Reading and Writing in a Technology-Rich World

by Marge Ford, Campbell City Schools, Campbell, Ohio

Podcasting, RSS, blogs, IM, hyperlinks, Myspace.com―if you are not at least familiar with these terms, you have already been swept aside by the current carrying most young adults through their daily dose of twenty-first-century communications. Students walk into my library, sign in to their personal profile on our district's server, open their email program, and catch up on all that's transpired overnight.

i see u were at the mall last night with larry LOL
i waited 4 u til closing :-(

Yikes! I thought word processing and computers were supposed to create better writers. Instead, students have developed a shorthand loaded with nonstandard English and emoticons and lacking punctuation.

After catching up on their email, the students might download a music or video file to their folder, upload a picture to their account in Myspace.com (if they can get around the district's filtering software―and they often do), and read entries posted by other students. Finally, they might work on their web authoring project, learning to navigate the intricacies of FrontPage or Dreamweaver. And while you're dictating those very important notes on Macbeth, they're instant-messaging or text-messaging their significant others. It's still all about reading and writing, but the media and delivery systems are transforming pop culture and technology as we know it. It's not your grandma's Chevy anymore!
 

Our Students

Literacy has become literacies―and we need to think outside the book. Today's students have navigated through traditional print resources and are shooting the rapids, bouncing from full-text online resources, to blogs, to podcasts, to instant messaging, from hyperlink to hyperlink―and churning white waters all around!

Who are these navigators? Paul Hitlin and Lee Rainie (2005) note that a "recent Pew Internet Project survey finds that 87% of all youth between the ages of 12 and 17 use the internet"―roughly 21 million. The teens surveyed, and their parents, believed that the Internet helped them with schoolwork, but a third felt it made cheating easier. When the study refers to the Internet, that includes those online INFOhio resources, email, and instant messaging.

An earlier study, The Internet Goes to College (Jones & Madden, 2002), also supported by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, polled today's college students. A significant number, 20 percent, began using the computer by the time they were eight years old. By the time they were eighteen, all the traditional-age college students regarded the computer as an everyday tool. There is indeed a growing population of young people who have embraced technology and use it in and out of school to gather information and communicate.

The New Literacies

What does this suggest for classrooms and libraries, teachers and librarians? Instruction must not only integrate and acknowledge these new literacies, but also help students navigate the rapids―they still don't know everything. The problem is neither do we, and we often hate to admit it.

First of all, we need to school ourselves about these literacies. What makes web logs, or blogs, different from journaling? What makes Myspace.com a magnet for readers and writers? View these sites on a nonfiltered computer and take some mental notes. Posting writing and personal information on the Internet is free, easy, and instant. The postings are often multigenre―composed of text, lists, video, pictures. The audience is real, and there is the possibility of direct response. It can be anonymous by allowing writers to assume a pseudonym or display an avatar. However, filtering software employed by school districts often blocks blogs or sites like Myspace.com, so using this publishing avenue is not always an option.

Fortunately, sites like Class Blogmeister, developed by David Warlick, are free and allow the teacher to control who is admitted to the blog environment. Therefore, the blog is not blocked by filtering software. In addition, the instructor who enrolls the students can review each entry and must release it for Internet publication. It may not be as appealing to students because the teacher has oversight, but it does allow for multiple readers who can comment on published entries. At a time when student safety is a concern, this site offers a controlled alternative to the freewheeling blog or public-posting sites.

I recently attended a workshop entitled "iPod in Education and Podcasting." What is podcasting? Basically, it is an MP3 audio file or video file delivered to your computer or MP3 player.

To use existing podcasts, look in the itunes directory, or try accessing the podictionary or taping your own pods. That way, you can make your class notes accessible to students for review or intervention. Students who are absent can catch up more effectively, and teachers no longer have to incessantly repeat information shared in class.

With this in mind, I created my novice podcast to target students in our high school government classes. I collaborated with the social studies teacher as he had students researching significant Supreme Court decisions. Take a listen. The podcast is sequenced with a companion website. No more "I was absent" excuses!

Teaching Students to Have a Critical Eye

Next, teachers and librarians need to consider the whole issue of information―specifically, information literacy. When students are given an assignment that requires research, they immediately hop on the Internet and use Google (or Ask.com or Yahoo) to explore their topic. After getting their 1.5 million hits, they begin to click and browse through the web pages generated by their search―without paying any attention to any evaluative criteria. Can they locate the author and determine his or her credentials? Is there a date on the page? Are they able to trace the links on the page? Can they determine the bias? These are all tasks an editor might perform for print materials―but who edits the resources on the Internet?

It is our responsibility to teach students to evaluate resources, especially online resources that can be posted by anyone. Try using a tutorial like Evaluating Internet Sites101! to begin a discussion of the validity of online resources. Require students to certify that they have thoroughly checked the site using evaluative criteria. Instead of debating the value of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia written by the wired public, let students compare the entries posted by "volunteer" researchers with those of the more classic print encyclopedias.

Pointing to Resources―and Serving as Resources

More traditionally, teachers and librarians need to become familiar with the INFOhio resources, which guarantee student success with full-text periodical articles and quality reference resources. Virtually every content area is supported with the online reference materials and databases supplied for free through INFOhio. Looking for data to analyze or graph in a mathematics class? Visit World Data Analyst. Need a copy of a work of art to model in your Art I class? Access the Art Collection. Searching for a Spanish nonfiction article to use with Spanish IV? Try Enciclopedia Universal en Espanol. In addition, INFOhio provider EBSCO supplies the same full-text periodical databases to Ohio public libraries and universities; so if we take the time to share these resources with students, we are supporting a lifelong skill they can use in the public or academic library setting.

As an even more valuable tool for helping students transfer skills to postgraduate venues, explore the resources recently developed through a partnership with the Institute for Library and Information Literacy Education (ILILE), a Library Services and Technology Act grant, and Kent State University Libraries and Media Services. Streaming video and print worksheets and handouts focus on the transition from high school to academic libraries and research. The video is generic and can be used in any setting. Looking for assessments to determine student proficiency with information literacy? Be sure to try TRAILS-9. Funded by ILILE, it's an invaluable resource to track student success and can be used as both a pretest and a post-test. So many resources, so little time!

More and more school librarians are providing a portal to numerous online resources through their library websites. In an article published recently in Educational Leadership, Joyce Valenza (2005—2006) observed:

To maintain relevance, the 21st century school library must expand and reinterpret library service. Existing both offline and online, it must offer around-the-clock access as well as instruction and guidance that support the face-to-face interactions of students with librarians and classroom teachers. (p. 54)

How many teachers and librarians supply an email address so a student can ask a follow-up question about an assignment? It's time to do that. Further, invite students to email drafts as attachments. By opening the Reviewing toolbar in Microsoft Word, teachers can attach comments, ask questions, and track the progress from draft to draft.

Ultimately, teachers and librarians must collaborate to provide that essential support that is the core of Student Learning Through Ohio School Libraries: The Ohio Research Study (OELMA, 2004). Students come to expect not just a repository of information in the school library, but a dynamic institution that satisfies their information needs. In this construct, teachers and librarians can better address the ethical dilemmas created by these new technologies. Cut-and-paste plagiarism is relatively easy; however, when a teacher makes a concerted effort to point out that copying without attribution is wrong, students are less likely to go that route (NCTE, 2005). Better yet, teachers need to guide students through appropriate summary and paraphrase skills, not an easy task.

In addition to teaching skills that encourage academic honesty, consider modeling other appropriate uses of technology. Christopher Birch (2005), in an article that appeared in Curriculum Technology Quarterly, suggests creating e-sheets, or content documents with embedded hyperlinks. The document would be posted to a website or made available in a desktop folder, and students would be able to click on websites that would help them with the assignment. In essence, you are able to do the same thing with the websites referenced in this article. Are you more likely to access those websites than you would be had you been required to type in a lengthy URL? That's twenty-first-century writing!

Actually, it's not just school libraries and classrooms that are reexamining reading and writing in a digital world. Recently, the National Archives announced a collaboration with Google (2006) that will offer historic films free online. The Library of Congress, in addition to the many other primary source materials it offers digitally online, is making available webcasts of addresses presented at the library along with events of the National Book Festival. All are offered as streaming video. In an introduction to a series of lectures entitled "Managing Knowledge and Creativity in a Digital Context," Deanna Marcum (2004), associate librarian for library services at the Library of Congress, posed a series of rhetorical questions about the Library of Congress that we should all be asking of our own institutions, be they schools or libraries. She asked:

What must we do to be successful in the 21st Century? How will the library of the future be as successful as that we have so loved in the past? How will the internet change the nature of our work and what must we think about in quite different ways?

We must all be forward thinking enough to ask the same questions―and not be afraid to search for the answers.

While you're reading this commentary on reading and writing in a world enriched by technology, one of your students is out there creating yet another way of reading and writing text, digital or print. I think Marc Prensky (2001) captured it best when he referred to those students as "digital natives." Electronic text and technologies are communication tools they have used all their lives. We, on the other hand, are "digital immigrants"—living life in translation.

References

Birch, Christopher. (2005, Fall). Hyperlinks help students rethink language arts. Curriculum Technology Quarterly, 15(1).

Google digitizes historic videoclips. (2006, February 27). eSchool News Online. Retrieved March 5, 2006, at http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=6137.

Hitlin, Paul, & Rainie, Lee. (2005, August 2). Teens, technology, and school. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved March 5, 2006, at http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Internet_and_schools_05.pdf.

Jones, Steve, & Madden, Mary. (2002, September 15). The Internet goes to college: How students are living in the future with today's technology. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved March 5, 2006, from http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_College_Report.pdf.

Marcum, Deanna. (2004, November 15). Introduction. How and in which situations web logs or blogs work: How and why they are valuable in children's education. Library of Congress webcast. Retrieved March 5, 2006, at http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=3382.

NCTE. (2005, November). Teaching about plagiarism in a digital age. The Council Chronicle, 15(2). Retrieved March 24, 2006, at http://www.ncte.org/pubs/chron/highlights/122871.htm.

OELMA. (2004, February 21). Student learning through Ohio school libraries: The Ohio Research Study. Columbus: Ohio Educational Library Media Association. http://www.oelma.org/StudentLearning/default.asp.

Prensky, Marc. (2001, October). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5). Retrieved March 5, 2006, at http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf.

Valenza, Joyce Kasman. (2005, December—2006, January). The virtual library. Educational Leadership, 63(4), 54—59.

Marge Ford is the library/media specialist for the Campbell City schools. She is a past president of OCTELA and a recipient of the Outstanding English Language Arts Educator Award, Special Distinction category, for 2001. She is a member of the board of directors for ALAN and an East Region director for OELMA. Her areas of expertise include integrating technology into the classroom, INFOhio electronic resources, grant writing, and children's and young adult literature. You can contact her at camp_mf@access-k12.org.

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