Musing: On Reading and Learning From a Computer Screen

One of the other tricks I have had to learn is how to read from a com­puter screen. Here are my mus­ings on learn­ing and read­ing from a com­puter screen instead of paper.

Ability to Learn from Computer Screen

My tra­di­tional edu­ca­tion con­sisted of text­books and black­boards. Working on a DEC PDP-​​11 with punch cards doesn’t really count as ‘com­puter time’. I was also taught how to read a book, absorb inform­a­tion, and to pro­cess that inform­a­tion. In fact, this is so vital to most edu­ca­tion sys­tems that most people don’t even under­stand that your ‘mind’ has been effect­ively ‘pro­grammed’ to ingest know­ledge from a book or paper medium.

Vendor Documentation

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, all com­puters came with an enorm­ous prin­ted manual. Computer rooms had entire walls of book­shelves devoted to Operating Systems and Software manu­als. When we wanted to learn some­thing, we got the manual from the shelf and star­ted read­ing. Successful com­pan­ies had good manu­als, bad com­pan­ies usu­ally did not. (1)

Then, we star­ted to see the doc­u­ment­a­tion on CD from Cisco, Nortel and DEC /​ Digital Equipment. So when I star­ted some­thing new, I would often print the entire manual, then read. Depending on the qual­ity and the what I needed to do, the manual might get a deep read­ing, or more a scan­ning over to absorb the information.

And that was fine until I star­ted trav­el­ling. Carrying sev­eral kilos of papers wasn’t much fun so I star­ted to read the CD ver­sions. It was slow and gradual, but the CD’s were port­able and updated reas­on­ably often. Certainly much more often than the prin­ted ver­sions were. Errors and omis­sions were fixed much more quickly. In the field I could quickly get to the documentation.

The Internet Effect

Then the doc­u­ment­a­tion switched to being online. Cisco was very early to put­ting their doc­u­ment­a­tion online. This led to them provid­ing sample con­fig­ur­a­tions and design doc­u­ments. This was a real advance, as we could tap dir­ectly into the col­lect­ive wis­dom of Cisco resources, instead of hav­ing to exper­i­ence ourselves in a project.

Inflection Point

A few years back I made a decision not to print any­thing that I needed to read. I would force myself to read it online. I had a few reas­ons for doing this:

• reduce my envir­on­mental footprint
• reduce clut­ter in my study — its hard to throw things out
• I dis­covered that Mac OSX was indexed. I could search for ANYTHING using Spotlight, and find it
• reduce the weight in my backpack

I needed to be hard on myself and archive mater­ial on my laptop, and not on the bookshelf.

Signed up to Safari

The other big decision I made was to sign up to Safari on the O’Reilly web site. This cost me about £230 (USD440) for a year, and gives me access to every book I could ever need. I wasn’t entirely con­vinced at the time but took a chance and I have been very pleased that I did.

I now have access to EVERY Cisco Press book. Not only the books released this year, but also the books that are out of print. For example, you can­not buy Cisco Press EIGRP Network Design Solutions by Ivan Pepelnjak (which is the best book ever prin­ted on EIGRP) but you can read it at Safari.

Not only Cisco Press, but every other text ever prin­ted. I needed to write a Perl script the other day, and there are about twenty dif­fer­ent books on how to do that. I needed to do some research on VMware, and there are dozens of books on that.

The more I read safari​.oreilly​.com, the more I am adapt­ing to read­ing from the screen.

Discipline

Some people had told me the most sig­ni­fic­ant prob­lem is that you can be eas­ily dis­trac­ted by email, web surf­ing and so on. I don’t have answers for this, you need to be dis­cip­lined to study and learn. You need to be dis­cip­lined about this too.

Conclusion

It has been pain­ful, like most forms of learn­ing (in this case more like unlearn­ing). At the start my con­cen­tra­tion span was much reduced, but over time I am get­ting bet­ter at pro­cessing inform­a­tion dir­ectly from the com­puter screen. For cer­tain types of inform­a­tion, I am now more able to pro­cess it from the screen.

Occasionally, I will still print a sec­tion of manual, say no more than twenty or thirty pages of mater­ial that I can read when I am wait­ing for some­thing (and hop­ing that the iPhone can do this for me).

Shameless Plug

If you think sign­ing up to Safari is a good idea, please USE THIS AFFILIATE LINK when you sign up and I will donate the money to the School Hall at my Childrens school. Note — I didn’t write this art­icle to make money, but my kids school would sure appre­ci­ate the funds.

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