Media exaggeration on the Daily Princetonian story

Media exaggeration and some misrepresentation was of interest to me this week as online columns described The Daily Princetonian report on, essentially, one student's remarks and turned it into a "consensus of students" and headlined "failure" of the Kindle at Princeton, from those bare bones after the beginning two weeks of an entire Fall Session study.

Longterm, who knows, that could be, but not based on the college newspaper's story.

  (I've had my own doubts about our inability to make notes on PDF's, a critical flaw for academic use, even if there are workarounds, and have written about it.)

But, after reading yet another misstatement of the Daily Princetonian story from a writer at a large online tecnnical site who actually gave the most balanced interpretation I've read (from about 20 online articles), I wrote a comment to the columnist.  I'll just insert that here and call it a day.  (There is a lot of other, more interesting news and I'll get those up tomorrow night.)

Written to the column mentioned above:

' October 1, 2009 7:34 PM PDT
' _____, you wrote one of the most balanced pieces on The Daily Princetonian report but even you said:

' Feedback from some students complained about the
Kindle's annotation system being "too slow" to keep up with the thinking of a reader who wants to effortlessly mark up text.  Others called the entire Kindle device "a poor excuse for an academic tool." '

  As with the other online reports that used mostly one student's feedback [but referred to] "some" and "others" (as above), they were/are all quoting primarily Aaron Horvath, who said all of the above.

  The ONE other student quoted talked about the 'huge benefits' and the downsides as well, one of the downsides being that you have to charge the Kindle to use it.

  The other two people quoted were
  (1) an obviously resistant professor who was "permitting"! his students (in a selected KINDLE STUDY classroom) to use Kindle location numbers, since not one of the students has dropped out of the study though they are allowed to, and
  (2) another professor who enjoys using the Kindle and had nothing negative to quote.

The Amazon Kindle study with several universities is taking place this year, so it's no surprise the relative effectiveness of the learning process using an e-reader and the paper-saving goals which are also a focus) wouldn't be studied next year.

  From that we've been getting tons of articles generalizing from that one student's words after two weeks of use, calling [the negative feelings] a "consensus" in one article and the study "a failure" in others.  As I say, yours was the most balanced I've read of about a dozen so far. '

  I don't know.  Am I the only one who wishes columnists would not overgeneralize and, essentially, mischaracterize one student's statements this way?
  The reluctant professor is obviously not loving the idea in the first place.  But the headlines have been about how "students" are responding to the Kindle :-).

  Students are allowed to opt out of the program, but so far none have, and we've now heard, primarily, from one student out of the 50 in the study.