The wording of Anthony’s title as an interrogative suggests an openness to the debate on the topic of speed reading. This is good news because there will be lots of differing views. However, at this time, instead of discussing the complexities of reading efficiencies and rate of reading text I want to turn attention to a more pragmatic value- add for Spreed technology.
For more than a quarter century I have been preoccupied with how to make the learning environment in higher education more accessible to students with great diversity in learning styles. And I have witnessed how technology has changed the learning landscape in universities. For example, within the past ten years students were encouraged to use laptop computers for taking notes in classrooms. Just in the past couple of years at least one American university (Duke) was handing out iPods for all freshman students. Courses were then made available as podcasts which students could download to their devices. Also within the past few years MIT has been busy trying to put all their course material online and available at no cost to the public. Perhaps more astonishingly, Google has embarked on a Project to digitize millions of university books to eventually be available online.
Given these recent developments, it is clear that technology is essential to what Jerome Brunner, the famous psychologist from Harvard described in 1966 as the Process of Education. New technologies and evolving soft ware applications have become imperative to students successfully participating in higher education. Spreed is just such an application which in my estimation has the potential to enable students to meet the challenge of rapidly perusing voluminous online or electronic material. “Smart” students are already looking for ways to expeditiously cover the enormous amount of electronic text. It is my view that students will readily opt for Spreed, that is reading faster, and as part of this process will decide for themselves what is an acceptable level of comprehension.
Posted by David Leitch
