I am so incredibly grateful to be living in the 21st century! I’m an information junkie through and through, and with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks it seems like I can find anything I want to find. This makes me as happy as the day I learned, at four years old, that I could check out as many books from the library as I could carry. (Really, I remember the librarian saying that to me and I remember the stack I shuffled out to the car, the corners of the picture books poking the insides of my elbows, the way the books smelled when I got them back to my room). It was unbelievable and glorious, and now as an adult living in the age of high-speed internet, MacBooks, free content and open source software, it’s even better. 

Of the experiments I incorporated into my teaching in the last year — the nings, the wikis, the google forms, joomla and edublog, apture, animoto, zamzar, zoho, teachertube, etc… — 90 percent of them were triggered from tidbits on a blog (the school, a technology-centered high school, already had a wiki). I have learned so much this past year and it has energized by life and my teaching by opening up possibilities for creative experimentation and play that did not exist when I used the old 20th century tools of teaching: the overhead, the whiteboard, the VCR. 

I am still amazed at the generosity of bloggers. You can see the list of blogs I read on the right of this page; I check them daily (okay, several times a day, by logging into my Google Reader to see what’s new). It seems impossibly kind that bloggers will take the time to provide advice — and links! — on tools, to share notes from conferences, to relay concerns about the state of their minds/hearts/jobs/education/the world… all at no cost to me. Do they know they are impacting a classroom in Ventura, California? No. Do they understand that 170 sophomores spent a year building a Ning community because of them? No. Do they get it that a teacher who thought so many times about bailing on the profession has been reenergized? I hope so!

[Photo Credit: "Information Superhighway" by nickwheeleroz]

Tomorrow’s New York Times will publish an article titled “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?“ by Motoko Rich (posted online a day early– another in a long list of reasons why I love online news!). Apparently this is the first in a series of articles that the Times will publish in an attempt to explore how technology is changing the way people read.

Obviously, this is a great concern to newspaper publishers and journalists, because it seems pretty clear that print-based media is dissolving before our eyes. If they don’t or won’t fully adapt to a 24-7 online platform, these news companies will simply die. It’s not just a matter of environmental choices or economics or reader preference, it’s the expectation that readers today have for media that is interactive and highly flexible. The young people interviewed in this article aren’t satisfied with their parents’ ‘one-way,’ linear reading experiences; they want to interact with the news and/or manipulate the narratives. And once you’ve had a taste of that, it’s hard to go back to just reading or watching the news.

One anecdote that I found interesting appears on the last page of this article. The reporter interviewed a teenager who was diagnosed as a child with learning disabilities. He said he finds reading books difficult but excels in online reading:

In a book, “they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed,” Hunter said. “Online just gives you what you need, nothing more or less.”

When researching the 19th-century Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for one class, he typed Taney’s name into Google and scanned the Wikipedia entry and other biographical sites. Instead of reading an entire page, he would type in a search word like “college” to find Taney’s alma mater, assembling his information nugget by nugget.

Experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to glean information. “When you read online there are always graphics,” said Sally Shaywitz, the author of “Overcoming Dyslexia” and a Yale professor. “I think it’s just more comfortable and — I hate to say easier — but it more meets the needs of somebody who might not be a fluent reader.”

Karen Gaudet, Hunter’s mother, a regional manager for a retail chain who said she read two or three business books a week, hopes Hunter will eventually discover a love for books. But she is confident that he has the reading skills he needs to succeed.

“Based on where technology is going and the world is going,” she said, “he’s going to be able to leverage it.”

Hunter’s mother’s comment makes me think of Ken Kay’s concern about whether or not we are teaching young people not only to find information, but to synthesize it and, yes, leverage it. Are we helping students use information to their own personal benefit? To advance their own agendas? 

As an English teacher, I will never give up on books as teaching tools and will expect my students to engage in literature’s one-way, “linear-ness” and possibly even to enjoy the experience. This year they will read Antigone, Things Fall Apart, Animal Farm, All Quiet on the Western Front and more. The authors of these works have important ideas that can only be found by plunging into them and dealing with the non-digital universe that exists when one mind speaks and one mind (can merely?) listen. But I’m also going to find or create online experiences that allow kids to interact with Orwell’s ideas, for example, and to hear multiple perspectives (rather than just the teacher’s). I’m reaching the conclusion that if we don’t work to better integrate literature into the Web 2.0 experience, books might gain a reputation of being so 20th century that — whatever form they take, print or electronic — they won’t matter anymore.

Information is powerful, but wisdom culled from literature provides the context and narrative richness with which to make meaningful decisions. 

(CC Photo credit: A.K. Photography )