What Do We Think the Book is Now? 2000 Students Weigh In — A presentation by Catherine Prendergast October 13, 2011

Although it is indisputable that we are now—and will be for the foreseeable future—reading increasingly from digital sources, what is less clear is how we adapt to the shift away from interactions with the familiar and durable media of paper and print. This talk reports on more than 2000 surveys of students assigned an etextbook in a major university first-year composition course that previously had assigned a print textbook. The surveys, given to four cohorts of students during two critical years of exponential growth in digital publishing, testify to changing notions of authorship, ownership, the experience of reading, and the definition of the book itself.

Catherine Prendergast is professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Rhetoric Programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author, with Richard Nardi and Cory Holding, Writing@The University of Illinois, an etextbook for the first-year composition course digitally published with eText.Illinois. She is also the author of Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World (2010), "The Unexceptional Schizophrenic: A Post-postmodern Introduction" (2009), and Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education (2003). Prendergast has also collaborated with scholars in the Slovak Republic on a comparative study of uses for, and attitudes toward, paper in American and Slovak academic settings.

This event is cosponsored by the First Year Writing Program.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/thursdayscalf11.php