January 25, 2009
A marvelous, synthesizing article on current research and thoughts surrounding how literacy is changing in our digital age from The New Atlantis. (I am kicking around doing my doctoral work on these questions.) It’s longish, but worth every educator’s time.
Christine Rosen, the author, is interviewed by NPR here on the Facebook phenomenon, which I’ve blogged about (skeptically) recently.
Looking forward to what you think. Comment liberally. My thinking is incomplete, to quote Bill Ferriter.
January 25th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I liked Rosen’s essay, though it seems a little alarmist to me. It is also somewhat irnoic to be reading it on the screen.
January 26th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I’m full of unfinished thoughts as well, though the first aHa! I had while reading this was that a lot of current educational common wisdom is based on a perceived correlation between success and computer use, while the data that supports that might actually just be reflecting a correlation between traditional reading and success. Those relationships have been changing, and continue to change, and we’ll see in 20 years just how misguided some of those ideas were.
January 26th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Okay. I read the essay. Then, for poohs and chortles, I read the 2009 Horizon Report. For bonus points, I went and read ‘To Read or Not To Read’, courtesy of the good people over at the National Endowment for the Arts.
And the cherry on top, with British spelling honoured (!): Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future.
And there’s a lot going through my tiny, pixelated brain, but most of it keeps coming back to some quasi-Nostradamus desire to pinpoint the exact date (how bout year?) when we complete the transformation to illiterate slobs.
Things that make me go grrr .
So now I’m all, like, yo, thinking, and next thing you know, I’m actually going to write a post over at my slumblog that demonstrates a decent command for the writing process along with opinions supported by data.
icky, ken. icky.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:20 am
I finally had time to read the excellent article – quite thought provoking.
While I was reading, I kept analyzing my screen reading based on the article’s information on how people read a screen. I didn’t defocus to Wikipedia but I do tend to skim. I’m old and need paper but I’m working on it.