“Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.”

The report is based on a national phone survey of 700 Americans aged 12-17 and their parents. It was conducted by Pew and the National Commission on Writing.

Co-author Amanda Lenhart comments in a media release that “There is a raging national debate about the state of writing and how high-tech communication by teens might be affecting their ability to think and write… Those on both sides of the issue will see supporting data here.”

Richard Sterling, executive director emeritus of the National Writing Project, said “We think these findings point to a critical strategy question for all educators: How can we connect the enthusiasm of young people for informal, technology-based writing with classroom experiences that illuminate the power of well-organized, well-reasoned writing?”

Full text of the Writing, Technology and Teens report is available online.

The New Media Literacies project at MIT takes what we might call an ‘embedded’ approach to teaching information literacy:

“How does digital copying relate to legacy notions of property? What do I need to know in order to collaborate with my online peers? How do I present myself online? What do I do when I encounter new communities with unfamiliar norms or ideas? In many cases, there are helpful analogies in “age old” practices. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom of the analog world can seem like an ill fit. A more appropriate approach might frame the core skills and ethical issues within already established structures, but recognize the complications and opportunities of the contemporary media environment.”

At Harvard, the Good Play project:

“…seeks to understand the ethical issues that youth face in the virtual frontier of new digital media. How models of ethics transfer from the offline to the online world–especially in the five areas of identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility and participation–and how young people understand their roles and responsibilities in digital contexts are key concerns.”

The two project teams met recently to share their experiences, and a summary was published on Henry Jenkins’ blog. Their blog post includes three examples of group exercises that help students work through concepts of responsibility, copyright and privacy.

The report also points to Spotlight, a group blog that publishes weekly articles about “what’s important” in the emerging field of digital media and learning.

The New Media Literacies project is building a ‘learning library’ and looking for partners, collaborators and contributors — see the NML web site for details.

Related posts on this Information Futures blog:

• Literacy, old and new
• Information management at a personal level
• Regardless of age, everyone googles

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.