Assessment 2 – Final words

What makes a good digital text, what counts as one, and what purpose do digital texts serve?

I have a question for you: How long is a piece of string?

What counts as digital text?

Theories about what constitutes ‘digital text’ or ‘digital literature’ are as diverse as the texts themselves. Is an investigative news story told in comic form, such as this one from elPeriodico [2021], any more or less a digital text than Faber’s digital edition of “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot (2022)? Who gets to decide?

Well, as teacher-librarians in a school setting, it turns out that WE get to decide – which is both awesome and daunting.

As a practitioner of more than thirty years, my overarching criteria for any text are (in no particular order): how will it support the curriculum?; how will it enhance student learning; how will learners (staff and students) access it? This applies regardless of format. With limited budgets in most school libraries, ‘bang for buck’ tends to be the overriding factor, and one that prevents teacher-librarians from purchasing many fine but expensive digital texts for their school learning communities.

“Expensive?”, I hear you say. “What’s expensive about paying $4.49 for The Going to Bed Book?! Nothing really, other than the cost of purchasing the device(s) to use it on – Mac Air from $1,899, iPad Air from $929, iPhone from $1,699; the understanding that educational pricing, distribution, and maintenance are priced differently (read that as more expensive) to personal purchases; and the knowledge of how to apply app/device management rules in an educational situation is complex – and the budgetary landscape for providing digital texts within a school changes dramatically.

In my school we have a one-to-one laptop program but there are many schools were this is beyond the financial capabilities of the school, the families, or both. It’s important to recognise that no matter how inexpensive a text may be, digital or print or other, if learners cannot access it then it has no value.

What makes a good digital text? and What purpose do digital texts serve?

The three criteria above are the starting point. I will add a fourth – how does it add value to our learning community? – and a fifth – who is the intended audience? Wheelers ePlatform for Schools, which provides ebooks and digital audiobooks, is specifically geared to an audience of emerging through to experienced readers from about Year 3 to adult. Comics Plus by Library Pass: High School subscription caters for the older age groups – Year 9 through to adult. These two subscription are provided to all in the learning community, but they particularly value-add for learners with learning differences, for example dyslexia or low literacy.

Compare your experience of reading digital texts with reading print. 

All literature has different “reading” modes. Comics read differently to picture books which read differently to non-fiction which reads differently to fiction. Digital literature is another mode of ‘reading’ as are film, photography or apps. As an enthusiastic and voracious reader, I am usually reading a print book, an ebook, and an audiobook at the same time, and interact daily with Twitter, Instagram and Facebook – and sometimes Tik-Tok – as well as following series on Netflix, Foxtel or free-to-air. Story is my life! My reading experience has always been one of discovery and reading digital literatures is just another way of reading text.

Choose the digital text you most enjoyed and discuss how you might incorporate it into a program at your institution. 

I enjoyed all three of my digital texts for different reasons, but I will definitely be trying to incorporate Bottom of the Ninth and webyarns into a creative writing unit for Year 8, which runs at the end of the year. Both texts tell a ‘story’ in a unique way. Bottom of the Ninth is technically amazing, whereas webyarns incorporates the elements of students’ daily lives in new and interesting ways. As an example of a multi-ending story, The Shootout is a great example of intertextuality and how genre can be subverted. And How to Rob a Bank feels both familiar and utterly foreign with its melding of the mundane and the criminal. LOL!

The ways that digital texts can be used, taught, read and accessed by learners are as diverse as the texts. Teacher-librarians must keep in mind the needs and limits of their learning community, as well as the quality of the text, in order to provide the best resources – digital or otherwise.

Reference List