally, some quantitative data is to be gathered to substantiate the data gathered. The data points to be gathered are discussed below.

Speed of reading

The litterature is not inconclusive on the effects of reading speed on the comprehension and rememberability of texts, but seems to point in the direction that for texts read on screens, faster reading speeds results in better comprehension.

Reading at extreme speeds seems to affect incidental information recall, but not the comprension of the text as a whole.

A lower reading speed might be an indication of something.

Retention rate

There might be a difference in how much the respondents retain the information extraced from the read text.

Comprehension

Result

The results expected from this study is

from interviews with a selection of respondents an overview of how the technology is percieved to perform in a real world setting is expected to be produced.

A prototype showcasing what is possible using new web authoring techniques will also be produced in the course of this project. The text will adhere to normative typographic convensions as much as possible.

  • paginated text
  • legible fonts
  • hyphenated texts

Outline of the report

  1. Stuff
  2. More stuff
  3. Stuff
  4. Stuff
  5. Yep, more stuff