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September 2008
By Sara Aase
The ability to read and write has long been our shorthand definition of literacy. “Marked with letters” is the term’s Latin etymology. But text messaging, blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are changing what we mean. We no longer write much in longhand. We abbrev. Write a sentence instead of a paragraph. Post pictures. Create videos. Link. And we’re as likely to download an e-book on Kindle as to pick up a bound version. In Japan, cell phone text novels are the new rage.
What does all this mean for the future of literacy? What might it look like years from now in our wired world? We talked to four forward-thinking experts who embrace what they see as an expanding standard.
Matthew Kirschenbaum
A professor of English at the University of Maryland and the associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, Matthew Kirschenbaum studies experimental and electronic literature—poetry or
fiction created for the computer that might include sound, animation, and nonlinear narrative branching.
How will schools change the way they teach reading and writing?
Authors like Shakespeare and Jane Austen will endure, and I’d hate to see them reduced to the equivalent of
‘eating your vegetables.’ You know, ‘We’ll read only these the old-fashioned way because it’s good for you.’ The classroom offers an enormous
opportunity to use games and electronic literature to stimulate students’ thinking. It’s all about engaging the students where, increasingly, their mind share really is, and that’s on the screen.
Can you give some examples of new ways to teach literacy?
What if instead of just reading Jane Austen, you could participate in a virtual world inhabited by her characters and really take a place in the story yourself?
How are new technologies
changing reading and writing now?
My students are doing a lot more writing than I was at their age. They are learning on a daily basis, through e-mail, texting, blogging, and IMing, how to express themselves well. There are mental gymnastics you have to do to express yourself briefly that are not so different from forms like haiku.
Marc Prensky
Marc Prensky loves video games. He founded Games2Train, a New York–based e-learning games
company whose clients include IBM and Pfizer, and he’s written books for parents touting the positive aspects of games. He believes literacy will
increasingly depend on acquiring the skills that allow us to create our own movies, animation, games—and the programs that run our machines.
How do video games relate to literacy and learning?
First of all, a lot of kids are motivated to read in order to play these games and a game like Yu-Gi-Oh! might require them to read at a level higher than their
current grade level. Second, good games are
complicated problems that involve
learning on multiple levels. Some are puzzles, some require cooperation with other people, and some require
estimating, calculating, decision making, and risk taking. For example, in some of the sports games like Madden NFL, you not only play against other players, you also run the team and the league. Adults tell us that they learned some of the skills they apply in business today from games like these.
What is literacy going to look like to our kids and to their kids?
Words, as good as they are, are not going to be enough anymore. More and more it’ll be, ‘Let me send you a program that explains what I’m talking about.’
Bob Stein
The Institute for the Future of the Book, a “think-and-do tank” based in New York City, is Bob Stein’s latest foray into advancing new tools for creating and consuming culture. Previously, Stein worked at Atari and then founded The Voyager Company, producer of the first CD/ROMS and of the cinephile’s beloved Criterion Collection of films.
How is reading changing?
A mother in London recently described her ten-year-old boy’s reading behavior to me: ‘He’ll be reading a book. He’ll put the book down and go to the book’s website. He’ll check what other readers are writing in the forums and maybe leave a message himself, then return to the book. He’ll put the book down again and Google a query that’s occurred to him.’ I think you’ll see this kind of
interactivity happening more with texts themselves, where readers interact with an author in a certain space. We created a tool where you can leave comment streams in the margins of a text.
Jean Gralley
Author/illustrator Jean Gralley lives outside of Washington, D.C., where she creates
digital picture books. One such project, Books Unbound, was part of a traveling
exhibition.
What kind of interaction do you
imagine for the digital picture book?
Right now I’m creating a digital book about the water cycle. At one point the narrative stops so the reader can slide a thermometer gauge up and down. As the temperature slides down, a water droplet freezes solid; as it slides up, the droplet boils and turns to steam.
What’s so motivating about motion for younger readers?
Something moves, we pay attention. Some people may worry that adding motion to reading may ruin kids’
interest in traditional books, but I
imagine the same was said when the picture book was born. I learned to love reading with comics. My peers and I moved on nicely to long books with no pictures at all. I believe motion is a new hook that will engage kids.
6 Words to Know
What Your Kids Are Talking About Tweet: 140-character post on Twitter, a social networking and “microblogging” site.
Lifehack: Process or technique that makes life easier to manage or more convenient.
Widget: Application that can be installed and used in any separate web page. Example: Scrabulous.
Feed/Channel: Automated stream of blog entries, headlines, or podcasts that you set up on the Web or on your computer desktop. Also called RSS or RSS feed.
Chicklet: Small icon adjacent to a blog post, article, or web page to indicate the availability of a feed.
Tag: Keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information.
Del.icio.us: Social bookmarking web
service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks
ARG: Alternate reality game. A story that evolves in real time, played by groups of
people, that provides clues or puzzles through websites, e-mail, and other means. Recently, “The Lost Experience” was an ARG that promoted the television show Lost.
Avatar: Representation of a player in a
virtual world, as in the game Second Life. |
© 2008 MSP Communications, Inc. All rights reserved