I recently read a post on Karen Richardson’s blog about questions surrounding reading and literacy. Then I remembered an article I read that came from one of our media specialists.
It was called Wonder Woman and was in the August 2007 edition of the School Library Journal. It describes how authors have been changing their writing to accommodate their young audiences. The audience, you see, has been impacted by digital technologies. They like choice in their reading. Which reminded me of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books.
I fear that tests will be the last part that “catches up” in education. Does it matter if they can read text? Or does it matter that they extract the content? I think it does. But we don’t stop there.
We need to ask the next question, and the next. Can they write their own text? Can they draw their own pictures? Can they develop their own multimedia? Can they “decode” the multimedia someone else has created?
I think the part scary to many will be the the to-be established fact that media in the future will de-emphasize text.
I see it in my own longing to use new services (such as Jott.com) that are voice/audio based.
I see it in my talking to teachers. “Less text, more pictures.” We were working on a brochure today, and I said “Who is going to read this?”
She said to me: “I wrote it… you don’t think people will read it?”
“Some will,” I said. “But many have now adapted a Web reading style to traditional text. Parents won’t read this brochure, there’s a sea of text. Instead, they’ll scan it.” We highlighted the main words or point in each paragraph to make them stand out. We made her brochure scannable.
The future of text may in fact be simplification. Time will tell. But the texts, albeit slowly, are changing.