Yeah, for books I'm generally 100% on board as I said above. Some academic books that I want to highlight and markup extensively aside.
But paper for note taking, articles I need to mark up etc. I'm just personally not very interested in giving up for readers, tablet PCs etc. But I'm glad the tech is there (or getting there) for people who are interested in making the switch.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonist
P.S. University faculty are not the target. Most I know are not subject to the pressures to adapt, at work in the "outside" world, and many, particularly in the non-tech-geek fields, are technologically averse (again, in my experience.) Many could barely set up a projector....  |
True, though I am all for technology in most respects--though many of my older colleagues are more adverse (I'm only 30).
But there's no pressure to adapt really. All you need to do is whatever you need to, to get your 2+ publications a year (or whatever your departments expectations are) to get tenure and then later promotion to full professor and after that you're set.
Computers for typing and finding articles and printing them etc. was a huge help in increasing productivity and even my old collegues (including some in their 70s) have embraced that. But scrapping paper for notes and printouts of PDFs doesn't offer much of a boost. Maybe moreso in something like medicine where there are 100s or 1000s of studies on whatever disease or medicine a person is researching as then it's probably easier to have them on a reader and searchable.
But not in smaller fields like criminology. It's a busy year for me if their are 10 articles published in my particular niche. It's just as easy (and easier for me personally) to just print them, mark them up and stick them in the file cabinet.