Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

What to Do With the Web

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What I find interesting about this longish, “the-Web-causes-all-sorts-of-problems” article in the New York Times  titled “Texts Without Context” is a) that a lot of it resonates, but b) that there aren’t any solutions offered. Basically, if you pick through the many references and quotes in the article, you can make a long list of what’s wrong with the whole social media/Interent thing, bullet points like:

  • Copyright and intellectual property are no longer respected
  • Plagiarism is rampant
  • Originality and imagination are being lost
  • We are losing our ability to think deeply and creatively
  • We now just want immediate gratification
  • Information overload
  • Further polarization of political views
  • A loss of the ability to read extended texts
  • An impatience with nuance
  • A loss of focus in a world of distraction
  • The sense of immature entitlement on the part of social media users
  • Decrease in overall quality of work
  • “Cyberbalkanization” or a growing comfort in the echo chamber
  • Loss of serendipity
  • Loss of an objective reality (i.e. the debate over climate change)
  • The end of authorship
  • Groupthink
  • Etc.

As I said, I really can get to much of this, though I’m not sure these shifts are necessarily worse as much as they represent simply a different way of doing things. But it seems that while we lament all of these “problems” we offer few if any solutions. Are we to pull the plug on the Web? Should we just treat it like some dangerous drug and “Just Say No”? What do we do?

I’m thinking none of this stuff is going away any time soon, and that if we are really concerned about these perceived negative shifts, we’d better start teaching kids to deal with them, right? All the hand-wringing in the world isn’t going to make them better or make them go away. Maybe we can use these as starting points for developing skills and literacies and habits in kids that they’ll need to maintain a healthy relationship with the Web, the same types of skills and habits we need to develop in ourselves. If we do that, we have to start early, with our youngest kids, and we have to make it a part of every curriculum, not just a unit in English class.

Wondering what on that list resonates with you, feels most challenging to you, and what you think we should do (if anything) about it.

The Web as a "Vicious Group Hunt"

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For all of its amazing potential for good, here is a sobering reminder of what else the Web is good for, namely preying on people and causing horrible havoc.

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

It’s a pretty unsettling picture of a Web where it seems if anyone really wants to, they can seriously mess with your life for no other reason than simply because they can. It cites the whole Kathy Sierra (who was Tweeting about the article) affair as well as some of the more headline-y stories that have occurred in the past few years. And while the article suggests that this type of behavior is not yet of a degree large enough to threaten the greater good, it is something we need to be cognizant of.

That the Internet is now capacious enough to host an entire subculture of users who enjoy undermining its founding values is yet another symptom of its phenomenal success. It may not be a bad thing that the least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity where the malice is usually intramural. But how do we deal with…the possibility of real harm being inflicted on strangers?

And, as I was thinking as I read through the article, can we mitigate the extent of those cases by better teaching about social networks and literacies in our schools? I know that on a basic level, none of these behaviors are new, that we’ve always had the ability and, for some, the desire to terrorize one another. It’s the scale thing, again, and the ways in which it’s so much easier to connect to other people and do the terrorizing with them, together, from afar. But I do wonder if we don’t make it worse as a system when we choose to filter and forget the bad parts (and in many cases, the good parts) of the Web with our students.

Kids Prefer Reading Online…

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So the unending debate over whether or not reading on the Internet is “really” reading gets played out  once again in this New York Times piece titled “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” It’s the story of a “typical” family where the kids are online some six hours a day reading and writing at FanFiction.net among other places. There’s not too much hand wringing on the part of the parents, however, who say things like “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

Sigh.

So here’s the crux of the debate:

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.

Kudos to the “experts” who note the difference with reading online:

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…In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.

So here is the interesting question for me: do we need to teach online reading? Some think not:

Some simply argue that reading on the Internet is not something that needs to be tested — or taught. “Nobody has taught a single kid to text message,” said Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English and a member of the testing guidelines committee. “Kids are smart. When they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.”

Don’t they? I think they do. I think that we have to help our kids navigate online reading spaces and provide an appropriate balance between print and digital environments. I think we have to help kids process and track and organized the things that they read, teach them to respond in effective ways, teach them to interact and become participants in the process in ways that don’t restrict their passion and creativity but also give them some context for what they are doing.

Read the whole thing. All in all, it’s a pretty interesting back and forth between old readers and young, and the bottom line is that it’s obvious that’s it’s something we need to be thinking of as we think about reading curricula and pedagogy.

(Photo “what am i reading?” by jamelah.)

Required Reading on Reading

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Nick Carr has a highly thought provoking piece in the Atlantic this month titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that raises some challenging questions about what the Web is doing to our reading skills and to our intellects. As with many of these types of pieces, it’s really hard not to read this through the lens of what this means for our teaching and our curriculum, and I think there is little doubt it means a lot. Carr actually makes several similar points to Mark Bauerline in “The Dumbest Generation” (which I’m almost finished with, btw) with the difference that I honestly think he wants us to think deeply about what all of this means. (Bauerline just wants to call names and toss around blame, for the most part.)

Let me say that Carr’s description of how his own reading habits have changed resonate deeply:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Describes me to a tee, though I have to say there are still longer works (Shirky’s book most recently) that I find hard to put down. But the denser stuff, Wealth of Networks, for one example, I find tough any more. And there are some prominent edbloggers who I simply don’t read because of the length of their posts. In many ways, my own angst about this is why I am so thrilled that my own kids are reading books, that they are at least getting a sense of that extended, deep reading that longer works provide, even though I know that once they start really reading more online, that may change.

While there is little research to clearly paint a picture of what is going on in our heads, something is most definitely afoot. Carr cites a study that says

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

(Read the comment thread to my earlier post to get a sense of that debate.)

There’s more that’s equally compelling in terms of making the case that in all likelihood, the Web is changing the way we read. But the obvious question here is, what are the implications for us as educators whose students are reading more and more in online environments? I’m not suggesting that this type of reading is necessarily better or worse than our pre-Web worlds. I don’t think Carr is either; in fact he takes pains to point to moments in history when new technologies were created and roundly denounced only to see great gains in ways few could have predicted. Perhaps this is a step in our evolution as thinkers and learners. Who knows? But what I do know is that very few schools are thinking deeply about what this all means in terms of reading development and practice.

Maybe this article will jump start some conversations.

(Photo “Day 79-Focus” by Margolove.)