The answer is actually quite simple. We have great tools at our fingertips. It is simply a matter of thinking outside the box and drawing upon the wealth of resources that are available online to engage, motivate and inspire our digitally savvy students. As a start point Web 2.0 meets Reading 2.0 is an amazing collection of Web 2.0 applications collected and collated by esessions an educator out of Alabama. It is a good site for teachers to go to start exploring Web 2.0 applications and reading.
The other resource is the taxonomy of reading capabilities developed by Luke and Freebody (1990). The Four Resources Model was developed as a means of responding to the complexity of reading and the changing and challenging demands in order to be a successful reader in today’s world. Whatever developmental point students are at, all four roles need to be taught systematically and explicitly. The roles are not a linear progression nor are they developmentally based. They are actually a set of skills that are interlinked, interdependent and necessary to be fully and functionally literate. The roles are just as appropriate when applied to multiple digital contexts as to the print context.

Students want to be part of the online conversation in an online world it gives meaning and purpose to their learning. We have a responsibility to engage our students as well as to develop discerning, critical users of the new technologies as both consumers and creators.

Four Roles/Resources of the Successful Reader
Roles/Resources What successful readers know and do
Code breaker
decoding the codes and conventions of written, spoken and visual text Understand
• the relationship between spoken sounds and written symbols
• the grammar of texts
• the structural conventions of texts
Text user
understanding the purposes of different written, spoken and visual texts for different cultural and social functions Know that
• different types of texts have different purposes
• these purposes shape the way texts are structured and formed
Apply this knowledge in using (eg comprehending, creating, transforming) text
Text participant
comprehending written, spoken and visual texts Make meaning by drawing on
• own experiences and prior knowledge
• knowledge of similar texts
Text analyst
understanding how texts position readers, viewers and listeners Is aware and can identify how
• texts are not ideologically natural or neutral but are crafted to represent the views and interests of the writer
• information, ideas and language in texts influence reader perceptions
• texts empower or disempower certain

Four weeks on and thoughts of NECC 2009 keep percolating through my head. What has stayed with me? What will I be acting upon? What will be the next move into the classroom? Who will be enlisted to try new stuff? What characteristics do they need to   . . .  just give it a go in an educationally sound context!

What has stuck?

Think as far ahead as you can. I am limited by what I don’t know. The more I know the more I know I don’t know!

I know we need to be engaging our students and I know technology can support that. Things are moving so fast as soon as I imagine things they are passe.

We have the opportunity to create powerful and meaningful learning environments. Environments where;

• Feedback is timely, targeted and valued;
• Adversity is used to grow learning;
• Exploration and experimentation are the norm; and
• Learning is recognised as being non-linear.

It’s not the where of learning that matters it is the how.

• Every student should have a computing device in their pocket and be taught how to use it effectively and responsibly. (APPs be they for google or ipod/iphone are powerful and a growing number have amazing educational potential.)
• Mobile devices provide opportunities for students to be online and to have access to information and be learning anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
• Are schools and classrooms as we know them appropriate learning spaces for today’s students?

Knowledge needs to be deep rather than broad and once you have explored a concept in depth only then do you realise fully how little you really know.

Being able to do a Boolean Search is an amazing thing and the Google advanced search capability makes it so easy to fine tune the information being gathered.

Digital text is challenging because:

• Potentially overwhelming with amount of content available.
• Where do we start?
• How do we determine what is relevant?
• Forces us to look for significance by using primary sources as much as possible.
• Analyse and hypothesise about  . . . Am I being manipulated?
• What’s worth reading?
• Read deeply and develop the skill of synthesis

Realise and understand that originality is NOT derivative.

Web 2.0 tools are powerful motivators and provide novel opportunities for student learning, constructing and creating knowledge as well as making available effective and exciting self assessment tools.

Teachers need to let go of their need to control students and student learning, they need to use their understanding of pedagogy and knowledge of curriculum outcomes to become co-learners, co-constructors and co-creators of knowledge along with their students. They need to develop with their students a purpose for learning; authentic tasks, problem or project based learning opportunities where they see what they are doing is relevant and worthwhile.

Parents in the digital age should be in their kids’ faces and in their spaces.

 
Human impulse is to write (21st Century Writing).

Kathleen Blake Yancey believes writing has been affected by the context of history from 1940’s to present

• war and distance created need for people to write letters
• school writing disciplined and punishment oriented
• freedom of graffitti writing, letters of freedom of gaol
• writing process, moves that lead to final product, process became very linear and unlike process real writers use. Energy and using steps in the way they need to be used not as a prescription.
• process became digitised, formatting and publication possible
• writing for connection – visual display powerful in writing
• connection is new and exciting and part of process who for, which medium and why.

Writing is about connection. What does that look like now?

1.  Blogging from school to the world – responses are important and a measure of success, teaches respectful reply. Students like the environment.

2. Take on the personna of characters creating back stories in poetry, drama, blog that represents the author, historical character, scientist

3. Information Ecology, past information owned by experts.

Create a concept map to answer question, search of blogosphere to answer the questions. Found not possible so had to go further into other forms of information: academic, mainstream and alternative. How do we know we can trust resources? Need to be explicit in posing questions.

Go to Time Magazine and see top 100 list of blogs.

4. Blogging as learning in action.

Give an explcit task to pursue and share on communal blog. Where is poetry seen in culture? Students can see poetry almost anywhere but how is it poetic? 

Signs project all signs are about what you can’t do. Used to be words alone. Became mixed and now all pictures. Need to participate not be a voyeur. (Blog Projects done at Virginia Beach Schools)

Three types of participation

1. Experts and laypersons are composing knowledge eg citizen scientist,

2. Citizens composing news, when people help each other information seems to be more reliable. Not just crisis driven but stories of people are being told and their stories are part of History.

3. Citizens have composing power in form of facebook, twitter, blogs etc. This means we need to develop understanding and control of these tools. Need to know which tools are to be used and when to support effective and appropriate connection

I do not necessarily agree with the writer’s conclusions; however, some of the ideas presented provide a very good argument for researchers, educators and testers to take a deep look at the strategies being used by young and old alike to access information on the www. 

The work of Jakob Nielsen, according to Bauerlain, “the guru of  web page usability” was cited. Nielsen has spent since 1994 gauging habits and screen experiences of computer users. He charts “people’s online navigations and aims, using eye tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests”.

Nielsen’s research reveals people scan 100’s of pages using a pattern vastly different from any learned at school. They read in an F pattern . . . extremely fast and only one in six reads a web page linearly.

Let’s face it the old linear way of reading, the emotional comfort provided by fiction books, the rigid content of textbooks are losing their relevance in the burgeoning context of the internet. Books are never going to be irrelevant because there always has been and always will be people who love the comfort and emotional attachment to the printed book. However, the speed, the amount of knowledge and diversity of interests are better catered for by the internet.

It is imperative that researchers and educators join forces to determine the most appropriate strategies needed by all people to be discerning, critical users of the internet as both consumers and creators.

We can’t keep teaching using 20th century methods, educators must adapt to the 21st century . . . almost 10% of the century has passed us by and still there is resistance to this concept.

The Horizons Report (2009, p.6) “call for formal instruction in the key new skills including, information literacy, visual literacy and technological literacy”, but what are they?

The text of the www is not static it is in a constant state of updating. How and what do we teach to cater for this fluidity?

What does it mean to be a reader or even a literate person in the 21st century?

Should we be opening our educational minds to findings from Nielsen’s research and incorporating some of his web usability ideas into our practice?

The concept of connective writing is not about the act of publishing it is what happens before and after publication.

Reading and writing now, are not what they were.

They were:

• Reading to inform, teach and indoctrinate.
• Writing was for the few, the elite of the literatii.

Now  they are skills used by all. They are vital elements for

• Personalisation and establishing relationships based on trust and with respect between readers/writers as the basis for interaction across the web.
• Self sponsored learning and we need to help our students to get to this stage.

What will be the life span of the printed page word?  It is in doubt because the printed word is not as easily accessible when compared to the fast flexibility that is provided in the www environment.

Writing is ubiquitous . . . it doesn’t have to be DONE at a particular time in a particular context.

It happens any where any time when the mood strikes, the link or the connection is made.

Connective writing stems from what we read because ideas for writing have beginnings in what people have read. Others’ thoughts and ideas are reflected upon and writing is then produced.

Sceptics question the quality and preciseness of the information. The audience requires quality and preciseness and they will ensure ideas are fine tuned and written in a knowledgeable way as knowledge is no longer the domain of the few. It is outside of us all. It exists in the world in the space of the www.

Writers on the web synthesise their ideas and link them to sources and context. Writing has to be linked. It cannot occur in isolation. It has little meaning if isolated, unlinked and unread.

What does linked writing look like? Look at Borderland.

Publishing is a cyclical process? It is not only writing it is reading. Is the way we read being changed by  our www experiences? Teachers who know their students and observe the way they work in a classroom can tell you reading for the students of today is a different more complex skill than it was even 20 year ago. The NCTE has endeavoured to address this with their recent NCTE Definition of 21st century literacies.

Do online readers use the same reading strategies as a paper reader?

Is literacy more dependant on images than words?

Is reading as we have been taught and tested still relevant?

What strategies are there to teach reading in an online world?

How do we use web 2.0 and blend it with the best of pedagogy to ensure our students learning needs are met?

Speak Up 2008 available 24 March

We are becoming Nodes around interest groups on line.

Children are learners and teachers.

Lines are blurrring between who is the teacher and who is the learner.

According to context the role of learner is fluid.