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Posted by Monty Solomon on July 27, 2008, 6:09 pm
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Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?
By MOTOKO RICH
The New York Times
July 27, 2008
BEREA, Ohio - Books are not Nadia Konyk's thing. Her mother, hoping
to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely
shows an interest.
Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the
Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of
the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.
A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses,
Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social
networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She
searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a
role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as
cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on
quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories
written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.
Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A's and
B's at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk
said, "I'm just pleased that she reads something anymore."
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about
just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is
playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts
around the world, and within groups like the National Council of
Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.
As teenagers' scores on standardized reading tests have declined or
stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are
the enemy of reading - diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans
and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the
reading of books.
But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one
that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a
teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure
time watching television, to read and write.
Even accomplished book readers like Zachary Sims, 18, of Old
Greenwich, Conn., crave the ability to quickly find different points
of view on a subject and converse with others online. Some children
with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter Gaudet, 16,
of Somers, Conn., have found it far more comfortable to search and
read online.
At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that
electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some
literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is
looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails
some engagement with text.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
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