How The Internet Saved Literacy
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How The Internet Saved Literacy - Forbes - 1 views
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For students in Jerome McGann’s literature seminars at the University of Virginia, to read and interpret Jenny, a poem by the 19th century British poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is to live it. McGann doesn’t require that his students show up to class dressed in 19th century garb. Instead, they must take on a role as one of the poem’s characters through an interactive Web-based software application called Ivanhoe, which McGann and his colleagues developed in 2001.
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Students are free to change their characters’ actions, add stanzas and delete others. As long as they provide substantive justification–historical and psychological–all changes to the text are justified and encouraged, says McGann. Using the software, which was developed with the help of the university’s computer scientists, students rewrite the poem and keep role journals, chronicling their journeys deep into the recesses of their characters’ minds. To play the game effectively, they must react to each other’s interpretations as well. “Collaboration is the demand laid on you by this technology,” says McGann. “Classroom work is typically solo. Ivanhoe encourages you to work interactively with others.”
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The Internet has become so pervasive that to be truly literate in 2006 demands some degree of technological fluency or at least familiarity. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 73% of American adults had used the Internet or e-mail as of March 2006. For the first time, the National Association of Adult Literacythe most wide-ranging U.S. study of literacywill test computer literacy in its 2008 survey that measures overall literacy. With such a large proportion of reading and writing taking place on the Internet, literacy has changed from a solitary pursuit into a collective one.
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“You aren’t just a consumer of text anymore,” says Margaret Mackey, a professor at the University of Alberta’s Library and Information Studies Department. Reading now demands an almost instantaneous response, whether through commenting on a blog or writing a review on Amazon . The Internet has shortened the feedback loop on writing and has made readers more active participants, says Matt Kirschenbaum, an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland. “Reading is more intimately associated with writing,” he says.
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This was not how it was supposed to have turned out. A number of studies have been released that suggested a negative correlation between Internet use and reading. Fortunately, those studies are now considered to have been unduly alarmist, according to several experts in the field. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts released a study titled “Reading at Risk” (the data was collected in 2002), saying that fewer than half of American adults read literature. “To lose this human capacity–and all the diverse benefits it fosters–impoverishes both cultural and civic life,” said the foundation chair Dana Gioia when the survey was released. The study failed to take into account whether people are actually reading more non-fiction works now.
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Indeed, despite fears that the Internet would stunt the reading of books, the sale of books has continued to trend upward over the past several years. In 2005, sales jumped 9.9%, to $25 billion, according to the Association of American Publishers.
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Internet 'speeds up decision making and brain function' - Telegraph - 0 views
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Internet 'speeds up decision making and brain function' Internet use could improve brain function and speed up decision-making, but it comes at the expense of empathy and the ability to think in abstract terms, scientists have found.
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A study of the use of areas of the brain during different activities found that it is markedly more active when carrying out an internet search than when reading a book.
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The stimulation was concentrated in the frontal, temporal and cingulate areas, which control visual imagery, decision-making and memory.
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The study's authors say it shows how our brains could evolve over the long term with the increased use of technology.
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Dr Gary Small, director of the memory and ageing research centre at the University of California, Los Angeles, said: "Young people are growing up immersed in this technology and their brains are more malleable, more plastic and changing than with older brains," he said.
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"The next generation, as (Charles) Darwin suggests, will adapt to this environment. Those who become really good at technology will have a survival advantage - they will have a higher level of economic success and their progeny will be better off."
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Participants were told to perform web searches and read books while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging scans, which record the blood flow to areas of the brain during cognitive tasks.The study found that those searching the web generated considerably more brain activity than those reading books. "A simple, everyday task like searching the web appears to enhance brain circuitry in older adults, demonstrating that our brains are sensitive and can continue to learn as we grow older," Dr Small said.
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"The study results are encouraging, that emerging computerized technologies may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle-aged and older adults. "Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function."The findings are expanded in Dr Small's book, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, and are published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
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You wouldn’t think so, however, if you consulted the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts, who, since 1982, have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading that are not only detailed but consistent. The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”
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More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen. The Department of Education found that reading skills have improved moderately among fourth and eighth graders in the past decade and a half, with the largest jump occurring just before the No Child Left Behind Act took effect, but twelfth graders seem to be taking after their elders. Their reading scores fell an average of six points between 1992 and 2005, and the share of proficient twelfth-grade readers dropped from forty per cent to thirty-five per cent. The steepest declines were in “reading for literary experience”—the kind that involves “exploring themes, events, characters, settings, and the language of literary works,” in the words of the department’s test-makers. In 1992, fifty-four per cent of twelfth graders told the Department of Education that they talked about their reading with friends at least once a week. By 2005, only thirty-seven per cent said they did.
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The erosion isn’t unique to America.
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The Ageing Brain: Neuroplasticity and Lifelong Learning | Eleonora Guglielman - Academi... - 1 views
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4. “Learn a trade or every day” Neuroplascity is linked to the concept of compeveness : if we stop exercising our mental facules we not only forget them,but the corresponding map is automacally assigned to otherfuncons that we connue to play. We could change the prov - erb “learn a trade for a rainy day” in: learn a trade for every day,and connue to pracce it regularly.
israelj
The definition of literacy is:
"ability to read and write, reading/writing proficiency;
competence or knowledge in a specified area."
Bearing this in mind, we are discussing the difference between being "literate" or able to read and write, comprehend what we are reading and convey what we wish, competently in writing.
Since our transition to the Internet, the definition of what predicates true literacy and the foundations it was raised upon have dramatically changed and are engaged in on-going evolutionary change.
Books of the past are transcribed into digital pages and cursive is in danger of extinction as a form of writing skill-something that was formally taught to every student before allowing them to graduate, for decades, perhaps even hundreds of years.
Where our emphasis has once resided, it has now changed.
We now live in a different reality that can and will broaden our minds, has been proven to provoke more mental activity than the written paper page and is in the scope of evolutionary reality.
Here is a quote from Forbes.com on "How the Internet Saved Literacy":
"A study of the use of areas of the brain during different activities found that it is markedly more active when carrying out an internet search than when reading a book.
The stimulation was concentrated in the frontal, temporal and cingulate areas, which control visual imagery, decision-making and memory.
The areas associated with abstract thinking and empathy showed virtually no increase in stimulation.
The study's authors say it shows how our brains could evolve over the long term with the increased use of technology."
"Dr Gary Small, director of the memory and ageing research centre at the University of California, Los Angeles, said: "Young people are growing up immersed in this technology and their brains are more malleable, more plastic and changing than with older brains," he said.
and,
"The next generation, as (Charles) Darwin suggests, will adapt to this environment. Those who become really good at technology will have a survival advantage - they will have a higher level of economic success and their progeny will be better off."
The brains of 24 volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76 were scanned for the study."
Simpson, A. (0039, November 24). Internet 'speeds up decision making and brain function'. The Telegraph. Retrieved May 15, 2014, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/3262597/Internet-speeds-up-decision-making-and-brain-function.html