Remember the last new book you sat down to enjoy? Remember the feel of the crisp, uncreased paper and the crack of the spine as you opened to chapter one?

Fewer kindergarten through 12th-grade students are embracing this type of traditional literary experience. That doesn’t mean they aren’t literate, however. Instead they are adapting their reading and writing to the tools available — digital technologies such as blogs, instant messaging (IM), or social networking sites — for correspondence and for gathering and sharing information.

“Kids today live in a whole new paradigm. The media-sphere they occupy has changed the way they perceive themselves and the tools they use to learn and communicate. They don’t choose to do it. It’s just what is,” said David O’Brien, a professor in the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development department of curriculum and instruction.

This so-called “media-sphere” refers to a brave new world of communications built primarily around Web 2.0 technologies — technologies which allow users to go beyond simply accessing information and relying on programmers to create Internet content, to composing their own information. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia collaboratively written by anyone who wants to contribute and Web-logs (blogs) are two of the better-known examples.

“With Web 2.0 we go beyond passively responding to Web content,” said University of Minnesota curriculum and instruction professor Richard Beach. “Now we interact with the text and create our own text.”

Find the complete story in the Sept. 27 Independent Review.
Source: Brigitt Martin, U of M News Wire