Last week, while on vacation, I finally found time to indulge in one of my favorite (albiet neglected) leisure activities; reading for pleasure.  Nothing academic or professional, just a few trashy paperbacks full of action and suspense.  Upon returning to work, I was disheartened by the realization that I probably won’t have another opportunity to enjoy more light reading until Winter Break; there’s just too much “required reading” that takes priority, and most of it is digital…but does reading online really count?

**Photo courtesy of ninjapoodles on flickr (Creative Commons, non-commerical)

In the July 27 New York Times article Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?, Mitoko Rich examines how the Internet and other forces are changing the way people read.  As Rich explains, student test scores are central to the debate:

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

Regardless of where you stand on the issue, we as a profession must acknowledge that reading has changed since the advent of hyper-text; the written word is no longer linear.  Whether that helps or hinders student performance largely depends on how learning is defined and assessed.  As noted in the article, opinions on the matter are sharply divided:

“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

And conversely,

“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.”

The “print vs. digital” question need not be an either-or issue as some would suggest.  McCullough is correct in that learning is acquired from great books, but mistaken to assume that learning is only acquired from books.  In today’s world, learning is on call at the touch of a button.  Unfortunately, much of what students read and learn online is fraught with errors and lacking in depth.  Students must be taught to take time and discern the validity of myriad viewpoints.  We need to prepare our students to be literate in the “traditional” and “digital” sense of the word.

With vacation over, this evening will be spent, as is often the case, on work-related reading.  After catching up on my RSS feeds, I plan to finish Sara Kajder’s Bringing the Outside In: Visual Ways to Engage Reluctant Readers.  I still have a few chapters to go, but there is some irony in that I’m reading a print book that discusses how digital technology can encourage students to read.  I don’t know if it “counts” or not, but at least I’m reading, and maybe I’ll get a few more kids to read, regardless of the medium.

That’s good, right?

Posted: 08|5|08 at 4:41 pm. Filed under: Digital Literacy.
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