Information Futures

Last year the USA’s National Endowment for the Arts released a study called To Read or Not To Read: a question of national consequence. NEA chair Dana Gioia said, “This study shows the startling declines, in how much and how well Americans read, that are adversely affecting this country’s culture, economy, and civic life as well as our children’s educational achievement.”

Critiquing the study this week, Steven Johnson observes that the USA’s current crop of 9-year-olds are more proficient readers than were the equivalent age group in 1999. (thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link)

Johnson points to a bias for print-based literacy in the NEA report:

Odds are that you are reading these words on a computer monitor. Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles because these words are made out of pixels and not little splotches of ink? According to the NEA you’re not, because in almost every study it cites, screen-based reading is excluded from the data. This is a preposterous omission, because of course the single most dramatic change in media habits over the past decade is the huge spike in internet activity.

People who participate in the online world are both reading and writing, says Johnson: the only reason we don’t know about the literacy skills of ‘digital natives’ is that we haven’t yet measured them.

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (available online for a fee, and republished with free access by The Australian), Matthew Kirschenbaum observes that the NEA report focuses on a single model of reading that is appropriate to understanding a 19th century novel but may not apply in other situations or to other texts.

The kind of reading we do online “values comparison and cross-checking as much as focus and immersion: lateral reading as much as reading for depth,” says Kirschenbaum.

Kirschenbaum suggests the NEA’s emphasis on ‘voluntary reading’ is misplaced: “How many of us who count ourselves as avid readers are able to maintain clear boundaries between work and leisure any more?” Reading is reading is reading.

The NEA report tends to treat ‘the computer’ as the venue for a single type of reading activity, says Kirschenbaum. He suggests that “we are not going to talk responsibly or well about what it means to read online until we stop conflating genre with value… There is a spectrum of writing online, just as there is a spectrum of reading, and more and more applications blur the line between the two.”

For higher education institutions, this new emphasis on ‘lateral’ literacy raises questions about the kinds of learning environments and skills-development services we offer to students and academic staff.

How will we help people to develop the information literacy skills they require to be adept at learning in a range of ways, including online and through virtual environments?

What technologies must we make available to students in our learning spaces? In our teaching spaces? How do we support a diverse student body who come to us with different skills and differing levels of access to emerging technologies?

How do we ensure that scholarly information is accessible to people with disabilities?

I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Notes

Steven Johnson is the author of Everything Bad Is Good For You: how popular culture is making us smarter.

Matthew G Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland at College Park.