Assessment 1 Blog post
Using your readings and interaction with the subject to date, develop a statement about your current knowledge and understanding of concepts and practices in digital literature environments, tools and uses, within the context of your work or professional circumstances.
As an English and French teacher for over twenty years, literature and reading are my passion and a key part of my role. I am ‘old school’ when it comes to reading preferences. I admit, I’m a book ‘smeller’ and love nothing more than holding a physical book and breathing it in. But I also understand that whilst this is my preference, a great deal of our students like both physical and digital texts. Our school, fortunately, subscribes to Wheelers ePlatform, so access to a digital and audio library is well-established. It is expensive, and we currently boast over 800 titles, but unbelievably, we experience below-average engagement with this format.
We also subscribe to some wonderful databases through EBSCO host, Brittanica online and Worldbook, yet these are also under-utilised. I have spent a good part of the last 18 months promoting these platforms, both to staff and students, as the expense has come into question when usage statistics have come under scrutiny. And then COVID happened, and all of a sudden, the engagement with these platforms skyrocketed! Fortunately, students had experienced some exposure to these through my relentless promotion, so this was a God-send. What was incredibly interesting was how the publishers we engage with to source our student texts, overnight, gave us FREE access to the digital counterparts of the physical texts we paid thousands of dollars for. Lamb acknowledges how the publishing industry ‘continues to look for ways to extend the reading experience’ (Lamb, 2011, p. 15) and this was so relevant and pertinent to my own experience.
What I did learn through COVID, however, was how much I didn’t know when it came to my knowledge of other platforms we had to learn overnight to teach our students online. It was the biggest learning curve of my life!
What I need to do more with our students, is to ensure that they can access the digital landscape with confidence, and with the necessary skills. Whilst our students, including my own children, have been born into a digital world, we can’t just assume they know how to access it effectively. We have such an important role to play in ensuring our students know how to access, critically evaluate and understand online resources (Leu et al., 2015) and this reading in module one certainly suggested great ways of incorporating such skills.
Jabr suggests that although research indicates that students who read from a screen have hampered comprehension and surveys suggest that most people still prefer paper (Jabr, 2013), I think we still need to consider our students and how they engage with digital literature, and understand how we can facilitate metacognitive learning regulation (Jabr, 2013). Digital literature and the platforms we use to access them aren’t going away, and indeed, we are going to see greater proliferation of these, whether we like it or not. I know I have to embrace these new technologies, and ensure that our students encounter their digital world with the literacies needed to navigate this online age (Leu et al., 2015). It’s an exciting time really, but with literacy being rapidly redefined and ever-evolving due to the new technologies for information and communication (Leu et al., 2015), we need to be one step ahead, somehow! Afterall, I am still one of those people who prints off her course modules and readings, because like those noted by Jabr, (2013) I find it hard to remember what I have read from a screen. I am relieved that I am not alone, but my mindset also has to shift. I think we need to listen to what our students want, but also need to take into account whether educational needs are met, in terms of purpose, functionality, accessibility, meeting curriculum needs and bearing in mind that literacy IS deictic and we need to, as teacher librarians and educators, ‘continuously rethink traditional notions of literacy’ (Leu et al., 2011, p 6).
References
Lamb, A. (2011). Reading redefined for a transmedia universe. Learning and Leading with Technology, 39(3), 12-17. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.csu.edu.au/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=67371172&site=ehost-live
Leu, D.J. et al (2011). The new literacies of online reading comprehension: Expanding the literacy and learning curriculum. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 55(1)5-14. Doi: 10.1598/JAAL.55.1.1
Jabr, F. (2013) The reading brain in the digital age: The science of paper versus screens. Scientific American, April 11. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/