The Future of Reading
There is nothing better on a summer day than a book in your hands. That statement will always be true. Or maybe not.
You’re reading these words on device of some kind, unless you printed them out. Amazon is selling a lot of ebooks today. Students are working through assignments online. Educators offer them online sources to read and video to view. It’s more than just convenience. When you are chasing information, the most current sources are online. The world changes too fast. Where does that leave the textbook?
Ever since high school, I’ve held onto my copy of Janson’s History of Art. In the edition I own, the timeline ends around Jackson Pollock. It’s useful if I need to know about the Venus of Willendorf and Alexander Calder. Beyond that, it’s frozen in time. It’s a wonderful, outdated book that, together with my high school volume of Shakespeare, makes for the perfect elevating experience — for my laptop. I use both to prop up my Mac when I work at a standing desk.
My volume of Shakespeare doesn’t need an update, but the shelf life of most reference books is short, shorter than ever. Educators know that students crave relevant texts — if they are going to be bothered with texts at all — and they crave agency — the freedom to make a choice about that they read and, even more on point, how they learn. These cravings are changing the nature of assigned reading. The meaning of an “authoritative voice” is changing, too. Students may be tasked with hunting down information, but they often are left on their own about where to find it, how to evaluate it, whether to believe it.
The directive Google it doesn’t always get you the facts. Google is biased about what it pulls up, skewed by popularity and advertising. Wikipedia is a moving fact target. Building a discerning sense of what is a fact and what is not is a challenge we all face, and we’re throwing it to students, too.
Stackup is a free Chrome browser extension that is working to help in two ways. First, it instantly provides a grade-level reading evaluation of any article on the web. Educators and parents can see if they are suggesting or assigning the appropriate websites. Second, the app’s founders are building a list of questionable news sites, and when you have Stackup installed and you come to one of those sites, the app alerts you with some questions to ask about it.
(Disclosure: Stackup is a client of Red Cup, my agency.)
The nature of text is changing, driving changes in the nature of reading. We will always have books. But the way we annotate, fact-check, explore, and learn is evolving.
Along with Stackup’s education director, Noah Geisel, I’ve worked through some of these ideas in a podcast called EdTech NOW. On the podcast, we’ve explored textbooks and how they might become irrelevant with Matt Miller. Noah talked about the value of using real world learning with Kelly Tenkley of Anastasis Academy. Kelly’s school and Matt’s book Ditch That Textbook are just two examples of educators pushing the envelope of what is possible in education. Jennifer Gonzalez and Valerie Lewis also added their voices to the conversation, building out a vision of learning in the 21st Century that embraces tech and puts students first. Also on the podcast, don’t miss Katrina Abston’s discussion of K-12 online schools or Alex Corbitt talking about digital texts and how can ELA teachers specifically make use of tech to teach writing.
We are launching season two of EdTech NOW. I hope you’ll join us. You can track the newest posts on SoundCloud and iTunes, or check in on our website.
