Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

The upshot of all of this is that someone who cares passionately about, say, So You Think You Can Dance, The Babysitters Club, Slashdot, Buffy, and The New York Post, thinks about them all critically, and discusses them with other people who think about them critically, is likely to be a better thinker and more informed participant in society than somebody who sits at home statically consuming the latest Booker prize winner without any further thought or discussion.

Also probably true with respect to various aspects of internet reading too - Cara recently read tons about the Amanda Palmer "Evelyn Evelyn" fiasco on OH NO THEY DIDN'T and then on Jezebel (and all interviews etc with Amanda Palmer and everything), and said the comments on the straight-up celebrity gossip site were by far the most intelligent. And then she sent a gazillion links to Bec -- in the room next door -- and they rehashed it all and were in total agreement.

I'm not sure I'm with you 100% on the audiobook listening and the two students though. While it's entirely possible to study a text critically by listening to a read version, as is proved by the disabled student's having made it to your course, it's not necessarily a set of skills every student will have gained. I've only been listening to audiobooks regularly for a couple of years now and I wouldn't dream of using an audiobook as my only source for critical reading (for review or study). Not that I'm going to stand in for every sighted student, of course. Still, I think your initial response wasn't as inconsistent as you're considering it to be. While it is reading in either case, it may very well not allow the type of critical reading necessary for studying a text for the sighted student. (I read for a blind woman studying clinical nutrition just after I'd left the graduate clinical programme, and I was astonished at how different - and much more complex - her study process was from mine or that of anyone else I knew.)