10-second review: When adolescent students use computers they are engaged and learning and empowered. When they are involved with conventional print literacy, they are not. The workplace seems to favor the adolescent students’ point of view.
Title: “Editors’ Introduction: Adolescents’ Literacy and the Promise of Digital Technology.” Mark Dressman, et al. Research in the Teaching of English (May 2009), 345-347.
Quote: "First, these studies have found that in marked contrast to conventional measures of in-school literacy which find that many adolescents struggle to read and write with efficacy, when literacy is digitized and made personally and socially empowering, adolescents become highly engaged and excel as readers and writer across a broad range of print- and image-based formats. The second point, which builds from the first, is to emphasize the stark contrast between the print-centric curriculum of conventional secondary schools and the multimodality of contemporary work place and everyday life, and to argue that in their literate practices many adolescents today seem to be anticipating and preparing for lives of work and play that leave the traditional practices of schooling far behind.”
Comment: I question the word “excel” in adolescents’ performance of reading and writing as a result of the use of digital technology. Further, if Twittering and Facebook “friends” are the face of the new office technology, I think we are in for a relapse in literacy. RayS.
No comments:
Post a Comment