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Text: What Makes a Difference?

This text explores the critical role of typography and design elements in enhancing reading comprehension. It discusses how different typefaces, such as sans-serif and serif, affect readability, particularly for different types of content. The importance of spacing, color consistency, and the distinction between paper and screen versions of texts are analyzed. Additionally, it raises questions about the future of e-texts and their potential impact on learning, as well as the evolving role of teachers in a digital age.

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Text: What Makes a Difference?

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  1. Text:What Makes a Difference? EDC&I 510 10/5/11

  2. Does Typography Matter? • Sometimes – odd letter forms slow people down, force more attention to delivery, less to content • Archaic “Black Letter” type faces • The inimitable Comic Sans • Any “script” typeface • Key features of any type face: ascenders, descenders, x-height

  3. Some Critical Points • Most studies support using sans-serif faces (like this one) for short or bulleted text • And serifed faces like this one for longer passages

  4. Upper or Lower Case? • Easier to ready longer passages if use both upper and lower case • All-caps = OK for short passages, labels • LC lettering has more distinguishing information, hence eases comprehension

  5. What’s Key Other than Type? • Spacing! • Between lines, around text (top and bottom of pages, margins (cf. Hartley’s “page grid”) • Column widths • Color • If you use it, be consistent! • Readers assume that things like color, headers, other graphic elements have meaning (and they’ll provide it if you don’t!)

  6. Paper or Screen? • Do not assume that on-paper and on-screen versions of a text are identical! • Resolution, color rendition, and so on, can vary • e.g.’s: pixilation, Moiré effects, etc. • Spacing often not rendered consistently from one e-platform to another

  7. Reading Is More than Decoding • Context is important to extracting meaning • How sentences, phrases are shown (line breaks, indents, etc.) affects meaning-making • Watch sentence structure, reading level, complex vocabulary, etc.

  8. PLEASE WALK UP ONE FLOOR WALK DOWN TWO FLOORS FOR IMPROVED ELEVATOR SERVICE

  9. The Textbook as a System • Intentionally constructed • Often (now, for large-edition texts) a team enterprise • Emergent style of text design: • Lots of ancillary materials (side bars, end-of-chapter questions, online supplements, etc.) • Comprehensive (match needs of maximum number of classes) • Heavy graphic/illustrative content • Often a lot of field testing

  10. Textbook Realities? • Texts = perceived as “authoritative” ( less “invested mental effort” by students) • Textbooks = a “technology” – both students and instructors need to learn how to use • Cf. Hartley’s “deep” and “surface” structures of text design, use, for understanding

  11. What’s Next? • E-texts, tablets, online materials, etc. • Possible interaction with Carr (“Google-stupid”) and Birkirts (“Gutenberg Elegies”) effects? • South Korea plans to convert all textbooks to digital, swap backpacks for tablets by 2015 • Jul 3rd 2011 6:39AM

  12. Final Queries • Do tablet or online ways of representing content fundamentally alter our ways of thinking, working with information? • If all information is online, on the tablet or in the cloud, do students need to know anything in order to succeed in school? • Teachers’ role: “Sage on the stage vs. guide on the side” – Can this really happen? Would it mean a change in who becomes a teacher?

  13. For Next Week (10/12)… Films! • How was learning conceptualized in early film studies? • Are the variables chosen for examination the same ones we’d choose today? What would be different? • What parts of that early research legacy do we still seem to be using (or should we be using) today?

  14. More for Next Week • Do you see connections between the approaches used in the Hoban/May studies, discussed in the Salomon & Clark paper, and described in Schmidt? • What parts of the “visual aesthetic” of film/video (effects, animation, etc.) have you found most powerful for your own learning?

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