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.

Assessing Online Reading Comprehension

Internet is the place where people use do find information nowadays. We use internet to do many different things, as getting general or specific information about a topic, shopping, planning trips, communicating, and an endless list of other activities. Very frequently, “online reading comprehension is specifically focused to solve a particular problem or answer a particular question” (Leu et al., 2013, p. 222). This inquiry-based activity, that is recurrent at the Internet, requires some skills as

•  Identifying important problems

•  Locating useful information related to the problems that are identified

•  Critically evaluating information that is found, often online

•  Synthesizing multiple sources of online information and evaluating arguments to determine a solution

•  Communicating effectively to others with digital technologies

•  Monitoring and evaluating the results of decisions, modifying these as needed (Leu et al., 2013, p.221)

It also demands new kills and strategies, as the ones involved in the process of generating a key word entry in a search engine, and monitoring the search process, for instance.

We need to prepare our students to be autonomous learners, to work collaboratively and to create new knowledge. This requires being a good online reader, which means that teachers need to prepare their students to deal efficiently with multiple source material, evaluating the source as well as the quality of the information, logically integrating this material, understanding the different perspectives and point of view they convey, building their own position, finding evidence to support this position and rejecting different ones.

The ORCA Project measures the main competences involved in online reading: locating, evaluating and synthesizing information and it still assess how the students communicate. This project already presented very rich results that will certainly be “useful in helping teachers and parents see and understand the types of higher level thinking and the types of literacy practices that are important to online research and comprehension. […] Good instruction depends on knowing what students can do and what they have difficulty doing.” (Leu et al., 2013, p. 232).

Besides detecting the skills students’ have already developed, as well as the ones they still need to develop, this project created and validated a methodology of online comprehension assessment that can be used or inspire teachers to create their own assessments that they can use in their classes to evaluate or to scaffold the students.

I am still not comfortable with the claim that online reading requires “even greater amounts of higher level thinking than offline reading” (Leu et al., 2013, p. 224). High-level thinking happens during reading in different scales, depending on the reader, on the purpose of the reading task, among other aspects. However, the argument that the Internet is “a context in which anyone may publish anything” is a strong one and we cannot deny that critical evaluation of the material is especially important in this case. I would rephrase it, though, by saying that online reading does not require higher level thinking in general in comparison to offline reading, but that it requires a special attention to the evaluation of the credibility of the source, reliability of the author, as well as the accuracy of the information.

Considering the amount of information available as well as the facility of access to this information, it might be the case that online readers needs to deal more often with information from multiple sources, that might be conflicting, complementary, compatible or even exactly the same. This will also require the use of high-level reading and thinking skills.

At our research at FALE/UFMG, we have been using think-aloud protocols to understand the process, followed by comprehension questions to measure understanding of the information, and interviews to verify aspects related to the process and to the ‘product’ (comprehension). Although it is useful and efficient as a research methodology, it involves a lot of work and is time consuming. This would not work in a large-scale assessment.

I like the idea of treating online reading assessment as part of the school routine, as proposed by Coiro & Castek (2010).

As online literacy practices become more prominent in schools, it is critical that educators move beyond thinking about digital assessment as isolated tests and view these more as authentic opportunities for students to practice and apply the skills, knowledge, and dispositions they will need as readers and writers in a digital age. (p. 316)

According to Coiro & Castek (2010) classroom language arts assessment situations should incorporate

a) Authentic (real world) multidisciplinary problems to solve. Those problems would encourage collaborative work, inquiry-based investigation and considering diverse perspectives.

b) Digital communication tools, allowing the students to develop skills to communicate both in non-standard writing forms as well as in standard writing (eg.: texting and academic writing), using the adequate language for each different purpose, audience and context.

c) Digital scaffolds to help students deal with their particular needs. "Multimedia enhancements such as text-to-speech reading aids, annotation tools, scaffolds for summarizing, synthesizing, and reflection” (p. 317), are suggested as a way to reduce the chance that decoding and language differences impair learning.

This view of online assessment would be difficult to hold in a large-scale assessment, but, in my opinion, it is the example schools should follow.

References

Coiro, J. & Castek, J. (2010). Assessment frameworks for teaching and learning English language arts in a digital age. In D. Lapp & D. Fisher (Eds.), The Handbook of Research on Teaching The English Language Arts, Third Edition (pp. 314-321).International Reading Association and The National Council of Teachers of English.New York, NY: Routledge.

Leu, D.J., Forzani, E., Burlingame, C., Kulikowich, J. Sedransk, N., Coiro, J., & Kennedy, C. (2013). The new literacies of online research and comprehension: Assessing and preparing students for the 21st century with common core state standards. In Neuman, S. B. & Gambrell, L.B. (Eds.), Massey, C. (Assoc. Ed.). Reading instruction in the age of common core standards, (pp. 219-236). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Serious Online Reading

My comments on:

Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say

Michael Rosenwald (reporter), Washington Post

April, 6^th, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/serious-reading-takes-a-hit-from-online-scanning-and-skimming-researchers-say/2014/04/06/088028d2-b5d2-11e3-b899-20667de76985_story.html

Books like The Shallows (Carr, 2011), the cult of the amateur (Keen, 2007) and newspapers articles like this one at Washington Post, raise the problem of attention span and reading abilities. I believe that we need to think about those problems, not to blame Internet and computers, but to find ways to help people that face this difficulty to concentrate while reading longer texts.

I already wrote about the Carr's and Keen’s texts and now I will concentrate on this newspaper article written by Rosenwald, and the comments left by the readers on the website.

By the title, we can clearly understand the author’s main claim: Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say. This title presents an already classic dichotomy that online reading is not serious and is only superficial reading, in contrast to print reading that is deep and serious. This is a premise that we need to consider a lot before buying. I wonder if this shallow reading would lead us to revolutions as the ones we had in Brazil before and during the Confederations’ Soccer Cup, and the Arab Spring, for example.

We have access to a lot of information now, and we certainly use some strategies to cope with it. As Julie Coiro says, “we need skip a lot of text”, we need to know what and why to read the parts of texts we select to read. Now we do not only have the textbook as a source of information, but we have a huge library with far more information than a human brain can even think of reading in a lifetime. That is why we need to browse, select, and evaluate information. We need to navigate to select pertinent (accurate, reliable, and relevant) information and read. I mean read, stricto sensu, read and build a mental representation of the texts, being able to grasp the authors’ main claim, to retell the main ideas, to make inferences to build and enrich meaning, to connect those ideas with your own experiences and knowledge, to make a judgment of this information, and so on.

The article starts with the following story:

“Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won’t commit to.

“I give it a few seconds — not even minutes — and then I’m moving again,” says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University.”

My question is whether what she is doing is reading or only browsing (casual looking). I seriously suspect that what is happening to Claire is that she is only browsing, as we browse magazines at the beauty shop to relax, to keep up with some gossip about celebrities and keep up with the new fashion trends (nothing against that at all!).

There is no problem in browsing effortlessly. The problem seems to show up when the reader does not develop other reading strategies or skills, or when he uses the same strategy to read all the texts in every single situation, as Claire seems to do:

“But it’s not just online anymore. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel.

“It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.””

This is a crucial aspect of reading. Different texts are usually read with different purposes. Different purposes lead to different approaches to the text and result in different understanding. It is interesting that Claire monitors her reading. She realizes that she is not using an efficient reading strategy for that purpose and try again.

This makes me think of how important it is to show the students different approaches to texts in different situations and how to monitor the reading process.

About the classics, what I can say is that people always had problems reading the classics! But kids do not have many problems reading Harry Potter, a modern classic. Some texts are more challenging than others and the readers’ motivation is a very strong variable.

One of the solutions that Rosenwald presents in the article is the idea of a “bi-literate brain”  We do not need to have a bi-literate brain, we need to develop a poly-literate brain. The idea of bi-literate brain brings back the dichotomy between print and digital, screen and paper, and all the prejudice that comes with this division, one is good whereas the other is bad, one is deep while the other is shallow, among others. Deep or shallow is a matter of effort.

We cannot read deeply without putting effort in this act, which means thinking, questioning, evaluating, connecting, comparing, finding evidences, among others. Reading thoughtfully requires cognitive effort.

This does not mean that online reading is always effortless. Oftentimes we need to navigate, monitoring the research process, selecting judiciously the information and reading it carefully in order to satisfactorily accomplish the task. Likewise, we can just browse printed texts.

The comments readers wrote about this article are also very interesting and vary from some people saying that they are facing this problem of lack of attention or patience when reading longer texts, and other people making very interesting and evaluations of the text. Most of the comments show some degree of dissonance or controversy. Those comments show clearly that people are not only browsing the Internet. Many people read deeply and discuss the information that interest them.

Here are some examples extracted from the 236 comments I found by the time I read the article.

KRoyall1 4/7/2014 8:29 PM EDT

I can attest to this. My backlog of unread books is bigger than ever because I don't have the patience for them.

Learning Activist 8:12 AM EDT

"This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia."

Two problems here. 1 - There isn't any 'deep reading circuitry' in our brains. 2 - The word 'developed', like so many words, misdirects our attention away from recognizing the role of 'learning'. The difference between the brains of people 'several millennia ago' and today, with respect to 'reading' is a learned not an evolved difference. There is no evidence for an evolved difference in our brains with respect to reading. Adding to that, learning to read early alphabets (Hebrew, Greek) was much simpler/easier than learning to read English today. The way we read (or read up till recently) is only a few hundred years old.

annandoc1 7:13 AM EDT

I agree with all that, but as an avid print reader all my life...I'm 65....I have to say, Henry James was a challenge long before computers were even invented!

Cogscientist 1:25 AM EDT

This article really has little to do with neuroscience or about the brain directly. It is about behavior, learned behavior or habits. Considerable research has shown that the reading of text on computers is significantly slower than the reading of the same text in a traditional format. One reason for this is simply much lower contrast, which slows perceptual processes. A consequence is preference for shorter and less complex texts in computer presentations. Skimming has always been a distinct skill from normal reading even when using conventional printed texts. It has its uses.  It is quite possible that students today are less capable of reading and understanding complex syntax. My mother, who taught honors English classes in Fairfax County, complained that this seemed to be the case long before reading texts on computers could have been a factor. A more likely explanation might be the extent to which TV replaced the reading of literature as a source of entertainment, so that even the best of students had considerably less practice reading sophisticated literature than was once the case. Perhaps the truest point in this article is that reading is too recent a phenomenon to have had significant impact on human evolution, so we are talking about variation in learned skills in varied and changing environments. Although we assume that these learned skills involve changes in the brain, we are still unable to determine exactly what those changes might be. References to neuroscience and the brain are just spurious attempts at gaining greater authority for anecdotal opinions

ThaddeusSKaczorJr 4/7/2014 7:59 PM EDT

I have been reading books, newspapers and cereal boxes for nearly 50 years. I also have been an early adapter of technology. This 'new' way of reading was taught to me about 40 years ago- it's called 'Speed Reading'. I find I can still switch between modes even in my advanced decrepitude, so if a younger person (or persons) has trouble doing so, it should not be extrapolated that a majority, minority or even more than a few people are having this problem. Correlation is not Causation, and a VERY large sample size and much lengthy research would be needed to prove (if possible) the wild and wide-ranging assertions put forth in this article.

The cult of the amateur. Is Internet really killing our culture?

Keen, Andrew. The cult of the amateur: how today’s internet is killing our culture. New York: Currency Books, 2007.

In the book “the cult of the amateur: how today’s internet is killing our culture” Andrew Keen show us his pessimistic perspective of the Internet.

According to Keen, the Internet is destroying music, media, economy and people, in special the professionals. In a very biased way, he tells us stories about huge music shops, music recorders and newspapers that went out of the business. Although in the very last few pages of the book he envisions a way in which the Internet can be good, matching professionals and the web, during the whole book he sticks to the point that the Internet is very bad for all of us.

One of the main points he defends in the first half of the book is that Internet gives a lot of credit to amateurs, leaving professionals behind or out or work.

According to him only professionals should write and publish news, only professionals should play, record and publish music, because everything that is done by non-professionals is not good, or is junk. This is a very strange idea if we consider all the great things many amateurs do and share on the Internet (or not). (Without even touching the matter of what being a professional means).

Media is biased, we know that professionals most of the times have to follow the news agencies agendas and political line, and are not free do write and express exactly what they know or think. Besides that, we cannot think that all professionals have always good intentions and disseminate the news in an objective and impartial way. There is no such impartiality and objectivity when communication is concerned.

If we consider the Arab Spring and movements like what we saw in Brazil during the confederations’ soccer cup, we will see very clearly that amateurs are not sharing only silly and low culture at social networks, they are exchanging information, they are discussing their rights and exercising their power as critical, conscious and active citizens.

Wikipedia may not be perfect, but if you think it is not good, the idea is that you should go there and help to make it better. Complain without acting is not a welcome behavior. If is not correct, fix it.

Pedophilia, pornography, gambling, crimes and many other problems the author attributes to internet have always been part of the human history. Internet is not introducing it. And, of course, we need to find ways to avoid that those things destroy or spoil the life of many people. Education for digital times must alert people, including students of all ages about security at the internet as well.

Keen talks about the Internet as being guilty for many social and cultural problems we face, without mentioning all the good things it brings to us. I could mention many good reasons to give all support to the Internet and free access to culture, but I will mention only online education that is increasing and proving to be a very trustable and honest way to improve the education of many students in many countries.

I do not mean to say and I do not believe that Internet includes only good things, as well as I do not believe that CDs, books, newspapers, movies produced by professionals are always good. We have good and bad materials in both worlds. All we need now is a very good educational system that includes the digital universe not only to have the students produce quality materials to share, as well as to make them very good and critical readers of the multimodal texts that circulate on the Internet and outside of it under the chancel or seal of famous publishers or brands.

In a very pessimistic or even apocalyptic view of Internet 2.0, and in a very elitist perspective, Andrew Keen, talks about the Internet using an aggressive ironic language, blaming the Internet for all kinds of problems we face as individuals and as a society. It is worth saying that those problems belong to the humanity for hundreds or thousands of years and they are not the computers fault.

Keen closes one of the chapters of the book called ‘moral disorder’ with the following paragraph:

From hypersexed teenagers, to identity thieves, to compulsive gamblers and addicts of all stripes, the moral fabric of our society is being unraveled by Web 2.0. I seduces us into acting on our most deviant instincts and allows us to succumb to our most destructive vices. And it is corroding and corrupting the values we share as a nation.” (p.163).

According to Keen, Paul Simon said that “We’re going to 2.0” (p. 113), and added “Like it or not, that is what is going to happen”(p.113). That is exactly the point. It is not worth it to complain and blame the computer and the Internet 2.0 for all our problems. Internet changed our world, challenged economy as well as many professions and jobs. It is forcing our creativity and having many people, professionals and entrepreneurs to adapt their business and life style to a different society in certain aspects. It also created, and is still creating, many other hobbies, jobs and professions. It gives voice to many people, it distributes information and knowledge to many people. This is our new chance to offer society similar opportunities to learn by giving access to information and culture that is not only produced for and by the aristocracy.

However as it usually happens with most novelties, we need to find the best way to use it. We need to help people to deal with it in the best and most fruitful way as possible. One of the ways to do that is preparing good and critical readers of online texts.