Beyond the Book Report: Better Book Practices in the Digital Age

This is a post against that oh-so-common school assignment, the book report, and an argument in favor of better book-reading practices now available to us. What's more, I'm going to argue against the digital book report, that half-breed that gets posted into a learning management system (LMS) or onto a blog, but is essentially no different from a paper book report turned into a teacher in the 1950s.

In the digital age, there is no excuse for book reports (either from teachers or students). Books --and our individual and communal experience with them -- are just too important, and the book report is more likely to kill engagement with that book than it is to invigorate one's literary experiences. So let's be done with it, replacing it with better practices.

Why I Can't Stand Book Reports
Where is this coming from? Well, one of my students, assigned to write a book review for my Digital Culture class, dutifully posted his on his blog and then linked to it with the phrase, "Book report time!"

That really bugged me. What is this, 7th grade?

It bugged me in part because as a parent, I've suffered through many a book report my children have belabored--usually at the last minute. And as a teacher, I've suffered from reading so many superficial or tedious responses to books or other readings. But mostly, it bugged me because it meant I had failed to get across to my students the more consequential ways that books can be part of their learning nowadays. So, I'm going to try to fix that, and I'm going to do so by arguing against the book report genre.

Creative Commons Licensed
Flashy Soup Can - Flickr

The Classic Book Report

1. Student reads the assigned or chosen book
2. Student writes a response that partly summarizes, partly analyzes the book (sometimes using a prompt from the teacher).
3. Student turns in book report to teacher.
4. Teacher grades book report, using it as evidence that the book has been read and its ideas understood.
5. Rinse, lather, and repeat

What is wrong with this picture -- especially given what books can be in the digital age? Let's take a look.

Review: Digital Culture

Digital Culture by Charlie Gere

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Gere's Digital Culture is among the best overviews on the topic I've encountered (after spending a summer immersing myself in many books on this subject). This book is readable, current (as of mid-2012) and manages not to immerse one in too much tech-speak. It covers the history of computing from a cultural point of view, and ties in 60s counter culture and arts movements in ways that I never realized were so formative of our current digital environment.

As someone who has studied the history of civilization and tried to connect this to our current day's digital world, I was especially appreciative of how he was able to describe various movements that led to what we would now call digital but which predate even electricity: capitalism, industrialization, intellectual practices of abstraction, algorithms, systems of cybernetic control -- various movements and ideologies from science, industry, economics, math, and language theory that are part of the conceptual infrastructure of our day as much as silicon is part of the technical infrastructure.

I'll never believe that computers are what make up digital culture again. They are a manifestation of other tendencies well under way and that we should appreciate separately from the briefer (though important) history of computation or communications technology. Great perspective.

A provocative concept from the book is the idea that in the modern world people have been fashioned into data objects (even prior to computers):

"...people are made visible as pieces of digital data. They are individuals, but their individuality is rationalized and normalized in a system of signs that also homogenizes them as a mass, and makes them interchangeable and manipulable as data."

Yikes. I've heard of people being objectified, but am I data-objectified by virtue of being a citizen of our modern world? We're all just a number, and that number is some combination of zeroes and ones.

View all my reviews