Summary:
Information technology (IT) has increasingly modified the landscape in recent years, changing how people live, work, and learn, digitalizing almost everything along the way. At the workplace, there is an increasing demand for digital skills for all young employees. At present, employers expect that HEIs are preparing graduates to have the digital skills to be ready to work from day one. Furthermore, as these young people progress in their careers, they will be expected to adapt to further technology. These new competencies must be introduced and perfected during HEI studies, since the employers expect that HEIs and all educational institutions will adapt to meet their demands of a digital society. In the field of education, these changes have been significant, and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) worldwide have witnessed an increasing interest in digitalization. For some HEIs, technology offers an opportunity to extend the academic program without adding more bricks and mortar to the campus. For others, digitalization has been combined with traditional on-site courses, resulting in a 'blended' approach. No matter, digitalization in education has been described as a fundamental process of the entire educational work, which goes beyond simply supplementing teaching with online tools. One way of meeting employer expectations is to integrate more information technology into HEIS by enhancing students' skills through new digital tools. However, deciding what should be used and for what purpose is an ongoing debate. Many technological solutions are touted for saving time, but are equally responsible for pushing a time-motivated education instead of a reflective and critical-thinking environment, competencies that are decisive for both our students’ academic education and their professional careers. These phenomena are met by another circumstance, as in our society, technology boasts speed and practicality; very often, it is instantaneous gratification, which is appealing to users, particularly young people. Social media, for example, have been designed to grab and hold our attention, distracting us with suggestions on the content we should absorb and keeping us searching for more. Thus, our students are being pushed toward constant changes in their attention, quick fixes, and rapid responses at the detriment of time-consuming and potentially' boring' tasks that are needed for all processes of learning. As a result, one of the casualties of digitalization has been traditional reading. Some argue that skimming digital content is reading, but is it? First, while digital-based reading is unavoidable in daily life, studies have shown that paper-based reading is often better or at least different: the literature has shown that reading digitally versus on paper entails different forms of processing, and that informational reading on paper is more conducive to comprehension and memorization. One thing is sure: Reading improves cognitive skills such as concentration, vocabulary building, and memory, but which form is best? Furthermore, the introduction of digital tools, Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses new challenges for young learners. Nowadays, students ask for summaries if the reading is too long. While this seems like a logical and mature use of AI, it is problematic. The student who has not read the article has no way of knowing if the summary is accurate. Further, if this practice continues with all articles used for submitting papers, what is the student actually contributing? The students would write essays or analyses based on summaries of articles they have never read and whose accuracy has not been verified. Which competence will they develop during their studies? This has led us to our current research project. Where is the reading in the age of digitalization and AI? In this project, we will identify the challenges of encouraging and, in some cases, reintroducing the basics of reading in HEIs. We will gather information from faculty members and students in business management education courses to strike the ideal balance between academic rigor and digital speed. In the end, we will propose a new, slower framework for learning that combines the elements of traditional education and innovative technology.
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