Reading and Navigating

What exactly is reading online? Is reading different from navigating? Can we split those two things? Is it worth doing this? Those are some of the questions that brought me here to URI. Of course I had my hypothesis that those are different actions that are part of a bigger thing that is reading, in this case, specially, reading on the Internet. But I wanted to know if I could find strong arguments to underpin it.

We have this new and huge (but not at all intimidating) environment that brings together images, sounds, movies, animations, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, social networks, and so on. A place where everybody can publish more or less privately. And where usually a response (more or less explicit – simply visiting and returning or not to that page is already a response / others are ‘like’, leaving comments, answering, sharing) is expected from the reader.

Man have been reading for more than 4.000 years, but reading became popular in the 19th century in a very optimistic view. So, reading is an old activity with a recent story of popularization. Popularization started with Guttenberg 16^th century, but only a small part of the population read at that time. Now we have computers and much bigger number of readers. This history gave us enough time to study a lot about reading and on the 70’s and 80’s a large amount of research about reading was made in a more cognitive approach, and this gave us a good idea about skills, strategies and aspects involved in this process.

With the advent of computers and the Internet, we had to rethink about this process, because this environment brings novelties. It was treated as a revolution in the beginning. The texts had no center, no starting or ending points, reading was not a linear process anymore and the reader would also be the writer of the text – those things are very controversial, and I would dare to say that some of them are very wrong. Those are discussions that already happened way before the computers. After some time the excitement calmed down and we could see things in a more balanced way. Online reading is not so revolutionary, but has its peculiarities and one of them is the process of navigation and the almost inevitable deal with multiple sources.

At the same time, reading online requires reading: decoding, understanding, making inferences, integrating, evaluating, visualizing, criticizing – all skills that were also required by ‘traditional’ reading. Prior knowledge, context, motivation, tasks, are crucial words, no matter where reading takes place. We need to think about how the ‘traditional’ fits the online environment. What would be a new perspective of decoding and building meaning that would explain reading online and its multimodality?

We need to amplify the notion of reading so that it incorporates the new features that the online environments brings and the skills they require: as dealing with icons, windows, scroll bars, search mechanisms, images, sounds, multimedia, hypertexts, links. We need to understand how lexical access, syntactic parsing, semantic representation, integration and discourse work in this environment. We need to think of those aspects in a broader sense and not only in relation to verbal elements as words, sentences, and verbal texts only. Although, we cannot forget that verbal reading skills are essential, and that we need to establish some limits since listening to a song as well as watching a movie are not reading.

We need to consider that those digital environments also need the ‘traditional’ skills. We need to think, however, how those skills will take place here, which one will be required in a different way or time, how they will work together with the new skills or demands of this dynamic multimodal multi-source democratic place. Locate information, that was seen as an easy and superficial skill, for instance, gains a new status, and evaluation is now even more necessary than before.

We play very seriously with the idea of navigate reading and read navigating, because many times it is difficult to clearly separate one action from the other, although we see when the focus is on the aim of finding and selecting information or when it is on more deeply understanding and integrating the information found and selected. A lot of reading happens during navigation and navigation also happens while reading.

This shows that we need to help our students to be good and deep readers as well as efficient navigators in different contexts, in different supports, and for different purposes. This will require skills and strategies that are different from the ones students are normally used to deal with when using computers. Teachers need to understand those differences and help students to manage Internet for “academic” and citizenship purposes.