eBooks and doing the reading for students

PROmedia eBook Reader (Photo credit: PiAir (Old Skool))

Pierre Tristam at FlaglerLive (Flagler County, FL) writes about new EdTech software from CourseSmart that allows teachers to see how much of the reading a student has done. Setting aside pedagogy and the old tradition of fooling the prof, Tristam argues about the nature of reading:

Reading is one of the few truly private activities left us, depending entirely on the isolation created between book and reader, and the way the reader chooses to engage with that book:  reading a page over five times, skipping five pages, underlining five lines, cursing at five others. It’s all between the reader and the book, an act that shares some of the intimacies of sex (and passion) down to its exhilarations and disappointments (a bad writer having a lot in common with a lousy lover). Reading a textbook may not rate in the same category. But it’s no less intimate. The act of reading a textbook still belongs exclusively to the reader. How you read a textbook is irrelevant. If you’re performing well in class, that’s all that should matter.

Amazon has been spying on its readers for some time now