But that was also back when journalism was a one-way street and limited to the printed page. Back when “news” didn’t make a high school paper because every issue was at least a week old when it landed from the printer. Being a high school journalism teacher in the 2.0 world is quite a bit different than hoping 500 or so fragile tabloid copies get into the right hands, and I have had a lot of fun this summer developing from scratch an online news site that has the potential — if not the practicality — to reach around the globe.

I’m wondering if it’s possible to accurately convey to the 30 students who show up in Period 5 tomorrow just what power I’m turning over to them. The power of this broad, instant reach. The power to make their voices heard like those darn persistent Whos in “Horton Hears a Who.” We are here, we are here, we are here! Do they realize, really realize, what the protection of the First Amendment and state and federal law confers on them? That their online news site cannot be shut down, taken away, denied? That their public forum cannot be excised from the course schedule by a hostile party, unlike “Publick Occurrences,” the first American paper, which was forbidden, burned and its publisher jailed back in 1690? That their adviser cannot be fired or forced out of her position (not in California anyway).

Is it possible to really communicate the difference that exists from just 10 years ago for ordinary people to be heard? My students were born in 1992-94. They’ve never really known a world without email and Google and PayPal. They don’t remember a time without FaceBook or MySpace or YouTube. It’s so easy to communicate now. Instantly. At no cost. With friends, with enemies, with strangers. The gatekeepers are dead, dying or irrelevant. Mostly anyways. The kids have no idea.

I will start class tomorrow with a welcome and an attempt to give them perspective. The first newspaper, handwritten and hung on street corners, was decreed by Julius Caesar in 59 BC and titled “Acta Diurna.”  The last news organization was born one second ago. And one second from now. There will be no end to them, and that is enough to make any journalist’s heart beat faster. I would not trade living in this era in this place for any other time in history.

And to The Foothill Dragon Press: welcome to a great big exciting fast connected world–it’s a nice time to be born.

(Photo Credit: “Yesterday News,” Creative Commons Licensed by Zarko Drincic on Flickr.com)

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 )