Do our students know how to read digital content?
At one of my presentations at the recent Schools' Librarian Conference, my answer to this question was "no"! Furthermore, I said, it wasn't only our students who were having difficulty; it was us as teachers too.
My "aha" moment came during a Google search lesson, when I realized my students were only looking at images and clickable items, rather than actually reading the words on the page. In the screengrab below, while doing a search for the feather image, very few read the words "Tip: Try entering a descriptive word in the search box", which was the next step they needed to take in their search.
I ran the same class across all our grades, as well in our teacher connect groups, and no matter what the age, there seemed to be the same result: We were simply looking at the screen, not reading what was on it.
When I started doing my own research on this, I found that we're not alone. Maryanne Wolf, a professor at the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in America, is an expert in the science of the reading brain.
She has two major concerns about digital reading: The first is that we don’t actually read digital content. We scan, we skims, we click, but we don’t read read. We look for images and colors and clickable items. We read in an F-shape, rather than in the linear way that we read books, skipping out information we don't think is important. And the second is that we don’t read for deeper meaning. The concern here is that because our brains are so flexible, there is a very real chance that we could lose this ability to read deeply and meaningfully.
So are we doomed? Not if we teach ourselves and our students to read digitally - not skim or scan, but actually read.
How can we do this?
1. Make students aware of how they read digital content. Put together a presentation on the topic and show them how we are currently reading digitally and why this method could be letting us down.
2. Teach them to become good researchers - how to find good-quality sources that will lend themselves to deeper reading.
3. Create higher-level thinking activities to keep their deep-reading brains alive, where they are reading not only for content, but also for meaning.
She has two major concerns about digital reading: The first is that we don’t actually read digital content. We scan, we skims, we click, but we don’t read read. We look for images and colors and clickable items. We read in an F-shape, rather than in the linear way that we read books, skipping out information we don't think is important. And the second is that we don’t read for deeper meaning. The concern here is that because our brains are so flexible, there is a very real chance that we could lose this ability to read deeply and meaningfully.
So are we doomed? Not if we teach ourselves and our students to read digitally - not skim or scan, but actually read.
How can we do this?
1. Make students aware of how they read digital content. Put together a presentation on the topic and show them how we are currently reading digitally and why this method could be letting us down.
2. Teach them to become good researchers - how to find good-quality sources that will lend themselves to deeper reading.
I ended my presentation with this quote (by technology visionary Edward Tenner), which I think sums up possibly where we are now, and emphasizes the need to focus on changing this status quo:
"It would be a shame if brilliant technology were to end up threatening the kind of intellect that produced it."
Further reading:
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/being-a-better-online-reader
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