Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Reading Screens, Writing Screens, Teaching Screens

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I’ve been sitting here for the last few minutes trying to come up with a number, a percentage that captures how much of what I read is read on a screen as opposed to a piece of paper these days. My first thought was 90%, but that sounded too high, so I’ve been sitting here trying to knock that number down. It’s really, really hard. Just about all of my books are on the iPad, all of my bills are online, all the newspapers and magazines that I read regularly are on the Web, all the RSS feeds, the Tweets, the videos… This may be TMI, but there aren’t even any magazines in the bathroom any more.

Maybe, in fact, it’s 95%.

Which, as is so often the case, leads me to think about my kids and the reading and writing they are going to do in the next school year. For my son who’s 11, I’m guessing about 90% will be given out and handed in on paper. For my daughter, who is 13 and has “adopted” my old MacBook as her own, it may be closer to 75% on paper coming in and going out as I’m sure she’ll be asked to print most of what she composes on the computer. In either case, I’m guessing not much instruction or discussion is going to be centered on the ways in which screen reading and writing are changing the very nature of the acts. They’re not creating links. They’re not deconstructing them.

They should be.

Two great pieces by Scott Rosenberg and Kevin Kelly have me thinking deeply about this. Scott’s piece, “In Defense of Links Part 3: In Links we Trust” neatly captures so much of the shift around reading that I think it should be required reading for every teacher (since every teacher is a writing teacher.) I’m serious. Here’s a fairly short snip that gets to the complexity of reading and writing in links.

The context that links provide comes in two flavors: explicit and implicit. Explicit context is the actual information you need to understand what you’re reading…you land on my page and you might well have no idea what I’m talking about, since this is part three of a series. Links make it easy for me to show you where to catch up. If you don’t have time for that, links let me orient you more quickly in my first paragraph with reference to Carr’s post. I can do all this without having to slow down those readers who’ve been following from the start with summaries and synopses. Again, even if the links that achieve this do demand a small fee from your working brain (which remains an unproven hypothesis), I’d say that’s a fair price.

By implicit context, I mean something a little more elusive: The links you put into a piece of writing tell a story (or, if you will, a meta-story) about you and what you’ve written. They say things like: What sort of company does this writer keep? Who does she read? What kind of stuff do her links point to — New Yorker articles? Personal blogs? Scholarly papers? Are the choices diverse or narrow? Are they obvious or surprising? Are they illuminating or puzzling? Generous or self-promotional?

Links, in other words, transmit meaning, but they also communicate mindset and style.

Which isn’t to say that written texts don’t communicate mindset and style. But it is to suggest that interacting with links, both by simply reading them and by clicking on them, creates quite a different experience, one with more complexity and, I think, more potential. It’s not as simple as “links provide context.” The choice of what we link to speaks volumes about our interests, biases, agendas, and those cues are now a part of the reading interaction, a piece of what we as readers then use to make sense of the text.

Kevin Kelly’s piece in the Smithsonian Magazine, A Whole New Way of Reading, also gets to the complexity of these changes.

But it is not book reading. Or newspaper reading. It is screen reading. Screens are always on, and, unlike with books we never stop staring at them. This new platform is very visual, and it is gradually merging words with moving images: words zip around, they float over images, serving as footnotes or annotations, linking to other words or images. You might think of this new medium as books we watch, or tele­vision we read. Screens are also intensely data-driven. Pixels encourage numeracy and produce rivers of numbers flowing into databases. Visualizing data is a new art, and reading charts a new literacy. Screen culture demands fluency in all kinds of symbols, not just letters.

There is a lot going on in that paragraph, a lot about balance, about participation, multimedia, literacy and more. And a lot about the flows of knowledge vs. the stacks of knowledge that John Seely Brown and others write about in Pull.

So here are the questions I’m asking: Are reading and writing changing in these linkable, screen centered environments? If so, does the way we think about reading and writing literacy have to change to embrace these shifts? If so, what are we doing about that?

Right now, I think the answer in most schools is “not much.” In fact, I’m not sure many even realize the extent to which this shift is occurring. They have other things on their minds. (Case in point, see this snip from a local newspaper that Steve Ransom tweeted to me this morning.) Which is why I just sent these two links to the English Department supervisor and various others at my local high school and my kids’ two schools. As good as they are at what they do, my sense is that they need us as parents out here in this stew to send them this stuff to read.

Here’s hoping they click the links.

Reading as a Participation Sport

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A few things have been pushing my thinking even more about reading and writing in digital environments, and I thought I’d throw some kind of random thoughts together here mostly to capture them but also to see where writing about them takes me. So apologies in advance for the thin threads and varied directions this may go in.

First, let me say I love my iPad…as a reading tool. I’ve been telling people that when the new OS comes out here in the next couple of weeks, my “grade” for it will go from a B- to a B+ just for the mere ability to multitask through many open programs, which is the major frustration I find with the device right now. I hate having to close one app down in order to open another up because it’s just so different from the usually six or eight programs and 30+ tabs I have running at any given moment on my MBP. But having said that, I absolutely love reading on the iPad. It’s light, it’s thin, it glows. Yeah…I’m having a moment…

To that end, I seriously don’t know if there’s a more useful app than Instapaper. Now, when I’m working on my laptop and my network floats up some interesting piece to read, I just “read-later” it in my browser and the article, stripped of all the ads and extraneous junk on the page, syncs right into my iPad for later, leisurely, comfortable consumption. And…for somewhat comfortable creation. (Btw, here is the RSS feed for my Instapaper saves if you want it.) With a little work, I can share out those pieces to Twitter, capture chunks on Evernote, save them to my Delicious account, all of which will get oh so much easier when the OS updates. But there is no question that  reading no longer just means consuming. It’s all about pulling out the most salient, relevant pieces and doing something with them that potentially makes other people more knowledgeable as well.

Second, there has been a great series of posts on my new favorite blog at the Neiman Journalism Lab (Harvard) regarding the use of links:

Why does the BBC want to send its readers away? The value of linking
Why link out? Four journalistic purposes of the noble hyperlink
Making connections: How major news organizations talk about links

Now I know most of these have a journalistic bent, but I think they have relevance for any of us who write in this linked world, whether it’s blogs or Twitter or whatever. In fact, I might argue that conversations such as these should be happening in fourth and fifth grade as we begin to help our students understand the value of public writing. I mean it might just be me, but I would love my kids to have an understanding of the value of links in writing in terms of how they can be used in storytelling, in keeping the audience informed, in enabling transparency and their value as a “currency of collaboration.” Isn’t that an inherent part of the online writing interaction that we should be teaching?

Third, back to the iPad for a sec. I love the fact that this morning, Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus landed in my Kindle app, ready for me to read. I just finished Switch (highly recommended) and now I have two abridged, annotated, digitally marked up versions of recent books in Evernote that are fully searchable and remixable and sharable (within limits, of course.) I’m becoming more convinced that I’ll never buy another paper book again if it has a Kindle version.

And finally, I bought the Wired Magazine app for the iPad on Monday ($4.99) and it’s, um, pretty darn cool. It’s also another small step in the way we read; embedded videos and audio, amazing graphics, interactive buttons to push. I found it much more engaging to read…that participation thing again. Not that it’s the reinvention of print, but I would have loved to been in some of the brainstorming and idea sessions when they created the interface. It is beautiful and functional. And soon, according to the developers, it’s going to get more social as well, more opportunities to do “connective reading.” Not saying I’m going to subscribe to Wired this way, but when textbooks are made for the iPad in this format…could be very interesting.

I know most people shudder when I say this, but I’m more than ok with letting go of the paper reading world at this point. I’m much more interested in exploring these digital spaces, their opportunities and their drawbacks (as Nicholas Carr has been espousing of late) than watching my paper books grow dust on the bookshelves.

You?

Cloud Books

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Steve Hargadon hosted a panel discussion the other night on the topic of “The Future of Books and Reading” and I was honored to take part with Maggie Tsai of Diigo, Travis Alber and Aaron Miller of BookGlutton, and author Bob Burg. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Diigo, and during our discussion I started thinking what the ultimate in social reading might be. This is still thin thinking, but this is what I want for Father’s Day, kids.

I want to be able to buy a cloud book, that is a license that allows me to access my copy of the book from any device that gets me online. (This assumes, of course, that the book hasn’t been released with a CC license, in which case I just need the access.) As I read my copy, I want to be able to annotate it a la Diigo, but I also want to invite others who have a license to that particular title to join me in the reading and annotating. (This is what BookGlutton is doing with public domain and CC licensed books, though the annotations are not on the text itself like in Diigo; more on the margins.) I want to be able to see and interact with all of those notes from any device as well. In addition, I want to be able to see all of the annotations by people who are also reading, and since that might be overwhelming, I want to be able to sort what annotations I view by date, geography of the reader and by tags. This last one is the key. I know I’ve said this many times before, but if I ever got the ability to tag at the comment level, my ability to organize my reading, writing and learning life would increase exponentially. I seriously get giddy thinking about being able to create digital notebooks filled with pages created by pulling together individual notes from disparate sources around one tag that I’ve left somewhere, complete with linkbacks and reference information. If we taught kids to do that, imagine the notebooks they could construct over their school years. Imagine getting rid of all that paper.

Imagine.

Kevin Kelly wrote this three years ago in the New York Times, and it appears we’re getting there:

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

While much of this will be done by the technology (the Semantic Web awaits) we’ll add the context, tweak the relevance. I know there is the potential for all sorts of havoc here, all sorts of breaking of tradition, all sorts of reading attention issues and much more. But maybe I’m an optimist to think that we could do this well, that it could be a value add, that while it will certainly be different, it could actually be better. I really love being at the beginning of all of this. Will be great fun to watch it all unfold.

(Photo “Sweet Home Under White Clouds” by tipiro.)

New Reading, New Writing

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A great essay by Steven Johnson in the Wall Street Journal this weekend “How the E-Book Will Change the Way we Read and Write” has me thinking hard once again about reading and writing skills and literacies as we move toward an even more digitally integrated world of texts and links. It immediately made me think of one of my other favorite essays on the topic, Kevin Kelly’s “Scan this Book” from the Times a couple of years ago, not necessarily because I agree with everything that both authors discuss but because each makes me take a look at my own reading and writing process through an adjusted lens.

But what was different in my reading of the Johnson essay as opposed to the Kelly essay was my ability to interact with it through Diigo. Over the last few months, I’ve become more and more enamored with Diigo as a tool for notetaking and bookmarking, sure, but as a platform for some interesting conversations. And, while I’m not sure Johnson even knows of its existence, it’s already bringing to fruition many of the social reading potentials we’ve been thinking of as futuristic. The idea that I can not just annotate a paragraph or a sentence or one idea on a webpage but that I can engage with others in sharing our thinking about that particular sentence or idea is at once powerful and daunting. I mean, imagine the meta conversations we might be able to have over different passages in the classics once they all get scanned and put online by Google (or someone else.) As Johnson writes:

As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

I’d say that is a pretty profound shift, wouldn’t you? One that is not so well understood and, in many cases, not even desired by many “traditional” book readers out there.

So when you compare the un-annotated Kelly essay to the marked up Johnson piece (this link lets you see all the notes), there is a vastly different feel, for me at least. And it would be even more different if you would add your own annotations to the piece. In my presentations, one of the most powerful examples of how this particular tool is a potential game changer is when I show this article, “Is Technology Producing a Decline in Critical Thinking and Analysis” in the un-annotated form and then turn the highlights and conversations on. There is nothing but critical thinking and analysis happening there as supported by, um, technology. The irony is palpable.

Is social reading and social writing in our kids’s futures? I don’t think there is much doubt about that. More and more I’m finding Diigo annotations and notes cropping up on the articles and essays that I read, and by and large I’ve found the commentors to be serious, thoughtful and articulate. In other words, while they do add volume, they also add value. Those of us who are mucking around in these new reading and writing spaces have no formal training in it, obviously, just a passion to connect and a willingness to experiment and engage in conversations around the the topics that interest us. But there are skills here that if developed with some intention (read: taught and modeled) can improve literacy in interacting with texts and people in these digital spaces. As always, however, we have to begin to see this shifts as natural progressions in the evolution of reading and writing and not simply tools that bring a temporary WOW! factor to the process.

De-Echoing My Reading Practice…Help Wanted

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Still in the progress of rethinking my online reading habits. About three weeks ago, I deleted every feed from my Google Reader and decided to start over, and I’ve been slowly adding feeds as I come across things of interest. But I’ve also been looking at different avenues to find the most interesting, most relevant stuff, and, most importantly, to shift my reading to include more diversity. Here are just some unsorted reflections and benchmarks so far.

  • I’ve stopped subscribing to all but a handful of edublogs. For some time now it’s been feeling like there’s not much new in the conversation. I may be guilty of that as well, and I think that’s a product of my narrow scope of reading.
  • My main source of reading right now is my Delicious network, which I am constantly revisiting. I’m thinking that for me at least, 50 people is about the right amount of flow. This is without question, however, not a very diverse group of folks in terms of read/write web worldview. It’s almost all info candy. I continue to find it really interesting, however, to see the types of reading themes that people dive into as it tells much about where a particular person’s thinking or research is at.
  • I’m finding myself devoting more time to the “friend’s shared items” in my Google Reader, which is a good and bad thing. The bad is that the “friends” list is generated by who is in my Gmail contacts which means I can’t add or delete folks from this stream without some difficulty. The good, however, is that there is some diversity in there as some of my contacts actively read and share thinking that is outside of my box at least. It’s been a main part in pushing my thinking about the whole “21st Century Skills” label, about which my thinking has been evolvoing quite a bit. (Short answer: Not much new there, but the label has some value.)
  • This post by Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web really has my thinking about filter creation a la Clay Shirky. There is something about this experimental phase that I really love, and I’ve been itching to figure out some different ways to identify, collect and sort the most relevant information out there. Not rocket science, and I’m sure others are farther down this road than I, but I’ve been hacking around with PostRank the last couple of days and waiting to see the results. I know that using a sorting feature to bring me only the most saved, commented upon, bookmarked posts from any blogs has it’s downsides, timeliness for one. But I’m playing with the choices.
  • I’m also digging more deeply into the Google News search and subscribe features as well as the Twitter search stuff. For instance, you can do a search for any Tweets that have the word “literacy” and includes a link. Problem is, of course, that it doesn’t catch everything and much of what it does catch is irrelevant.
  • I’m growing increasingly enamored withe Google Notebook as a way to capture the best snippets and ideas for a variety of purposes. More and more, I read with an ear for saving the most salient parts, which is really challenging me to think of my own organizational schemes in a good, but somewhat frustrating way.

So I’m asking for a couple of things, here. First, how do you create diversity in your reading? What strategies do you use and who are some authors that your read to get out of your own boxes? And second, what other ways of filtering information have you come across or do you use to increase your signal to noise ratio?

There is so much to read, and I want to read it all, but I know I can’t. What is most important to me right now is that my reading stretches me and pushes me, not just affirms what I think I already know. I feel bad on some level on giving up many of the blogs I’ve ready for many, many years now. But if I can tap into the strengths of the network and the best filters that are currently out there, I trust that the best thinking and writing from those long-followed sources will float up through my attention stream anyway.

(Photo “Research Team” by Dean Shareski.)

Reading to Find: Rip-Mix Classrooms

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Ok, so humor me for a minute here…

Here’s what I LOVE about reading on the Web, when I get into a link flow that dances me from blog to blog, post to connected post and comments, and after about 20 minutes of just letting myself be carried away by the threads of conversations I land on something that makes a small part of my brain blow up in wonder. (This is also, by the way, something that I think too many of us fight when we read online, this idea that if we just let ourselves get caught up in the link trip, reading snippets here and there, scanning there and here, that we’re not really reading deeply somehow. Like my seventh grade English teacher Mrs. Tharp is on my shoulder shaking her head in disdain. It’s just a different depth, I think.)

So bear with me as I try to capture this: somehow I got to Sarah Stewart’s post on the Connectivism course and hopped from there over to this mind-bending post at Mike Bogle’s blog which led me to graze around his site a bit to find this post which sent me to this conversation about Open Educational Resources on Brian Lamb’s site which led me to this comment by Mike Caulfield which provoked me to search for and find this very cool concept of Rip-Mix Learners. Setting aside the beauty of that idea, let’s reflect for a second on that process, one that I’d bet most teachers would dissuade their students from practicing. At every point, my decision to click was motivated by an interest for context, for moving more deeply into the one idea in the maze of stuff that was pulling me most at the moment. I didn’t read half of these posts in their entirety, nor do I feel the need to go back and do so. If I had, I most certainly would not have ended up where I did. And while I know that I just as easily could have ended up someplace even better, I let my interest drive the narrative, not the expectations.

While I’m not suggesting I understand fully the implications of reading in this way, I do know that these flow moments are, on balance, a good thing. I love being lost in it. And it’s almost as if I’ve done this enough to know that if I just give myself to it, the thing I’m supposed to find and learn will eventually make itself known, like it’s finding me somehow. Ok, that may be a bit over the top; suffice to say it’s Zen in a way that I wish all of my moments were.

So anyway…

…this concept of Rip-Mix Learners has my brain taking off in all different directions.:

Rip Mix Learners is a student-run Open Courseware project, in which students make audio recordings of the lectures, compile class notes, and other materials and share them with their peers online.

I’m thinking “Rip-Mix Classrooms” or “Rip-Mix Workshops” or heck, “Rip-Mix Conferences.” I’ve been railing of late at all the paper note talking conference attendees whose observations and reflections and experiences will never be connected after the conference ends. And I know that we’re already doing this to some extent on the conference level and the classroom level (i.e. Darren’s scribes and others.) Problem is, most schools would probably attempt to shut this down and call it cheating, especially if, as this group is doing, they are collecting and adding tests and quizzes to the mix.

The horror!

"Why Johnny's Professor Can't Read"

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If this article in Innovate (registration required) didn’t keep hammering the “N-Gen” meme and all the requisite star-struck statistics and high-fallutin description so hard it would have been a lot more fun to read.  But the bottom line thesis is still important for all educators to consider:

Much in the same way that Rudolph Flesch’s 1955 landmark book Why Johnny Can’t Read criticized the American educational system for not teaching phonics, we suggest that today’s instructors are missing an opportunity by not learning to read the texts of the Net Generation. Failing to recognize these texts as valuable tools in the teaching and learning process, professors dismiss an entire constellation of literacy skills.

And here is the crux of the problem:

…while N-Gens interact with the world through multimedia, online social networking, and routine multitasking, their professors tend to approach learning linearly, one task at a time, and as an individual activity that is centered largely around printed text…Not having been raised in the world of the N-Gen student, then, presents some significant challenges for faculty members who must attempt to address the needs of a learning style they have never experienced, may know little about, and may be unable to comprehend fully because of their different skills in processing information.

What I like about the article is that it attempts to make a cultural case for educators to get up to speed, not necessarily an technological one (though, obviously, the two are tied.) Learning cultures have changed:

Many faculty members developed their writing skills in a print world where text took the conventional form of paragraphs on a page or was packaged as a book or an article, a story or a novel; its production was typically conceived of as a solitary act. Consequently, their previous experiences with and understanding of text are quite different from that of the N-Gen student, which may lead to profound misunderstandings. When instructors perceive linear, print-based texts as a benchmark, the N-Gen’s texts may, at first glance, fall quite short. However, these digital texts do not necessarily lack style, coherence, or organization; they simply present meaning in ways unfamiliar to the instructor. For example, a collection of images on Flickr with authorial comments and tags certainly does not resemble the traditional essay, but the time spent on such a project, the motivation for undertaking it, and its ability to communicate meaning can certainly be equal to the investment and motivation required by the traditional essay—and the photos may actually provide more meaningful communication for their intended audience.

Whoa. I can hear the screams now. Essay writing akin to collecting images on Flickr? Even I bristle a bit on that one. But the overall point is clear: We can do this all differently now, and to not get our brains around the shifts has some real implications, specifically in the ways in which it limits us from understanding what our students create and, more importantly, helping them to create and construct with the most effect. And, as has been observed many times here and elsewhere, one of the biggest shifts is the move away from individual knowledge to distributed knowledge built on collaborative and, I would argue, network literacies that are unfamiliar to most of us. (Not to say these kids are born with them, btw.)

Let’s face it, the percentage of educators that Johnny comes into contact with K-16 who are fluent at digital texts is maybe 10%. That doesn’t mean that Johnny won’t be able to figure it out on his own. (You know others have suggested that “literacy is natural,” though I do want to probe that idea bit further at some point.) But it does mean, I think, that we’re missing an opportunity to help Johnny make even more of his digital potential. And I’ll ask you, if you had the chance for your own children to have 100% of their teachers who understand these shifts, wouldn’t you want them to? I know I would. Doesn’t mean that we make everything that happens in the classroom digital or Web 2.0 or whatever else. There are plenty of things worth doing the way we’ve been doing them for a long while. But for my kids to have teachers who don’t have a choice in the matter because they just “don’t get” digital environments is unacceptable.