Digital Literacy

Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

I can understand where all sides are coming on this topic. I am a part of both sides myself. I do believe that the internet and our digital world is here to stay. I believe that it is becoming increasingly important to be competent at using the internet and all of the digital information available. It really does depend on what you are reading on line if it is helping or hurting. I can relate to the guy mentioned in the article. I use the internet to keep up to date on video games, technology, and politics. I also have an iPad that has made that increasingly easier to navigate. I use apps for sites like Mashable to follow tech news. I follow other sites such as TUAW (the unofficial apple weblog), gizmodo, engadge, macworld, tech crunch, all things digital etc. for tech news. I have a list just as long for sites that I follow for video game news, music news, and politics. Apps like Flipboard and Pulse news reader have helped streamline this process. I can take 30 minutes over lunch and catch up on all the realms of news that I follow. These are sites with trained journalist. They are also sites such as NYT and WSJ that demand a higher level of reading comprehension. All of these can be beneficial to literacy. I am reading sites that are trustworthy, validated, and have educated writers. This also allows me to spend much less of my day keeping up with all the news, and that leaves more time for other things in life.
I could see the flip side of this argument if you follow sites for fan fiction as the girl in the article. Constantly reading poorly written material with grammar issues could be harmful to readers. This may even allow them to become comfortable with these errors and make them in their own writing.
I do agree that nothing can ever take the place of a novel. I am a reader. I will also admit that my leisure reading has taken a hit more and more as I spend more free time doing other things on the internet. I believe that reading an actual book that follows a story will help readers become more fluent at reading in a way that reading in any other fashion cannot mimic. Reading books has helped me read faster, learn more vocabulary, and comprehend the subject matter of the text in a way that makes me think. I will always advocate for reading tradition books, especially during development. I just see that transition being made to digital with the Kindle, Nook, iPad and so on. I have already read a few books on my iPad. I will admit, even though I am a digital geek, I am also a book nerd who enjoys holding a physical book in my hand and having the book on my shelf as a trophy once I have read it. This also helps for good topics of conversation.

Watch and Learn

This is an example of doing whatever it takes and whatever works. This does bring reading into an otherwise potentially mindless medium. I do not see television as a whole mindless however. LOST is absolutely brilliant and requires much more out of its views than the average show. Anyway, this is definitely a way to bring reading into the picture. In situations like this in India, there are sometimes no better options available. The study shows that this has helped literacy and that is impressive. I also like the idea of subtitles for songs. We all know that we can memorize songs 10 times better than poetry and 100 times better than random dialog. I am impressed that they found something so cheap and accessible to help out their literacy problems. Maybe they can continue to develop it and help the citizens progress to the next level of literacy.



Why You Tube Matters

He made some points that I never really thought about. It is true that the written word took over memory so long ago. We still have the option to memorize anything, but most people choose not to if it is easily accessible in text. If we progressed to video as our median, then we would still have the option to read, but I bet a lot of people would opt out of that option. It does make sense that reading and writing is much less natural and much more difficult to attain and utilize. I can see it still staying in the context of education and of the intellectual circles. I believe that reading and writing is one of the components of being “educated” and will always be valued in that way. I consider myself educated and intelligent at least to some point. I am not sure that could be said if I did not know how to read. Also, given the option, I am not sure I would choose the easy way out and avoid learning to read. It would still be extremely limited. I would not have been able to read this article. I would not have been able to type this blog. I would have never been able to enjoy Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I would have just had to wait for the movies and watch someone else’s imagination and interpretation at work. All of that would be lost without knowing how to read and I am not willing to give up that privilege.
I do agree that it is a form that can be much more widely accessible. I do agree that we can still use this median to cover most of the knowledge and material available in this world. I also think it is impressive that people have been able to use this tool in so many resourceful way, but I am not willing to give up on teaching students to read and write. I will always stress the level of importance to my students. This is a major component of education, which can be correlated with higher class jobs, higher pay, better economic status etc. We live in a world where being educated opens up so many doors of opportunity and I think not stressing that could be dangerous.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

I think it is interesting how they compare this with learning a new language. Scientist and, even those who have experienced it, can tell you how different it is to learn a language as you are developing early on rather than after your brain has become fully developed. I can see this in students I have dealt with in the classroom. They can so easily pick up on technology. They even make me feel dumb sometimes and I am a true techie. I never saw that coming. I also like his use of the word “accent” and the examples given. It is so true. My mom helped me edit my papers through high school and college. She always has to print them and edit them and then give me her edits on paper to go back and change on the computer. That is something I would never have to do. I can understand how hard that can be for older teacher who are just not tech savvy at all. I can definitely see the classroom changing a lot more as younger teachers who are more familiar start taking the place over older teachers who are true “immigrants.”
The idea of meeting the students where they are by using video games seems great to me. We have already explored this concept when teaching science in our ESCI class. I do see the classroom losing its relevance each and every day and will continue unless something is done about this. I hope this idea will continue to catch on as I work my way into the classroom as a teacher over the next few years.

Do They Really Think Differently?

I can further attest to this idea of video games again. Just as he mentioned in the article, kids do not have shortened attention spans necessarily, it is just they are choosing not to focus. I have worked with students after school and I currently work at a homeless shelter with a lot of kids. If I try to sit and work on homework with them, it will not last more than a few minutes. If I pull up a fun and challenging game on my iPad, they are glued for hours if possible. I can also attest to the fact that video games can be very engaging and challenging. Both the video games Portals and Braid have been big hits lately in the area of story and having very challenging puzzles to solve. Portals 2 is coming out this Spring as well. There are other games, especially RPGs (role-playing games) and especially the Final Fantasy games that deal with very deep, engaging narratives. These games are able to use video games as a landscape for telling stories that are at the level of a good novel. Until resent voice overs, a lot of the story had to be driven through text. The vocabulary level was impressive enough to teach me new words much like a good book as well. I have spent my life defending video games to those around me. Proving them as an art form has been a heated discussion lately too with the creation of cinematic games with deep stories and well developed characters that would impress Martin Scorsese. That is a discussion for another time. Anyway, I agree with him that video games can be used as learning tools if developed by the right hands and taught in the right way. That is something that will also come easier with time as more and more younger teachers come into the schools.