Technically, a “listening” reflection, but I digress.
Perhaps due to my recent lesson in Science 10 on the actual scale of the universe, I can see some benefits that a scroll has over discrete pages in writing, which goes against the general sentiment of the podcast in this module. Even with a disclaimer at the bottom right, diagrams such as
give students the wrong impression about distances between objects in our solar system. Discrete pages make a to-scale (both distance and size) diagram of the solar system almost impossible, yet with something that can scroll indefinitely, it is much more easily achieved.
Consider for example one of my teaching tools, Josh Worth’s Pixel Moon in which they created a website with everything to scale. https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
Scrolling through this website actually provides students an actual sense of the solar system that’d be almost impossible with discrete pages.
That said, the above example is a very specific (and rare) example of how a scroll outperforms pages. As discussed in the podcast, if the direction of writing is parallel to the scroll, then it could be quite odd to write an entire line all the way to the scroll before having to rewind it back to the start and starting a new line. The need for scribes to section off with columns lends itself to discrete pages being the next logical evolution in writing media. There’s also the additional issues mentioned such as difficulty of tracking where specific sections are in a scroll and requiring hands to hold down to read.
Misc. Notes:
Religion and preference for certain types of writing mediums.
China’s focus on paper, single written text, Chinese history
Marking off columns of text.
Portability of books vs scrolls, ease of transcribing pages.