Summer Reading Book Review: “Skim, Dive, Surface” by Jenae Cohn

Looking for a beach read? Need a book for your poolside bag? Never fear, Tech-Based Teaching is here! 😎

In this series, we’ll be perusing books about teaching and learning in the past, present and future. Check back all summer long for new reviews!

July’s book, Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading by Jenae Cohn, considers the present-day ubiquity of digital texts and how they can be used in the classroom.

Overview

Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading rests on a key fact of the modern classroom: texts, including textbooks, have gone digital. While physical books still exist, there’s a move toward ebooks or online texts such as open educational resources (OER). This shift in how information is accessed is explored from past to present, with considerations toward the future.

Cohn covers digital reading from multiple angles. “Skim,” the first section, looks at reading from a historical and scientific perspective. “Dive,” the second and longest section, is divided into five thematic chapters, each filled with lesson plans. Lastly, “Surface” assesses digital reading through a critical lens, circling back to some of the equity concerns raised in “Skim.”

The book sits at a comfortable length, around 342 pages in the ebook. Lesson plans and hands-on ideas on using digital texts take up around 40% of the book, excluding the appendix and references. In that sense, while Cohn covers a lot of topics, there’s a practicality to the text that educators will likely appreciate.

A Closer Look

Cohn first goes into detail about the reality of present-day education. There are equity concerns with digital reading, and not in the ways you might expect. She refutes the idea of the digital native while acknowledging that many students use electronic devices in order to balance schoolwork around other responsibilities. These ideas come into play later on in “Surface,” which posits that while digital reading might be a necessity, that doesn’t mean that ethics around virtual texts should be ignored.

Cohn uses the word “flexible” to describe work in the digital reading space. The lesson plans in “Dive” don’t mention specific edtech tools, which is Cohn’s attempt to evade technological obsolescence. Instead, specifics are shared in the appendix, which can be updated in later volumes as necessary. The appendix is divided into categories like content curation and collaboration, all of which match parts of Cohn’s digital reading framework.

The final section is the smallest, although it brings up big ideas that many folks in edtech grapple with. For example, how does ownership work in a virtual space like a learning management system (LMS)? How much control should students have over what they submit to their LMS? What are the expectations of privacy with digital reading?

The digital reading framework will likely be of most interest to readers, given that the lesson plans are detailed and offer activities that are applicable to all disciplines. Each lesson chapter includes an introduction to the core idea and a mini lit review (“Scholarly Connections”) before offering three step-by-step activities. In the case of “Curation,” for example, one activity is to create a pin board on a topic.

A nice aspect of the framework is how lessons connect to digital reading’s best qualities, rather than trying to force any historical concepts of reading. For example, digital reading benefits from hyperlinks, which can enrich the way students understand scholarly communication. Many of the lessons align with librarianship values and the way that information literacy is taught, such as the idea of “lateral reading” to put sources into context.

It feels especially fitting to read this book on an ereader. Much of what Cohn pointed out as advantageous to digital reading were things that helped me to understand the text. I flipped through bookmarks and hyperlinks. I searched for popular highlights, which were created through a collaboration of readers. And, of course, I used active note-taking to supplement what I was reading.

Takeaways

Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading is a topical read. The move to digital reading was already well underway before the pandemic, but the subsequent shift to virtual schooling hastened things along. In early chapters, Cohn shares the results of interviews with teachers and students about their feelings toward reading digital texts. Results varied based on the purpose for reading — whether for work or play, for memorizing or experiencing. A great deal of people preferred digital texts when doing scholarly work!

Regardless of preference, digital reading isn’t going away. Some professors assign OER textbooks to help students with rising costs. Other teachers use social media and other digital texts to connect with the real world, where tweeted one-liners can make a huge impact. As such, empathizing with students and finding ways to connect to digital texts’ inherent advantages is key.

Cohn explores a breadth of topics, from reading in general to information overload, which means that all digital reading is acknowledged, from online textbooks to social media. If you’re looking for a book solely about how students can interact with ebooks, you might be a bit disappointed. That said, Cohn’s broad focus makes the book more evergreen. It’s impossible to know what digital reading might look like years from now, but it’s just as impossible to escape its presence in today’s classroom. Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading is worth a read to better understand how to help students (and yourself) with this new reading reality.

If you’ve read this book, what did you think of it? Share your thoughts below.

For more book ideas, check out this guide for a list of brainy books.

About the blogger:

Jesika Brooks

Jesika Brooks is an editor and bookworm with a Master of Library and Information Science degree. She works in the field of higher education as an educational technology librarian, assisting with everything from setting up Learning Management Systems to teaching students how to use edtech tools. A lifelong learner herself, she has always been fascinated by the intersection of education and technology. She edits the Tech-Based Teaching blog (and always wants to hear from new voices!).