by Brigitt Martin

Remember the last new book you sat down to enjoy? The feel of the crisp, uncreased paper and the crack of the spine as you opened to chapter one?

Fewer K-12 students are embracing this type of traditional literary experience. That doesn’t mean they aren’t literate, however. Instead they are adapting their reading and writing to the tools available—digital technologies such as blogs, instant messaging (IM), or social networking sites—for correspondence and for gathering and sharing information.

“Kids today live in a whole new paradigm. The media-sphere they occupy has changed the way they perceive themselves and the tools they use to learn and communicate. They don’t choose to do it. It’s just what is,” says David O’Brien, a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.

This so-called “media-sphere” refers to a brave new world of communications built primarily around Web 2.0 technologies, which allow users to go beyond simply accessing information and relying on programmers to create Internet content, to composing their own information. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia collaboratively written by anyone who wants to contribute, and Web-logs (blogs) are two of the better-known examples.

“With Web 2.0 we go beyond passively responding to Web content,” says curriculum and instruction professor Richard Beach. “Now we interact with the text and create our own text.”

Writing as entertainment

According to a 2005 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 33 percent of all American Internet users between 12 and 17 years of age have created or worked on Web pages or blogs for groups, friends, or school assignments. Seventy-five percent use IM, and 55 percent use social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace.

Creating, reading, and responding through these new mediums require a set of skills grouped under the term digital literacy. “Digital literacies are sets of practices in which traditional forms, modes, and affordances [the interaction of author, environment, and available tools] of reading, writing, and negotiating discourses are transformed, just as persons using digital technologies are transformed,” O’Brien explains.

Writing within Web 2.0 applications, for example, frequently involves cutting and pasting or linking to text from a number of different online locations into a single document. Graphics, video, and audio are often as important to comprehension as text. This approach requires the author to “define connections and relationships between key topics, terms, and ideas through their use of hyperlinks between digital texts,” Beach says. Audiences must then be able to comprehend information across different modes—verbal, visual, and oral—as well.

The ability to communicate multimodally is a true skill, O’Brien says. “A digitally literate person is somebody who can successfully transform the processes and the texts to understand or be understood much better than traditional print literacy would allow.”

New voices

Even written text has expanded beyond traditional genres to incorporate more verbal styles of expression, as curriculum and instruction professor Cynthia Lewis found in a study of IM use among 14- to 17-year-olds. Writers would use all uppercase words or a larger font to indicate a raised voice, for example. Different smiley face symbols, called emoticons, expressed emotions that couldn’t otherwise be conveyed in writing (such as laughing).

She also discovered that her subjects adjusted the tone, voice, and style of their communications depending on the purpose and recipient, often shifting deftly from one to another. To establish a new IM relationship, they would write about topics of interest to the correspondent and even mimic the recipient’s written voice, at times. Then they would quickly jump to another conversation, using a different tone. The structure of IM—multiple exchanges carried on simultaneously in different on-screen windows—calls for this skill.

Learning to adjust the purpose and tone for different audiences is key to good writing. “This is often difficult for students,” Lewis comments, “but connecting these skills to the ones they already practice on their own helps them to understand the concepts of audience, purpose, and style and the processes of adjusting these three components to successfully communicate a message.”

Plugging in educators

At its core, digital literacy involves looking beyond traditional print communications, which can be a challenge for an education system that typically is slow to change. “This is a major paradigm shift in schools, from simply regurgitating information to accessing vast amounts of online information and constructing their own knowledge.” Beach explains.

He describes research he and O’Brien did with a group of middle-school students who were behind grade level in reading. When given the opportunity to use digital media, including wikis for online collaborative writing and software to create their own comic books and radio broadcasts, the students became highly interested in creating content. “Kids often are more engaged than they are with traditional print media, so they end up with improved writing skills,” Beach says.

The challenge often is not only engaging the student with digital media, but also educating teachers who are not digitally literate themselves. One way to encourage educators to become purveyors of digital literacies is to show them what their students are capable of creating using Web 2.0 tools, says Beach. He gives the example of a class project in which the students publish online their own pollution study—complete with audio, video, and photographs—aimed at influencing local politicians. “We can let the students become the experts to some degree, which enhances their sense of agency in the classroom,” he explains.

The digitally literate future

The media-sphere has also changed how the digitally literate prefer to access information. O’Brien notes that researchers are seeing attention spans shorten for more traditional presentations of information, like a teacher lecturing at the front of a classroom.

“It’s not a lack of patience, however,” he notes. “They aren’t simply multitasking, they’re multi-mediating, and their brains are adapting to doing many things simultaneously and in little pieces.”

Society as a whole is shifting alongside these technological changes, and it’s important for youth to be prepared to succeed.

“It’s not going to change, so we’d better all move forward, O’Brien declares. “After all, do we want to capitalize on this trend and make school more interesting, or be afraid and let kids venture into these new frontiers alone?”

For descriptions of Web 2.0 tools and other examples of student work, see Beach’s Web site, digitalwriting.pbwiki.com.

 

Many College faculty and instructors are using learning technologies in innovative ways. A few additional examples:

Gillian Roehrig, associate professor, curriculum and instruction: Online science, technology, engineering, and mathematics mentoring program, a collaboration with the Minnesota Department of Education, supports 59 beginning secondary teachers in the areas of science, mathematics, and technology education, who are matched with mentors that have experience teaching the same content area and grade level. Online features include chatting and small learning communities.

Gary McLean, professor, work and human resource education: McLean arranges online conversations between at least two global human-resource experts and the students in his International Human Resource Development course. Sometimes he also connects his students with students who are taking the same type of course in another country.

See past issues of the former college magazine, Link, for stories on high-tech research into brain development, kinesiology, and more (cehd.umn.edu/alumni/link/).

PHOTO: Dawn Villella