Vision Statement for Teaching and Learning Online Reading Comprehension

My Beliefs About Reading On The Internet – What counts as online reading comprehension?

I believe that reading today means to understand different written textual genres in different supports, environments and formats. When I say written I am not discarding other languages, but emphasizing the importance of the presence of the written verbal language to characterize the process as reading (stricto sensu), knowing that, inevitably, it will be surrounded by other semiotic resources. “All texts are multimodal. Language always takes place with other semiotic modes and is embedded in them” (free translation from Portuguese, Kress & van Leuween, 1998, p. 186)

Reading online involves reading texts in digital environments. This activity includes accessing and understanding the information, which includes many skills that can be condensed in the following categories (based on Coiro & Dobbler, 2007, Jenkins, 2009, Goldman et al., 2012, Kingsley & Tancock, 2013):

      Finding and accessing information

      Selecting the most appropriate ones for the task or reading aim

      Read and understand – built meaning from the text

      Make connection among the texts or fragment of texts read

      Built a coherent representation with the information found.

All those skills involve constant evaluation of the information, and monitoring of the reading process.

Coiro & Dobler (2007)  point out “the intricacies of rapidly integrating a physical process of clicking the mouse, dragging scroll bars, rolling over dynamic images, and navigating pop-up menus that intertwines with a cognitive process of planning, predicting, monitoring, and evaluating” (p.242), that make online reading so unique.

Reading on the internet involves social and individual skills, social and cognitive aspects. The context and the knowledge that “a reader brings to a text (even if the text is a grocery store) helps to shape the kind of meaning that is made and negotiated. Here, a reader's experiences, background knowledge, and sociocultural identity are as important (if not more so) as the decontextualized cognitive skills necessary to decipher a text." (Hammerberg, 2004 p. 651). Although I disagree that a grocery store is a text – I believe it is the context (van Dijk, 1977) –the social and pragmatic aspects of the communication act plays a fundamental role at understanding.

On the other hand, cognitive skills is also very important to allow the construction of meaning from written texts. According to Coiro e Dobler (2007, p. 217) reading online requires “new comprehension skills, strategies, and dispositions” and involve generating questions, locating, evaluating, synthesizing, and communicating information on the Internet.

In sum, reading involves making meaning from the written code as well as analyzing critically the texts social function.

My Emerging Beliefs About Teaching Reading on the Internet – How should online reading comprehension be taught? 

Two approaches of teaching online reading that go in different direction, but might get into a similar result are (1) the ones that first models to the students and them let the student do by themselves; and  (2) the ones in which the students are given (or create) a question or a problem to solve, and help is offered by the teacher during the process, or metacognitive analysis of the process is made at a latter point of the work or after it.

One example of the first king of approach is the Internet Reciprocal Teaching (IRT) Model (Leu et al., 2008). This approach starts with the teacher modeling and thinking aloud to show the students how they are supposed to behave as readers. Kingsley & Tancock (2013, p. 391) point out that reading research shows that “teacher modeling followed by collaborative inquiry tasks proved to be a successful instructional framework for Internet instruction (Castek, 2008;  Kingsley, 2011;  Leu & Reinking, 2010)”.

The other approach would be based on a constructionist or constructivist view of learning as Papert (1993) and Ferreiro and Teberosky (1979), respectively, propose for instance. In these perspectives, given a task the student needs to find ways to solve the problem by himself of with other students. The teacher’s role is help the students when they need.

I believe that there is not only way to teach online reading comprehension. Mixing different approaches will certainly be beneficial for the students, because they will be able to choose the ways that best fits them, among a range of options that the teacher showed them. So, blending teacher modeling and scaffolding what the students are expected to do, as well as working with a more constructionist approach of learning might bring good results.

Given all the possibilities that the Internet offers us, to teach reading on the internet should involve different practices, using different software and apps, authentic material and real situations. The vast amount of information we have available, enables a rich and productive use of the inquiry process as a learning tool. This is a way to help students learn to learn so that they will be able to do it in their personal and professional lives, adapting to the changes and challenges introduced by the modes of production and the technology, that are constantly changing.

“Internet inquiry involves curiosity, which leads students to search, scan, and ultimately seek to find an answer to their inquiring minds” (Kingsley & Tancock, 2013). An Internet based inquiry in a participatory culture (Jenkins, 2009), can count on a “Collaborative Problem-solving” situation, in which students will work together in teams to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (Jenkins, 2009, p. 3).

In this perspective the purpose of the teacher should be to make students became motivated, fluent, and critical readers of texts (print and digital). According to Guthrie, Wigfield, & You (2012),

classroom practices and conditions that support student motivation in the classroom context are most likely to impact students’ reading competence by virtue of their effects on students’ motivations, which are then expected to increase behavioral engagement in reading, which is the proximal variable that influences cognitive competence in reading. (p. 629)

Role of the teacher, when focusing on teaching online reading, should be to promote situations that will challenge the students to learn from this huge amount of texts available at digital environments.

Personal Reflection:

Sometimes I think that I might be over estimating the value of Internet and the necessity of helping our students to be better readers so that they can fully exercise their rights as citizens of our contemporary society. However, the more I read, the more I see that there are many other teachers/researchers concerned with this and all the complexities that read, write and learn online and offline involve. 

All those reading and discussions show me that reading online amplifies the necessity of some skills as well as make important skills that were seen as lower level skills. One example is locating information. To locate information online might get much more complex than locating in a single print text. Another one is selecting information. Now we have the Library of Babel (Borges, 1941) available almost anytime, anywhere.

Internet obliges us, as teachers, to focus on higher levels skills. It is not that we did not know about those skills before (Bloom’s taxonomy is from the 50’s; and PISA’s results with the expected levels of reading are available since 2000), but they were “higher” level skills that “some people” needed to develop, now they are essential skills that everyone needs to develop.

The readings, always exploring the “different sides of the coin”, reinforces my beliefs that there is not one truth and the miraculous approach. We need to know many approaches and perspectives to have many tools available to use, and to have many lenses with which to analyze the phenomena and situations.

As far as my teaching style, I tend to be very constructionist/constructivist, in the sense that I normally give the students problems to solve, projects to develop, and I help then during the process. I must pay more attention to the moments when I can scaffold more. As I teach undergraduate and graduate students that are or will become teachers, this will work also as a way to show them how to help their own students or future students.

References

Coiro, J., Dobler, E. (2007). Exploring the online comprehension strategies used by sixth-grade skilled readers to search for and locate information on the Internet. Reading Research Quarterly, 42, 214-257. 

Coiro, J. (2003). Reading Comprehension on the Internet: Expanding our understanding of reading comprehension to encompass new literacies. The Reading Teacher, 56(5), 458-464.

Ferreiro, E., Teberosky, A. Los sistemas de escritura en el desarrollo del niño. México, Siglo XXI, 1979.

Goldman, S., Braasch, J., Wiley, J., Grassaer, A., Brodowinska, K. (2012). Comprehending and learning from Internet sources: Processing patterns of better and poorer learners. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(4), 356-381.

Guthrie, J. T., Wigfield, A., & You, W. (2012). Instructional contexts for engagement and achievement in reading. In Handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 601 634). Springer US Chicago.

Hammerberg, D. D. (2004). Comprehension instruction for socioculturally diverse classrooms: A review of what we know. Reading Teacher, 57(7), 648-661.

Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. The MIT Press.

Kingsley, T., Tancock, S. (2013). Internet Inquiry. The Reading Teacher.

Kress, G.; Van Leeuwen, T. (1998). Front Pages: (The critical) analysis of newspaper layout. In: Bell, A., Garret, Peter. (Eds.) Approaches to media discourse. Blackwell Publishing. p. 186-219.

Papert, Seymour. The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, 1993.

van Dijk, T. A. (1980). Text and context: Explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. Longman.

# 2 Reflections

DEFINING ONLINE READING COMPREHENSION 

·        How do the researchers across your three readings define online reading comprehension (or reading on the Internet)? Are there similarities and differences in their definitions?

·        How does each researcher capture what they believe to be the key features of reading on the Internet? (e.g., What tasks/measures are used?)

·        How do these definitions build on previous ideas or frameworks of offline reading comprehension that you read about earlier this semester?

·        Has much changed in the past seven years (Coiro 2007 > Kingsley & Tancock, 2014) in terms of how online reading has been defined among these researchers?

·        What theories inform the work of each researcher? Are these theories more aligned with cognitive, socio-cultural, or other perspectives of reading and literacy?

·        Do you agree with how each group of researchers define and measure online reading comprehension? Have they left anything out of their definition(s)/measure(s) that you consider important? If so, what, and why do you think your ideas are important elements of online reading comprehension?

Since Coiro & Dobler (2007), Goldman et al (2012) and Kingsley & Tancock (2013) adopt a cognitive approach emphasizing reading skills and strategies, it does not come as a surprise that they all have a similar concept of reading that view it as “an active, constructive, meaning-making process” (Coiro & Dobler, 2007, p. 217). In order to make meaning, readers need to use “strategic cognitive processes to select, organize, connect, and evaluate what they read.”  (Coiro & Dobler, 2007, p. 217) Reading online requires, besides traditional skills and strategies, new comprehension skills, strategies, and dispositions “to generate questions, and to locate, evaluate, synthesize, and communicate information on the Internet (Leu et al., 2004).” (Coiro & Dobler, 2007, p. 217). Online reading involves “using effective strategies to narrowing focus, locating information, evaluating the information for accuracy, and synthesizing it into a product that the reader can use to effectively share this information with others” (Kingsley & Tancock, 2013, p. 389).

They also agree that online reading means, inevitably, dealing with multiple texts. They claim that online reading, as emphasized by Goldman et al (2012), that it requires the construction of an integrated model, that bring together the meanings of the single texts, the connections among them and reasoning about the author, the purpose of the text, and evaluation of reliability, and its relevance to the readers’ tasks.

Online reading is seen as an inquiry task in which it is important to have a question, to know how to look for information in multiple texts, to monitor comprehension and navigation, to evaluate the sources of information and to integrate relevant information for the task.

Because reading online requires dealing with multiple and multimodal texts, in a rich, diverse and dynamic environment, these authors claim that it is more complex than print reading (pegar uma frase da coiro).

According to Goldman et al (2012), “coordinating among these many processes of navigation, selection, evaluation, connection, and monitoring increases the need for self-regulation skills” (p. 356)

Coiro & Dobler (2007) develop a research informed by three different, but complementary, theoretical perspectives. One is a cognitive view of reading that views reading as an active meaning-making process, involving the use of a set of skills and strategies. The other one is the perspective of new literacies according to which “traditional reading skills are necessary, but not sufficient, to read and learn from information on the Internet.” (Coiro & Dobler, 2007, p. 217). The third one is the theory of cognitive flexibility (Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson, & Coulson, 1991). “According to this perspective, open-networked information spaces such as the Internet require readers to draw from and integrate multiple knowledge structures while adapting to the rapid changes from one reading situation to the next (Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson, 2004).” (Coiro & Dobler, 2007, p. 218)

They studied the online reading comprehension strategies of skilled sixth-graders, and using think aloud-protocol to collect the data. They focused on three aspects of comprehension that are considered important from a new literacies perspective: locate, evaluate, and synthesize information.

Goldman et al (2012), by their turn, focused on the “readers need to deal with multiple sources of information, evaluate and select information that will be integrated in his mental model about the topic”.

They used the think aloud protocol methodology to understand the processing that undergraduate students engaged in a web-based inquiry task about volcanoes using multiple Internet sources. Better learners were contrasted with poorer learners. The results of this study “indicate that better learners engaged in more sense-making, self-explanation, and comprehension-monitoring processes on reliable sites as compared with unreliable sites." Besides that, “better learners also engaged in more goal-directed navigation than poorer learners” (Goldman et al, 2012, p. 356),

This work is informed by theories of comprehension and learning from multiple texts (e.g., Perfetti, Rouet, & Britt, 1999) that articulate how models of single-text comprehension (e.g., Kintsch, 1988, 1998) need to be expanded to capture the processing of multiple texts.

This is an inherently intertextual process in which multiple sources of information are juxtaposed with one another, portions are evaluated and selected, and information is integrated as part of a process of updating the expert’s mental model about the topic (Goldman, 2004; Hartman, 1995; Rouet, Favart, Britt, & Perfetti, 1997). (Goldman et al, 2012, p. 356)

Kingsley, T., & Tancock, S. (2013) tells the teachers what they could do to help students become better online readers. They “describe four important competencies needed for Internet inquiry, what they look like in the classroom, and what scaffolds are needed to guide students to use them independently” (p. 389): (1) generate high-quality inquiry topics, (2) effectively and efficiently search for information, (3) critically evaluate Internet resources, and (4) connect ideas across Internet texts.

This text has as theoretical support the new literacy studies, that include “the many facets of reading and writing required when interacting with digital texts (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2 008;  Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, Castek, & Henry, 2 013)”. Quoting Coiro & Castek (2011) they believe that online reading is primarily task based, as readers typically use the Internet to ask a question or solve a problem.

Another set of ideas that inform this work are the Commom Core State Standars, and the fact that they give emphasis on higher-level thinking and acquisition of digital literacy skills as reanding digital texts, evaluating sources, and developing a product.

CHALLENGES OF ONLINE READING COMPREHENSION 

·        What do these researchers suggest makes online reading comprehension so difficult? Do you agree/disagree?

·        What makes an online reader strategic?

·        How do more strategic online readers differ from less strategic online readers?

·        What does development have to do with strategic reading and online comprehension?

·        What instructional strategies do these researchers recommend with respect to how to teach online reading comprehension to learners of various ages?

Dificult (online reading)

These studies consider online reading comprehension more difficult than reading print texts because it requires:

higher level Internet inquiry skills as:

- generating high-quality inquiry topics,

- effectively and efficiently searching for information,

- critically evaluating Internet resources

- making integration from multiple sources / connecting ideas across Internet texts.

Facing a great amount or results in a search can be overwhelming for the students and discourage them from using a variety of sources in their inquiry (Kingsley & Tancock, 2013, p. 393).

Readers have to establish relationships among different parts of the text that are not signaled in the text, so readers must infer and construct them (Goldman et al, 2012, p. 356)

Students are not very critical in relation to the information they find. They “typically believe anything published on the Internet must be considered valid and reliable (Kingsley, & Tancock, 2013, p. 395).

Strategic reader

According to Coiro & Dobler (2007), skilled readers employ a range of integrative processes to aid their comprehension of text. These processes have as key elements, four kinds of prior knowledge - prior knowledge of the topic, prior knowledge of printed informational text structures, prior knowledge of informational website structures, and prior knowledge of Web-based search engines -; inferential reasoning; self-regulation; and affective variables related to efficacy and motivation. Skilled readers are motivated, have the four kinds of prior knowledge and know how to use them, make inferences (in special forward – predictive - inferences), and monitor well the searching as well as the comprehension process.

Skilled readers plan, predict, monitor and evaluate. They are actively engaged in building comprehension and accomplishing the task as they search for information.

Goldman et al (2012), concludes that the more strategic approach of some readers “was largely based on awareness of their task, their current understanding, and assessment of what they still needed to accomplish the task” (p. 376).

# strategic and less strategic reader

The study made by Goldman et al (2012), explicitly compares strategic and less strategic learners. The results show that the better learners were more likely to go to pages on reliable sites and to return to them than poorer learners were. The better learners also more sharply distinguished between reliable sites that were worth investing meaning-making processes

Better learners showed a larger differential preference to employ self-explanation and monitoring on reliable sites. Better learners’ reasons for leaving pages reflected greater planfulness and goal-directedness than those of the poorer learners, especially on reliable sites. Finally, the information/ source evaluation comments suggest a greater tendency among the better learners to take note of information quality and credibility than the poorer learners did, while relevance seemed the primary driver of the information/source evaluations of the poorer learners (Goldman et al, 2012, p. 370).

Better learners were more strategic than the poorer learners in both how and what they read. Better learners used more monitoring and evaluation processes to determine not only what they understood from the information provided but also whether it was scientifically credible or task relevant. Although decisions to visit sites were made on a similar basis—using keywords to infer the presence of information likely to be task relevant—the patterns of processing events indicated more evaluation on the part of the better learners regarding how the information that they were looking at did or did not further their understanding of volcanoes in general and the eruption of Mt. St. Helens specifically. Decisions to continue on or seek information on other sites followed from these evaluations. (Goldman et al, 2012, p. 375).

How to teach

All those authors believe that students need instruction to develop better strategies to deal with information online, and that specific instruction help students to make better online research and improve comprehension.

According to Kingsley & Tancock (2013, p. 391) reading research shows that “teacher modeling followed by collaborative inquiry tasks proved to be a successful instructional framework for Internet instruction” (Castek, 2008;  Kingsley, 2011;  Leu & Reinking, 2010). So, they recommend the use of  Internet Reciprocal Teaching (IRT) Model (Leu et al., 2008), that can be summarized in three main steps:

• Teacher-led instruction— the teacher explicitly models the actions
• Guided collaborative practice — The students work collaboratively to solve common tasks
• Inquiry — students work to apply new knowledge of skill(s)

CONNECTIONS/IMPLICATIONS/QUESTIONS/CRITIQUES

·        What connections do you see between these ideas and things happening in your teaching/learning context? Teaching practices? Student behaviors? Classroom climates?

·        What implications do these ideas have for your work in education?

·        What questions do you have? (e.g., clarifying terms, broader applications, extended wonderings, critiques)

·        Do these ideas spark any interests for your final project?

• These ideas help me understand the necessity to teach more explicitly the strategies that skilled readers use, so that students that did not develop that skill can develop or students that did not use that strategy yet might get the benefits of using it.
• When we see reading as a cognitive process, we understand that anything is simple when reading is concerned. Learning to read is difficult, and reading is not a trivial process. Reading online might be more complex because it inevitably deals with multiple sources of information of different kinds, in a more dynamic environment, requires good searching skills, and making connections that are not explicitly signed in the text, among other skills. New environments, genres, supports, require different gestures, approaches, and bring different purposes. I think it is important to notice that online reading highlights complexities that the school system did not focused much before, such as multiple source reading, multimodal texts or different modalities and supports of texts. Even locate information, that is a basic skill, Pisa (2009) results shows that students can find information in one part of the text, but they are not good at locating information that is spread out in different parts of the same document.
• Research in Brazil usually do not separate students as poor or better learners as Goldman at al did. This discomfort provoked by those labels is explained by a social approach, which believes the problem might be the system, or the measures, and not the students’ intelligence. As Hammerberg, (2004) points out “severely labeled children are a function of an educational system that demands we identify specific cognitive traits on a continuum from low need to high need” (p 654).
• I like the idea of modeling (Kingsley & Tancock, 2013), but I think we need to be careful not to make the student depending of a model or believing that that is the only way to think or read, or that different approaches to texts are wrong.

References:

Coiro, J., & Dobler, E. (2007). Exploring the comprehension strategies used by sixth-grade skilled readers as they search for and locate information on the Internet. Reading Research Quarterly, 42, 214-257.

Goldman, S., Braasch, J., Wiley, J., Grassaer, A., Brodowinska, K. (2012). Comprehending and learning from Internet sources: Processing patterns of better and poorer learners. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(4), 356-381.

Hammerberg, D. D. (2004). Comprehension instruction for socioculturally diverse classrooms: A review of what we know. Reading Teacher, 57(7), 648-661.

Kingsley, T., & Tancock, S. (2013). Internet Inquiry. The Reading Teacher.

Thinking about the similarities and differences between new literacy studies and digital aspects of literacy from a sociocultural perspective (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003; Mills, 2010; Coiro, 2003; Leu et al, 2013)

Thinking about the similarities and differences between new literacy studies and digital aspects of literacy from a sociocultural perspective ((Lankshear & Knobel, 2003; Mills, 2010; Coiro, 2003; Leu et al, 2013)

A socio-cultural perspective brings the focus to the social and cultural aspects involved in literacy, and not “merely” consider decoding, using strategies, and building meaning as part of it.

Sociocultural theories of language and literacy are not always about reading in the traditional sense of decoding a text and extracting meaning from it. Instead, literacy, in sociocultural terms, emphasizes the social worlds and cultural identities of students and views the act of making meaning as always embedded within a social context. (Hammerberg, 2004 p.648)

According to Lankshear and Knobel (2003, p. 8) “‘Literacy bits’ do not exist apart from the social practices in which they are embedded and within which they are acquired.” So, “being literate involves much more than knowing how to operate the language system. The cultural and critical facets of knowledge          integral to being literate are considerable (p. 12).

This approach is more concerned with the social aspects of literacy, the cultural practices in which literacy takes place and how the literacy agencies (not only, nor mainly, school) act. They “regard literacy as a repertoire of changing practices for communicating purposefully in multiple social and cultural contexts. Knowledge and literacy practices are primarily seen as constructions of particular social groups, rather than attributed to individual cognition alone” (Mills, 2010, p. 247).

The New literacies perspective, on the other hand, focus the skills, the strategies, the texts and the tasks. This is a more cognitive perspective where thinking, reading, writing and building meaning from the text is considered as the main points.

The authors of this report [RAND, 2002] defined reading comprehension as “the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language” (Coiro, 2003 p. 459).

Textual and cognitive aspects of literacy are essential.

New text formats (e.g., hypertext and interactive multiple media that require new thought processes); new reader elements (e.g., new purposes or motivations, new types of background knowledge, high-level metacognitive skills); and new activities (e.g., publishing multimedia projects, verifying credibility of images, participating in online synchronous exchanges) (Coiro, 2003, p. 459).

Social activities are taken into account, not in a broad sense as in the socialcultural perspective, but as a way to promote meaning making, communication and learning.

As far as I understand, none of the perspectives ignores or rejects the importance of the aspects of the other approach. It is mainly a matter of focus.

As similarities between the two approaches, we can point the expansion of the notion of text and, consequently, the expanded notion of text. Text is not only written products, but multimodal, participatory, communicative events.

Dynamicity is also a concept that we can find in both approaches. The sociocultural approach considering literacies as something that changes “on the basis of the social and cultural context in which communication occurs”, making the notion of identity and competence fluid. (Hammerberg, 2004, p. 649). And the New Literacies considering the “deitic” aspect of the literacy, caused by the fast pace in which new technologies changes, creates new social practices and requires a redefinition of what it means to be literate (Leu at al, 2013, p. 1160)

Another similarity seems to be the idea that literacy involves active construction (reception and production) of meaning and the “use of cultural tools, symbols, texts, and ways of thinking in an active process of "meaning making and reality construction" […] To be literate in a particular setting involves specific situations, purposes, audiences, texts, and tasks. (Hammerberg, 2004, p. 651)

They also seem to agree that digital literacies are more demanding than print literacies, or demands different ways of dealing with the communicative situations it affords.

Innovative digital practices are significantly more complex and varied than traditional literacy curricula and externally imposed standardized assessments currently permit (Street, 2005b). Consequently, many features of new literacy practices remain “untapped” by standardized literacy tests: self-monitoring online reading, collaborative online writing, digital media production, critical media literacy, and hybridization of textual practices (Mills, 2010, p.  262).

Both perspectives are interesting and present very important aspects related to digital literacy. As someone that has a background in linguistics, I am more used to the new literacies approach. I need to consider social aspects, because in Brazil the sociocultural differences are very big and they have influence on text interpretations and on the readers familiarity with computers, programs and apps. However, I usually focus on the characteristics of the text, on reading skills and strategies as well as the comprehension built by the reader. The way we find to deal with sociocultural differences is to select students from the same school or people of a similar socioeconomic context, or make different groups of subjects.

For example, in some research we developed, we consider that different life experiences will lead to different interpretations, that textual genres requires a different approach, and that each reading situation (aim/purpose) requires different gestures, strategies. We mainly want to know if the readers can find information, how they deal with the interface, the design, as well as other multimodal aspects of the text, and how they build meaning based on digital texts.

References:

Coiro, J. (2003). Reading Comprehension on the Internet: Expanding our understanding of reading comprehension to encompass new literacies. The Reading Teacher, 56(5), 458-464.

Hammerberg, D. D. (2004). Comprehension instruction for socioculturally diverse classrooms: A review of what we know. Reading Teacher, 57(7), 648-661.

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2003). From ‘reading’ to ‘new literacy studies.” In New literacies: Changing knowledge in the classroom (pp. 1-22). Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Leu, D. J., Jr., Kinzer, C.K., Coiro, J., Castek, J. (2013). New literacies: A dual-level theory of the changing nature of literacy, instruction, and assessment. In R.B. Ruddell & D. Alvermann (Eds.), Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, Sixth Edition, (pp. 1150-1181). Newark, DE: International Reading Association

Mills, K. A. (2010). A review of the “digital turn” in the New Literacy Studies. Review of Educational Research, 80(2), 246-271.

MIMI ITO

Mizuko Ito is a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people in Japan and the US. She was born in Japan and is the Research Director of the Digital Media and Learning Hub at University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Her doctoral work was part of the Fifth Dimension project led by Michael Cole. She worked for many years in a research group at Keio studying mobile technology use. Recently she completed a study on digital kids and informal learning. As part of this research, she did case studies of anime fandoms in Japan and the English-speaking online world, focusing on anime music videos and fansubs. 

Mimi Ito has a large work on games and believes that socializing and playing is a side of learning and that schools can have a spirit of entertaining an playing as part of what they are doing.

She believes that the kids might use the online world, media production games as environments to develop sophisticated forms of technical and media literacy. 

Connected Learning

Connected learning is one of the projects in which Mimi Ito is involved. It is a set of principles designed to nurture the students of this century, embracing new forms of learning and technology. Those principles encourage active engagement, real problems and real needs. 

Connected learning is when you’re pursuing knowledge e expertise around something you care deeply about, and you’re supported by friends e institutions who share e recognize this common passion or purpose. 

From: http://connectedlearning.tv/infographic

Videos

In this video Mimi Ito talks about connected learning, children and learning environments. According to her we need to find ways to connect formal learning and informal learning in a more coordinated way in order to match school and life outside school, including computers and games contributing to foster kids intellectual and personal development and proactively engage students.

To understand better the idea of connected learning, watch the 5 minutes presentation of Mimi Ito at DLM 2013 - http://vimeo.com/40908737

Some Keynote Quotes

Peer-Based Learning in a Networked Age

(University of Michigan's Enriching Scholarship, 2010)

"Networked media offers an unprecedented opportunity to support learning that is highly personalized and learner-centered, driven by passionate interest and social engagement. But very few learners and educators are taking advantage of this opportunity. And the reason for this is that too often we separate the worlds of young people and adults, play and education."

"My argument is that we need to engage with kids’ peer cultures and recreational lives outside of school if we want to tap into the power that today’s networked media offers for learners."

"The technology itself has no power to transform learning. It is up to us to take that technology and do something new with it, something that doesn't just reproduce our tired old scripts. These experiments and explorations won’t succeed, spread or scale without a dedicated network of educators who are working together to build a new model for 21st century learning."

Why Social Mobile Media Matters for Broadcasters

(National Association of Broadcasters Show, 2009)

"One of the studies I did with my colleague Daisuke Okabe in Japan, and that was funded by Intel research, was a particularly good one for satisfying my nosy tendencies. We asked young urbanites and their families in Tokyo to show us what's in their bag, and then we tracked how they used their portable devices, wallets, keys, and other media as they moved around the city."

"What is so different about today's world of mobile, social media is that context matters as much as content does. And by context I mean the personal context as well as social context."

"The social is what gives meaning to media consumption, and media content is what feeds social buzz. Marketers talk about this as viral media. For kids its media that has social currency. If you see an elementary aged kid pull out his gameboy, if you see a teenager pull out her video ipod of camera phone in a social situation, you'll see a kind of flocking behavior as kids gather around the device. The media is the social glue, the common language that means you belong."

Latest Publications
 

Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World (2012)

 This book investigates how otaku, a once marginalized popular culture has come to play a major role in Japan’s identity at home and abroad. In the American context, the word otaku is best translated as “geek”—an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. Otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. This once stigmatized Japanese youth culture created its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction, comics, costumes, and remixes, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media. 

Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software (2009)

In Engineering Play, Mizuko Ito describes the transformation of the computer from a tool associated with adults and work to one linked to children, learning, and play.

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (2009)

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out investigates the intricate dynamics of youths' social and recreational use of digital media. It reports an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings -at home, in after-school programs, and in online spaces. 

Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project 

This report summarizes the results of an ambitious three-year ethnographic study into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings -- at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces. The authors view the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends but situated within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that frame the experience of youth in the United States.