Reading and viewing notes
From PLN
Reading and viewing notes
|
Is reading in trouble? Is the very definition of "reading" changing? How does viewing--real-world exhibitions, virtual exhibitions, visual media--relate to reading? And what about gaming?
Shorter notes that appear to relate directly to reading and viewing now and in the future appear here.
The future of reading
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest July 2008
The July 27 New York Times started its series on the future of reading by asking: R U really literate if U never crack a book? The article gives an excellent overview of how the Internet is changing the way people read.
Today’s teenagers spend hours a day on the Internet, some at popular sites like fanfiction.net, where you can create your own stories and add characters and revise plots in existing stories. Some of the writing there is full of spelling and grammatical errors. But is what they do there legitimate reading?
Some argue that the Internet is “the enemy of reading” while others defend it. The defenders don’t deny the value of books, but they argue that the classics aren’t for everyone, and “some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.”
One problem is that standardized reading tests don’t test for online reading skills. Some countries will start testing for “digital literacy” next year, but not the United States. There’s no question that book reading and Internet reading differ. And while there are links between teens’ declining reading scores and a slump in their reading for fun, it’s not clear whether they think of what they do on the Internet as “reading.”
How online reading differs from reading a book
- Searching for answers to questions is “central to online reading.” Book readers form questions less frequently; searches are limited to TOCs and indexes.
- Online readers have to find and evaluate information at multiple sites, synthesize it and build answers from these different sources. Book readers “have high confidence in books”; information there is “already organized and synthesized.”
- Online reading is interactive. Online readers share ideas and respond to and create content via the Web. Book readers “interact less directly and less often.”
Online reading may also shorten our attention spans (see "Is Google making us stupid?" in the Atlantic), and research has shown that Web users are “persistently weak in judging whether information is trustworthy.” On the other hand, some people with reading difficulties read better online than in books and low-income children given access to the Internet from home show improved reading scores.
”Some literary experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures, they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem... Books aren’t out of the picture, but they’re only one way of experiencing information in the world today.”
There’s been little large-scale testing of digital reading skills, but the Educational Testing Service has a digital literacy test that “requires students to solve informational problems by searching for answers on the Web.” Of the 20,000 students who’ve taken it, only 39 percent of college freshman showed “’core functional levels’ in Internet literacy.” Some literacy experts advocate for federal testing of digital reading skills in the nation’s report card tests, but traditionalists “have held sway” and the next round of tests will include only “print reading comprehension.”
Next year, “the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading, math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an electronic reading component. The United States…will not participate.”
In spite of the ongoing debate about the importance of digital literacy, people agree “that children need a wide range of reading experiences.” What’s not clear is whether today’s Internet junkies will ever read books for fun and how that will affect them in the long run.
(Motoko Rich, "R u really literate if u never crack a book?", The New York Times, Jul. 27, 2008.)
How should libraries handle online resources?
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest July 2008
Reading and writing about The New York Times article on the future of reading made me think again about the W. B. Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland.
This splendid online exhibit transported me back to my English-major youth and thrilled me with Yeats’ reading of Lake Isle of Innisfree, pictures of Maude Gonne, of Yeats’ wife (not Maude Gonne), several brief documentaries—on and on. What I would have given to see all of this when I was studying Yeats in college!
I read about the physical exhibit (where much of Yeats’ work on display has been digitized) in The New York Times. The print edition of the Times didn’t mention the online exhibition, but the the online edition did.
Questions
- Is viewing the online Yeats exhibit legitimate study? Is it equivalent to reading the book about the exhibit? Less? More? I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know, but I do know that I was able to sample the online exhibit from home--no delays, no trips to the library, no ILL requests, no gasoline used, no costly trip to Ireland.
- What should libraries be doing about providing access to these rich Web resources? The online exhibition is cited at the end of Wikipedia’s excellent article on Yeats. But I didn’t find it in WorldCat or in any of several library catalogs. OCLC now offers a Web harvester, which may help. Libraries will need to move quickly though to link to these online resources, or--is it already too late, and should we just let Google and Wikipedia handle it?
- What’s your library doing about online resources?
Related articles
- Ebook notes - Notes and comments on text in digital form.
- Kindle experiences - First-person commentaries on experiences with one newer combination of reading and viewing.
- Kindle and ebook reader notes - Facts and notes on ebook appliances.
