Lunch & Learn: “e-Readers in the Classroom?” with Janet Temos, Stan Katz, Dan Kurtzer, and Trevor Dawes

In the Fall term of 2009, Prince­ton con­ducted a pilot spon­sored by the High Mead­ows Foun­da­tion, the Uni­ver­sity Library, and the Office of Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy, to assess the use of e-readers in the class­room. The reader used was the Ama­zon Kin­dle DX, a light­weight, portable e-reader with the capac­ity to hold approx­i­mately 3500 books, in three Uni­ver­sity courses.

The project aimed to explore the use of the e-readers in classes for which e-reserves were the pri­mary read­ings. The print­ing of e-reserve read­ings at Prince­ton accounts for a large por­tion of print­ing in pub­lic clus­ters (total of 10 mil­lion sheets of paper last year). The e-reader pilot sought to tar­get e-reserve read­ings and present them on an e-reader to see if print­ing could be reduced.

The pilot par­tic­i­pants con­sisted of three fac­ulty mem­bers, 51 stu­dents, and sev­eral admin­is­tra­tors in the Library and the Office of Infor­ma­tion Technology.

The three courses in the pilot involved con­sid­er­able eRe­serve read­ing, all had some con­tent in the Kin­dle store, and they had to be of a size that would per­mit the involve­ment of three courses. The courses in the pilot were Civil Soci­ety and Pub­lic Pol­icy (Pro­fes­sor Stan­ley Katz, an under­grad­u­ate sem­i­nar), U.S. Pol­icy in the Mid­dle East (Ambas­sador Daniel Kurtzer, a grad­u­ate sem­i­nar), and Reli­gion and Magic in Ancient Rome (Pro­fes­sor Har­riet Flower, a grad­u­ate seminar).

Devices were given to stu­dents in Sep­tem­ber. The pilot was vol­un­tary with opt-out pos­si­bil­i­ties at any time. One stu­dent opted out at the start of the pilot. No stu­dent opted out after the pilot began. Stu­dents were asked to do the bulk of the course read­ing on the Kin­dle. 95% of the stu­dents reported that they had not pre­vi­ously used an eReader.

Par­tic­i­pants were asked to do pilot course read­ings on the e-reader with­out print­ing as much as they felt it was pos­si­ble. The pilot con­cluded with a sur­vey and some final focus groups in Feb­ru­ary 2010.

The sur­vey results are avail­able at at the e-reader project web site and in the pre­sen­ta­tion slides.

The goals of the pilot were to reduce the desire to print, to explore the unique strengths of eRead­ers, all while being care­ful not to affect adversely the class­room experience.

At the April 14 Lunch ‘n Learn sem­i­nar, Janet Temos, Direc­tor of OIT’s Edu­ca­tional Tech­nolo­gies Cen­ter, Stan Katz and Dan Kurtzer two of the fac­ulty involved in the pilot, and Trevor Dawes, Cir­cu­la­tion Direc­tor at the Uni­ver­sity Library reviewed the find­ings of the Prince­ton e-reader pilot and shared their experiences.

Temos reported that the pilot did indeed reduce stu­dents’ desire to print.

Stu­dents judged the screen size, image res­o­lu­tion, device weight and stor­age capac­ity to be excel­lent. High­light­ing, anno­tat­ing, nav­i­gat­ing within and between books, and the dic­tio­nary fea­tures achieved much less pos­i­tive eval­u­a­tions. Over­all, Temos reported, the stu­dents thought that the devices had promise, the rea­son they said at the end that none opted out.

Kurtzer noted that, in his grad­u­ate sem­i­nar, all of the stu­dents were expected to read the course mate­r­ial before com­ing to class. And so, while they may have expe­ri­enced some chal­lenges with nav­i­ga­tion, those did not occur in class. He reported that all of the stu­dents liked the fact that they could carry all of their read­ing around all of the time.

Many of Kurtzer’s stu­dents have recently down­loaded mate­r­ial from cur­rent classes to main­tain the expe­ri­ence. Main crit­i­cisms included high­light­ing, keep­ing track of book­mark ref­er­ences, and mov­ing between and among pas­sages from dif­fer­ent books.

One prob­lem that the pilot addressed was the dif­fi­culty of work­ing with pdf doc­u­ments because you can’t enlarge the type size. The only sur­prise in the data, reported Kurtzer, was that the pilot appears only to cut down 50% of the stu­dents’ printing.

Use of the Library’s eRe­serve sys­tem has grown expo­nen­tially, Dawes com­mented. The pilot pro­vided a good oppor­tu­nity to test the use of the eRe­serves sys­tem on an eReader plat­form. For this project, the pro­cess­ing was dif­fer­ent in that it was required to scan the pages indi­vid­u­ally, trimmed, and processed fur­ther by OIT staff. Early on, we dis­cov­ered that the Kin­dle could not read pdf doc­u­ments in their native for­mat. The amount of staff time involved was large and, he con­cluded, would not be sus­tain­able for the device. We will con­tinue to mon­i­tor progress to see if new devices will be able to accom­mo­date pdf’s more efficiently.

Pro­fes­sor Katz’s course involved 23 books. He empha­sized that the device is superbly ideal to accom­pany travel, and he and stu­dents agree whole­heart­edly with that assess­ment. That said, it was wholly inap­pro­pri­ate for the close tex­tual work involved in the course.

Class­room dis­cus­sion required that all stu­dents be look­ing at the same pas­sages, and they were expected to anno­tate those pas­sages. Anno­ta­tions col­lapse into foot­notes, the key­board is tough to use, and the Kin­dle had built-in lim­its on the amount of text that could be high­lighted and anno­tated. The tedious nature of find­ing pas­sages caused con­sis­tent class­room con­fu­sion. All that said, he is off to San Fran­cisco for a dis­ser­ta­tion review. “I will load it into the Kin­dle, said Katz, “and love it once again.”

Janet Temos was trained as an archi­tec­tural his­to­rian, and received degrees in art his­tory from Williams Col­lege (MA 1992), and Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity (PhD 2001). She began work­ing with the Edu­ca­tional Tech­nolo­gies Cen­ter (ETC), in 1993, and became a full-time mem­ber of the staff in 2000. She is now direc­tor of ETC, and con­tin­ues to work with fac­ulty who wish to use com­puter tech­nol­ogy in their teach­ing. Cur­rent projects include courses on film, archae­ol­ogy, medieval man­u­scripts, African lan­guages taught in the US, and a col­lab­o­ra­tive project with the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Art Museum to develop an on-line repos­i­tory of dig­i­tal images of objects in the museum’s East Asian collection.

Daniel C. Kurtzer retired from the U.S. For­eign Ser­vice with the rank of Career-Minister. From 2001–2005 he served as the United States Ambas­sador to Israel and from 1997–2001 as the United States Ambas­sador to Egypt. He served as a polit­i­cal offi­cer at the Amer­i­can embassies in Cairo and Tel Aviv, Deputy Direc­tor of the Office of Egypt­ian Affairs, speech­writer on the Pol­icy Plan­ning Staff, Deputy Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of State for Near East­ern Affairs, and Prin­ci­pal Deputy Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of State for Intel­li­gence and Research. Kurtzer was a mem­ber of the Amer­i­can del­e­ga­tion to the Israel-Palestinian auton­omy nego­ti­a­tions (1979–1982), helped nego­ti­ate the cre­ation of the Multi­na­tional Force and Observers (1981–1982), nego­ti­ated and over­saw the suc­cess­ful arbi­tra­tion of the Taba bor­der dis­pute between Israel and Egypt, crafted the 1988 peace ini­tia­tive of Sec­re­tary of State George P. Shultz, and in 1991 served as a mem­ber of the U.S. peace team that brought about the Madrid Peace Con­fer­ence. Sub­se­quently, he served as coor­di­na­tor of the mul­ti­lat­eral peace nego­ti­a­tions and as the U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive in the Mul­ti­lat­eral Refugee Work­ing Group. Kurtzer received sev­eral of the U.S. Government’s most pres­ti­gious awards, includ­ing the President’s Dis­tin­guished Ser­vice Award, the Depart­ment of State Dis­tin­guished Ser­vice Award, the National Intel­li­gence Community’s Award for Achieve­ment, and the Direc­tor Gen­eral of the For­eign Ser­vice Award for Polit­i­cal Report­ing. Ph.D. Colum­bia University.

Stan­ley Katz is pres­i­dent emer­i­tus of the Amer­i­can Coun­cil of Learned Soci­eties. His recent research focuses upon the rela­tion­ship of civil soci­ety and con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism to democ­racy, and upon the rela­tion­ship of the United States to the inter­na­tional human rights regime. He is also a com­men­ta­tor on higher edu­ca­tion pol­icy. For­merly Class of 1921 Bicen­ten­nial Pro­fes­sor of the His­tory of Amer­i­can Law and Lib­erty at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity, Katz is a scholar of Amer­i­can legal and con­sti­tu­tional his­tory, and on phil­an­thropy and non-profit insti­tu­tions. He is the edi­tor of the Oliver Wen­dell Holmes Devise His­tory of the Supreme Court of the United States and of the forth­com­ing Ency­clo­pe­dia of Legal His­tory (OUP, 2009). The author and edi­tor of numer­ous books and arti­cles, he has served as pres­i­dent of the Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can His­to­ri­ans and the Amer­i­can Soci­ety for Legal His­tory and as vice pres­i­dent of the Research Divi­sion of the Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion. He is a mem­ber of the Board of Trustees of the New­berry Library, the Copy­right Clear­ance Cen­ter and numer­ous other insti­tu­tions. He is a com­mis­sioner of the National His­toric Pub­li­ca­tions and Records Com­mis­sion. He also cur­rently serves as chair of the Amer­i­can Coun­cil of Learned Societies/Social Sci­ence Research Coun­cil Work­ing Group on Cuba. Katz is a mem­ber of the New Jer­sey Coun­cil for the Human­i­ties, the Amer­i­can Anti­quar­ian Soci­ety, the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety; a fel­low of the Amer­i­can Soci­ety for Legal His­tory, the Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Arts and Sci­ences, and the Soci­ety of Amer­i­can His­to­ri­ans; a cor­re­spond­ing mem­ber of the Mass­a­chu­setts His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety and an aca­d­e­mico cor­re­spon­di­ente of the Cuban Acad­emy of Sci­ences. He has hon­orary degrees from sev­eral uni­ver­si­ties. Ph.D. Har­vard Uni­ver­sity. Katz is direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Arts and Cul­tural Pol­icy Studies.

Trevor A. Dawes is the Cir­cu­la­tion Ser­vices Direc­tor at the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library, where he is respon­si­ble for the cir­cu­la­tion, reserve, cur­rent peri­od­i­cals, stack, remote stor­age and Bor­row Direct oper­a­tions in the library. He pre­vi­ously held sev­eral posi­tions at the Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity Libraries. Mr. Dawes earned his MLS from Rut­gers University’s School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Infor­ma­tion, and Library Stud­ies, and has two addi­tional Mas­ters Degrees from Teach­ers Col­lege, Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity. He is an active mem­ber of the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion and the Asso­ci­a­tion of Col­lege and Research Libraries.

The pod­cast and pre­sen­ta­tion are available.