Hi all,
Last week there were two interesting radio shows on WNYC, the New York City public radio station, on how screens are changing the way our brains process reading and why we might need to train our brains to be 'bi-literate'.
The 'Bi-literate' Brain: The Key to Reading in a Sea of Screens http://www.wnyc.org/story/reading-screens-messing-your-brain-so-train-it-be-bi-literate/
Training Your 'Bi-Literate' Brain http://www.wnyc.org/story/training-your-bi-literate-brain/
What is your experience of reading on a screen? With two of the three nationally used high school equivalency tests being offered as computer based tests and many colleges using online course material, the ability to read well on a screen seems to be an important skill. I'd love to hear what are some ways you are working on this with students.
best,
Nell
Comments
Hello Nell,
I'm not sure that this is new. There are different kinds of hard copy reading. Novels are usually read in a linear way, although some require jumping back and forth to check details. On the other hand, most people read newspapers and magazines by "jumping around", choosing articles, skimming and sampling them, and reading some all the way through. Skimming is not new. It has been taught in school for years.
Some online reading is also linear and deep -- reading journal articles online, for example, requires concentration, as does reading some novels on a digital device.
I don't think the difference is so much that online reading is different from hard copy reading. It may be, however, that with the exponential growth of reading materials -- and the push of text by email, blogs and tweets -- that many people don't have as much time to read novels. I am still reading novels, although I have to "make time" to do it. It helps to have a book group meeting to place a "competing demand" for me to read a novel or other book.
James Gee -- and others -- argued that there are many literacies before we had the Web and the proliferation of online reading. We can -- and should -- teach people how to read in many different ways, including in the many ways that one can read online. Whatever one is reading, however, having a "metacognitive dialogue" with oneself while reading is often helpful, for example asking oneself "What's this about?" "Why am I reading this?" "What do I hope to learn from reading this?" "How does this fit with what I think I know about this?" "What does this word or term mean?" and other questions may be more important than whether one reads hard copy or online.
David J. Rosen
djrosen123@gmail.com