In my checking up on the latest news on EduSpaces I discovered that it will be continuing. I had accepted its coming closure rather too quickly, having become habituated to the constant change that happens on the web. Like any near loss, the threat of EduSpaces disappearance caused me to reflect on why I value it so much. For me, as someone who values communication possibilities and is rather limited in terms of howto knowledge of technology, EduSpaces, or Elgg, as it was when I joined, taught me to blog, gave me a community and helped me understand the dynamics of social networking.

Here is what I said in the Discussion about EduSpaces closing:

• Elgg created me as a blogger, and gave me a space that I had nowhere else, a space where I could write about what fascinated me and actually receive responses that weren't blank stares and dismissals, a space where I didn't have to dumb-down my thinking and musing. I have "Friends" who feel like real friends, and I have corresponded directly with some and even met one. My sense of the world opened up because of Elgg, and I found the Community Blog structure a real help for a course I ran a number of times. (Way better than Blogger, but that's another story.)
  
  I am sad that EduSpaces, formerly called Elgg, is going. I believe it had a special space in the theoretical and practical post-secondary educational use of the web. It was ahead of its time in many aspects, especially with its distributed social network, and its educational portfolio function. In the Community blog I used for courses, students provided their pictures or images to represent themselves, which made recognizing the author of an individual post visual and easy. The ability to add files, made it useful for student work being "handed in" and for MP3s being added for oral/aural work.
  
  I am grateful to Dave and Ben, the volunteers who made it possible, and allowed me the space to grow.
  
  The only constant is change, and this seems especially true in the web world.

I am glad EduSpaces is still here; I know I would have lost contact with many of my Eduspaces 'friends'. I feel a bit guilty that I moved so soon, and that I am probably going to desert the replacement blog I set up.

Here is the link to my most recent post - http://www.commun-it.org/community/vinall/weblog/663.html - on the importance of using (and teaching students how to use) Styles when writing academic papers, and on the Innovate article on managing academic research using Zotero.

I've been thinking a lot about reading. Two friends who are in danger of losing their sight, my days facing my laptop screen, and my evenings reading books have led me to these thoughts.

I can't remember when I didn't love reading. I still have some of my well-loved early childhood books, about Dutch babies and cabbages. I don't know why I had them; my family isn't Dutch in background, but maybe they came from the Dutch family up the street that I think of when I look at these very early readers. Comics helped too. I loved my Sunday School comics with Bible stories told visually as well as with words. I collected comics when I was in grades 2, 3, and 4. I had my favorites among the ten cent ones and the fifteen cent Classics were where I first learned about British novels. I now see my love of stories revealed by the combination of words and images as part of a cultural shift towards movies, tv, online multimedia, and graphic novels.

By the time I was in grade five I was a regular at the neighbourhood library, and a delighted recipient of "A Girl of the Limberlost" and "Anne" books from my grandmother, advised, I'm sure, by my mother. My mother has told me that on family vacations I was more likely to read than to play with others my age. I can remember my delight at trading comics, at borrowing books from my grandmother's friends on summer visits, and at keeping a book going at school for after homework was completed, and another going at home. My mother called me a "bookoholic" and I certainly was in constant and anxious need of reading material. 

This paid off in school, as I used historical novels to help me understand and remember the history I studied. I loved English, both literature and composition, and that's what I studied in university. I was carefully discreet, while I was an undergrad, not to reveal my penchant for Harlequin Romances which I read to relieve stress; I could study till 9:00, then engage in two hours of undemanding reading with a guaranteed happy ending. It was less acceptable to my peers than excessive alcohol, but cheaper and more relaxing for me.

So I kept reading, and both indirectly and directy, learning about language, meaning, communication and audience needs. Teaching English as a Second Language to adult immigrants deepened my understanding and following the influence of my eventual husband led me to a broader reading path that added non-fiction and theory to my reading of high status fiction, poetry, romances and mysteries. I kept reading but I felt guilty because it was (made) clear to me that I often read when I should have been cooking, cleaning, or preparing more officiously detailed lesson plans. (My husband never denigrated my reading habits and kept feeding me book suggestions. He did, however, take over the cooking of meals, leaving me to reheating leftovers and cleaning up - a much more comfortable fit for me!)

I was lucky enough to get a job teaching in the Community College educational stream in Ontario when it was new and teachers were seen as the experts in educating and administrators as the servants of learning, there to support students and teachers. (Sadly that understanding is gone.) I got to teach students, who weren't there to study literature, poetry and fantasy short stories. My passionate belief in, and love of, the pleasure and learning that could be had from poetry and stories, plus freedom from the Canon, allowed me to teach individual student how to find what appealed to them, how to recognize and follow their own taste. We had a collection of Canadian poetry as a text, and half the poems looked at in class came from there, the other half were chosen by the students from any source including music lyrics, which we often played in class. I believed then and still believe, that people reading and thinking about poems that 'speak' to them is more important than knowing which poems they "should" like.

I also believe that studying the Canon and knowing about poetic forms and figures are essential for effective teaching. The way I avoided teaching "should" and "taste" was to teach forms and figures, with poems as examples. The students had to find poems, with, say, rhyme, and point out where the rhymen was and how it added to the meaning, or metaphor, or alliteration etc. I taught structure. With the fantasy short stories, I taught structure too, and figures, and Greek & Roman mythology and other reference sources. I believed I was passing on our literate culture and, by trying to help students understand the meaning and the sources of stories, that I was helping them learn to get pleasure and learning from stories.

I also taught business writing. And I loved trying to get information clearly presented in the right structure. The memo form held delight for me because of its clarity and formal structure; I could teach the form and even those who struggled with English could learn to use the form and present information clearly. The business report was an expanded version of the memo and teaching this pragmatic form of writing, the one more honoured in our culture and my institution, gave me a sense of usefulness and self-esteem.

It will come as no surprise, then, that after I started reading educational theory and pedagogical theories on how people learned to write, I began to focus on how people learn to read. I loved reading about the research and theories on learning writing, but I noticed that many other teachers of writing wanted the condensed version, or even the Coles Notes version; they didn't want to engage in a lot of reading. I could understand why. When someone writes, it's visible and there's a set of rules so you can point out what is wrong. (I'm not discussing how effective that is, or rather isn't, as a teaching approach.  I'm just pointing out how accessible writing is.) teaching people to read, on the other hand, is much more complex for a variety of reasons.

When I read, it happens inside my head; nobody can see that activity. All they can see is that I'm looking at a page with text on it. I can be asked questions about what someone else thinks I should have got out of the text, but all that does is show whether I managed to read it the same way the tester did. Five minutes in any bookclub will make it clear that there is no identical replication of meaning in everybody's head, even though they are reading identically repicated text in identical books. We all read from our own context, and weave the words in front of us through our own mental and emotional landscapes, reaching our own unique understandings. This is true for factual material as well as fiction, as anyone who has ever read a textbook can attest.

I had already got this far when I went back to school to get my M.Ed. I ended up writing a QRP (Qualifying Research Paper - sort of a Masters thesis) on reading, my longest, deepest mental/emotional passion, hobby and professional skill. I called it, Seeking Signs of How to Live: a Woman's Web of Reading, and got both pleasure and learning from it. I discovered theories about reading that I had developed my own version of, and theories that broadened my understanding. I came to recognize that reading was a phenomenolgical as well as a mental/emotional experience. The size and smell of a book, the feel of the paper, the shape of the font, even the physical reading space and their personal reading history, all influenced the reader. 

All the while, an almost invisible denial was about to push itself into my understanding. I had had students whom I was pretty sure were illiterate or close to illiterate. One of them never read the story we were studying before class, but was the fastest in the class at recognizing metaphors and references when the story was read aloud. He couldn't read visually, but he could read aurally. He could hear and understand. At Christmas he was gone, so I never learned any more about him, and his reading problem. I encountered many others, and came to believe that many of them were very bright, but there was some blockage when it came to recognizing letters and words on paper. I knew through my brother's experience, that it could be eyesight, but glasses, I believed, were the answer to that. 

I had discovered, when I was a university student working one summer for an insurance company that used a numbering system for their files, that my eyes did weird things. The third time we had to pull the files to get back into a correct order, I went to see an optomatrist.  My eyes sometimes reversed numbers, so I would 'see' "1 2 4 3 5" rather than what was actually there: "1 2 3 4 5". I took this as a minor problem that partially explained my struggles with spelling, and didn't worry about it. When my daughter was struggling in the early grades, we had her tested, and discovered she was dyslexic. I began to read about dyslexia (irony intended) and came to realize that the identically printed pages of books were being read by eyes that didn't see in identical manners.

We all see the text differently and we all read the text from different positions, different background knowledge and life experiences. And these differences have been exacerbated by the rapidly changing communication environment, which includes different surfaces and environments for reading, different purposes, different audiences, different expectations and different possibilities. Everybody, but especially teachers, need to look at what we know about how people read and what possibilities are available to us in this era where the computer-based environment has become dominant.

More soon. 

 

In my last post I laid out my personal background in terms of my reading experiences and observations. I love reading, but I believe we are in a radically changing reading environment. I see different kinds of reading as falling into one of three major categories:

• lyric reading;
• useful reading; and
• faux reading.

Lyric reading, like singing, entangles the whole person in its meaning. Useful reading is informational  and a requirement for specific tasks and accomplishments. Faux reading is the recognition of words used in an isolated and semantically meaningless way as indicators or symbols, seen in ads, commercials, some art, and traffic signs. All require word-recognition, useful and lyric reading require knowing how to decode the text, but only with lyric reading is the reader fully immersed in the text.

(BTW I am using the term "text" to refer to letter symbols combined into words on paper or a screen. Although many use the term "text" to refer to any kind of recorded material, visual image(s) or aural works, I am using it in the traditional meaning of written words formed into a meaningful whole.)

I love what I call lyric reading, where an author has written a beautifully, organically flowing text where I can ride on the text through the story or thoughts. It's a rich intellectual and emotional experience. At the end of such a read, usually in a book, I am left exhilarated, thrilled, and excited. Or sometimes with an almost frightening addictive hunger for more of the same. And, occasionally, violently angry or devastated.

The dark side of lyric reading is the emotional impact it can have. I remember reading, years ago, a text about the psychology of women. At first I agreed with what the author was saying, so I relaxed and simply let the information flow into my mind (and emotions). I let down my guard down because I trusted the author. Then the author wrote, and I read, something that violated my sense of myself as a woman. What the author said contradicted my very experience, and I (in a term we used back then) freaked out and threw the book at the wall. Which rather startled my friend reading nearby. I didn’t have an intellectual response to an intellectual statement; I had a personal response that was highly emotional in nature. In fact, I can remember the room this happened in. It’s as though the intensity of my reaction took a snapshot of the moment and slotted it into the permanent area of my memory.

I have read other books that I had a similar response to, in fact one sent me into a week of depression. It, too, was a book of ideas, not fiction, and it, too, drew me in and then, as it felt to me, violated my trust. I remember hearing a professor of philosophy (and have a memory “snapshot” of her, our classroom, and other class members) describing a similar response to reading some contemporary literary criticism. She told of reading it and finding it delightfully rich and insightful, until the author made a general statement about women which abjected her, by assuming that she and any other woman could not participate in his understanding. She had accepted his use of the term “man” as meaning “human” but his context made it clear he meant men only. (That’s why I have never trusted the use of that term which so easily slides from the general inclusive to the particular exclusive. But that’s another argument;->)

I have had a similar dark experience with fiction that I was reading in a lyrical fashion. Usually I can tell by page 40 if I am interested in a novel, and if I find it’s author’s ‘world view’ compatible with my own. This has some overlap with my liking for happy endings, but is not the whole story. There are novels, stories, that have tough and/or sad endings that I have “enjoyed” reading. The endings made sense to me; I could see they were logical outcomes of character and circumstance. However, there are authors I have learned to be cautious with, even to avoid.

I won’t mention which one or even the author’s name of this particular book because I don’t want to discuss literary merit (which it had) but I want to look at the phenomenological aspect of reading. I was reading this novel, finding it fascinating, seeing how it described aspects of life that I had experienced, at one with the flow of the story. There were three main characters, and I was “riding” through the story on one of them, partially a gender choice as I am very sensitive to gender. The one I was riding was interesting, accomplished, and, I thought, deserving (whatever I meant by that.) In one paragraph she was revealed as “undeserving” for behavior that was not that different from what the others were doing. With no indication of compassion, she was extruded from the otherwise positive ending. I was shocked and kind of unbalanced. I felt depressed for quite a while, and didn’t read that author again for years, and when I did, I read her with my defenses carefully in place. I could no longer read her in a lyrical fashion, though I could still read her in, I will explain later, a useful fashion.

The real joy of reading, for me, is in positive lyrical reading. Reading where, at the same time as the text flows through me, my whole being is immersed in the text and I am riding the story or the ideas in a thrillingly engaged way. I am enjoying reading as it flows, bringing light and understanding into the waiting crevices of my being and I embrace it. The text has disappeared, has become more than transparent, just the energy playing me. Both novels and treatises can affect me that way, if I’m reading them at some magical point in time where I need the story or the thought patterns that they give me. Unlike the reflective (and emotional) slow reading of poetry, lyrical reading is fast, a grasping of the whole while the spotlight of my mind travels over the particulars of the text of that precise moment. It’s a rich, exciting, intellectual, and emotional experience, and I love it.

Sometimes I do become the “readaholic” that my mother accused me of being. Sometimes, especially with an author who can write dense, multi-stranded plots in rich evocative language with accurate facts and details, I become so engaged that even the end of the book doesn’t release me. Especially with a series with ongoing plots and characters, I find myself moving from one book to the next,  without taking needed breaks, Or reading the author’s next treatise to see where their thought is going to take me.

Lyric reading is rich, can be addictive, and has a dark side. It is, I believe, an experience that fewer and fewer people will have, as the web, games, tv, music and movies drain that kind of rich emotional/intellectual experience away from reading. Do you experience reading the way I’ve described? Do you believe that it is declining in popularity? What do you think is the the impact of new ways of recording on the older way of recording words on a surface?

Useful reading is just that - reading used to accomplish something else. Reading a manual, where you are trying to learn how to do something, for example.

 

Recipes were probably one of the earliest forms of useful reading, and business reports are probably one of the most prevalent today. Reading for information to help you make decisions about what actions you will take is essential in today's word, which is why illiteracy is so limiting. However we are, I believe, in what Walter Ong called Secondary Orality, a society where although "based permanently on the use of writing and print” (Ong, 1982, p.136) much of our communication is casual and repetitive, whether oral or text.

• secondary orality is a type of interpersonal communication that is neither classically oral nor literate, and has been made possible entirely through modern communication technologies. This communication is now instantaneous, so despite its use of the written word, it allows for transactions to be nearly as cyclical as orality; thoughts and ideas are repeated and revisited several times, instead of simply being stated once, as in literacy. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_orality 

I believe that literacy will continue to be important, but I also see that just as movies and tv have usurpted some of the space formerly occupied by lyrical reading, especially narrative space, so the web is taking over some of the "useful reading" space. Take a look at sites such as VideoJug. where recipes, among other things, can be shown, not just described. Being literate would help, but much of the useful information can be derived from seeing and listening. The strongest, IMHO, tutorials on the web make limited use of text, especially extended text. For example, this tutorial on gMail - http://www.google.com/mail/help/tour/indexStart.html  or this explanation of what a wiki is - http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english use text, and reading, in a limited way, almost as a back-up to the visual. The addition of the visual is reducing the need for as much text, and, in fact, is part of a trend of reducing over text use in favour of visuals. Jakob Nielsen's advice in writing for the web - http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/ shows the current tendancy in text. Reading is moving from linear to scan and spot, and the screen is reinforcing that tendancy.

So, in this rather unorganized freewrite, what am I trying to say? I am saying that reading is changing, because of the web, but also because of movies, tv and radio. And the changes are interesting and have both positive and negative aspects. Something is being lost, but there are people who will benefit. As a brief and final example, I could imagine a seriously dyslexic person composing an essay using a camera, their voice and VoiceThreads - http://voicethread.com/#home  

I love Twitter and actively follow a number of edubloggers through it.Through JosieFraser I came upon EwanMcIntosh and the Guardian debate on whether social bookmarking will bring positive chnages to education. WARNING - you have to set up a (free) account with the Guardian to access this and vote on the debate.

McIntosh makes an interesting point about historical timing and the response of the educational system that is as true in Ontario, Canada as in Scotland: 

• The web turned sixteen last year, just as another generation of sixteen year olds left school with more knowledge of the web from outside formal education than from within it. This trend of learning about the potential of the web from outside the school gates will continue into the future, especially as social networks become ever more portable and mobile, on cell phones and gaming consoles, such as the highly pocketable Nintendo DS or Sony PSP.

  Educational methods could continue on their merry, Victorian way, but that's unlikely to engage today's learners, and it's impossible to envisage tomorrow’s parents, the Bebo Boomers, accepting the 9am-4pm, timetabled, do the exams you're told to when you're told to, inflexibility of the 20th Century school. An impact of social networks on educational methods will happen, if not down to parent pressure alone but to kneel at the non-negotiable alter of Inclusion, that is, providing a learning experience that is accessible to all. - http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=article&debate_id=3&story_id=10492319

What he says seems both sensible and obvious to me, even if not to all of my fellow teachers, and his conclusion demonstrates his point:

• And, if you need a final point to consider, something practical to show the power of the social network for changing the way teachers learn themselves, just re-read this debate. It was written one Sunday afternoon, with collaboration over Twitter, the mobile phone and web-based social networking tool, with teaching colleagues from the US, Scotland, Canada, England, France, New Zealand and Australia. Has social networking changed the face of educational methods? Almost certainly: yes. - http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=article&debate_id=3&story_id=10492319

I will be following the debate, and voting "pro".

I'm finding it fascinating watching how the web is influencing the look and structure of newspapers. By the 1940s, magazines with their frequent images had begun influencing newspapers, as pictures became frequent, especially on the front page.

TheStar.com - Today's Paper via kwout 

Pictures catch the eye first, and the text is there to support the information in the pictures, just as on well-designed web pages. Then it's almost as though headings were hyperlinks, that you could click on (read below) for more information. The information is conveyed initially by the graphics, and the text is augmented further by graphics.

Our culture is becoming more visual in the representation of information, and was even before the net. The increasing use of  photos as part of newspapers and magazines grew steadily during the 20th Century, and was indirectly augmented by movie and tv. We like visually conveyed information and attractive graphic design, and the smart communicators know that. And, the side of the newspaper and web connection I haven't mentioned, the fact that I collected all my images from the web and are publishing them on the web, even though what I'm observing is newspapers!

Also posted on http://webtoolsforlearners.blogspot.com/  

I've just read John Seely Brown's and Richard P. Adler's article in the Educause Review, and it is fascinating! (Via Stephen Downes),

Currently I have been spending much time in the world wide library that is the web, engaged in informal learning about the possible impact of our new communication technologies on learning, and, consequently, on education. Minds on Fire is the most comprehensive, succinct, and insightful piece I have found so far.

This is essential reading for anyone who wants to be informed on learning and education as it is currently developing.