Hilve Firek
Technology and the Reading Habits of Our Students: Implications for the English Classroom
The author reviews research on what effects technology may have on students’ thinking, and offers ideas for the classroom.
____________________________________________ If your students are anything like mine, they can't live without technology. Don’t believe me? Just try taking their cell phones away from them for even an hour. They quickly exhibit signs of "connection withdrawal"! As English teachers, we try to extol the wonders of the written word, but our students may lose interest if they can't "interact" with the text. If you ask them to open a lengthy book, their foreheads quickly hit their desks. And this phenomenon isn’t limited to teenagers. The witty folk over at The Onion have parodied the state of our country’s reading habits in their aptly named article “Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text” (http://www.theonion.com/articles/nationshudders-at-large-block-of-uninterruptedte,16932/): Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text. Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words. "Why won't it just tell me what it's about?" said Boston resident Charlyne 52 Wisconsin English Journal
Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. "There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I've looked everywhere—there's nothing here but words." "Ow," Thomson added after reading the first and last lines in an attempt to get the gist of whatever the article, review, or possibly recipe was about. Humorous, yes, but telling. As we march bravely into a future where we can find the answer to almost any question quickly and easily on devices that fit in our pockets, we have to ask ourselves what this is doing to how we think. As we click on link after link, we have to wonder what this does to our ability to delve deeply into what used to be called the world of the mind. Bottom line: If our thought processes are indeed changing, then our teaching practices must change, too. Let’s first consider how truly engaged a student is when he or she is playing a video game. Photographer Robbie Cooper illustrates just how emotionally involved children can become when playing games in his video titled “Immersion,” available on the New York Times video library (http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/11/21/ magazine/1194833565213/immersion.html). If you watch the video, you’ll notice that some kids rarely blink, others talk to the characters in the game, and one child even cries. The rapid-fire Volume 53, Number 2
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Technology and the Reading Habits of Our Students: Implications for the English Classroom
images and sounds, along with the user-driven interaction, lead to a level of engagement that is rarely seen even in the most student-centered classrooms. Our Brains on Computers The New York Times recently ran a series titled “Your Brain on Computers” (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/features/timest opics/series/your_brain_on_computers/index. html). The articles address how our addiction to being “connected” is changing our lives. One of the features examines how the distraction of computers and cell phones—which aren’t phones as much as pocket computers—impact how children learn. In “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technolo gy/21brain.html?ref=yourbrainoncomputers), one young man discusses why he chose to surf on the Internet rather than read his summer assignment: “On YouTube, ‘you can get a whole story in six minutes,’ he explains. ‘A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.’” The student’s principal describes the child as one of many, as a young man caught between the real world of school and an addictive “virtual world,” a world where books— and the weighty ideas they contain—have no place. In the same article, Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote that there should be genuine concern when contemplation is replaced by ceaseless activity. The brains of young people “are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing.” And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.” Indeed, best-selling author Nicholas Carr explores this issue at length in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains: The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it 53 Wisconsin English Journal
makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neural pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brains to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. This explains why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re aware from our computers. Our brains are becoming adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. (194) This concern is also voiced by Maryanne Wolf in her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain: “Will the accelerated rate of change already experienced by our children have consequences that radically affect the quality of attention that can transform a word into a thought and a thought into a world of unimagined possibility?” (214). Karen Schramm, an English professor at Delaware Valley College, has observed that technology use does indeed negatively impact students’ thought processes: “My concerns arise from the careful observation of students’ attitudes and academic performance, and what I see, too often, is laziness and, more sinister, genuine cognitive disability” (3). As an example, Schramm recounts a class assignment in which small groups of students were asked to analyze passages in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: I was looking for evidence of reasoned thought, analysis of literary strategies to convey the chaos of the “human condition.” Whipping out his PDA, one student punched a few keys, and in a nanosecond, the trusty computer brain had provided the passages with ease. Then the student accessed to gain the necessary context. Analysis appeared, readymade—general fluff, but hopefully it Volume 53, Number 2
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would suffice. Mission accomplished. Total time on task: approximately two minutes. Total learning accomplished: zero. (4) Nonetheless, few of us would suggest moving back to a time before computers. The proverbial genie is out of the bottle, and— barring a nuclear attack—he’s just not going back in. The march of time has always involved give and take, and none of us can predict what the future holds. To illustrate, Carr discusses how Socrates (in Plato’s Phaedrus) rails against the advent of writing, because the written word makes memory less important. Carr writes that Socrates “argues that dependence on the technology of the alphabet will alter a person’s mind, and not for the better. By substituting outer symbols for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers… preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness” (55). Of course, the ability to read and write is now synonymous with what we can minimally expect from an educated person. Did our memories suffer as a result of the alphabet? Probably. (I, for one, can’t step inside a grocery store without a list.) But what was gained— widespread literacy—far surpassed what was lost.
Moving Beyond Linear Narrative Here’s the deal: We know our students are addicted to the stimulus-response nature of technology (see “Attached to Technology and Paying a Price” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technolo gy/07brain.html). What should we do? Throw books away? Ignore the “big ideas” that have shaped our civilization? Give in and let kids play Halo all block? Of course not. Rather, how can we restructure our classes and our assignments so that we capitalize on what students do well? How can we build a bridge between the techsaturated world of today and the English 54
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classroom? How can we use the technology our students use every day to encourage more meaningful reading and writing experiences? First, we need to look beyond the technology itself. If we only look at the tools available on our networks (e.g., PowerPoint), then we limit ourselves to what we already know the tools can do. For example, I know I’m not the only one who has fallen into the trap of “research and present.” Many students have reached the point where the words “computer presentation” elicit the same groans as the words “read two chapters of The Scarlet Letter.” Instead, we need to focus on the meat-andpotatoes of our content: the big ideas that shape how we view ourselves in relation to our world. For example, if we’re reading Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, we know that students can connect to the feelings of alienation felt by Pecola. Exploring this character’s experiences helps us to understand our own feelings and those of our fellow human beings. Here’s the heretical part: Is there any reason we can’t start in the middle of the book? Can we select a passage that is particularly moving and start there? After all, young people who surf the Net already have an understanding of nonlinear narrative, so why can’t we simulate the Net experience and “link” to particular scenes? Can we guide our students in a nonlinear reading of the book that covers what we want students to know? After all, if they’ve made it through the Spot books, our kids already have an understanding of linear storytelling. Can our students move past linear narrative and “interact” with written text as if it were hypertext? Certainly, if a teacher guides them in doing it! Next, can we ask students to summarize the emotions of each selected passage in a tweet of 140 characters or less? If we don’t have computers in our classrooms, we can have pairs of students write their tweets on paper and put them on the bulletin board. When the whole class is done, the board will contain the entire “twitterature” version of the book! This activity— Volume 53, Number 2
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Technology and the Reading Habits of Our Students: Implications for the English Classroom
and others like it—simulate computer-type experiences in paper-and-pencil classrooms. The activities need to be short, emotionally powerful, and connected. In essence, they need to mirror the literacy experiences of today’s wired adolescents. Let’s explore what else we can do. Once students have written and illustrated the twitterature versions of their books, they can go to the computer lab and share their work with one another via Wikispaces (http://www.wikispaces.com ) or another Wiki site. Or, they can make a Web page (Google Sites are easy) that extends the story or explores it from another character’s point of view. Of course, the YouTube generation is already very comfortable with making and editing videos. Shoot-and-share camcorders can be purchased for around $100 (a worthwhile investment), and students can create video responses in minutes. One of my favorite projects is the filming of commercials, mainly because commercials are short and to the point. (Just think of the 45-second projects your students might create for The Bluest Eye.) Don’t worry if you don’t know how to make a video. I promise you that someone in your class does. The video doesn’t need to be Oscar-quality. It only needs to provide the tool by which a child connects to the text. If you choose to do lengthier projects, you might want to download a video project checklist (http://www.teneasyways.com/sitebuilderconte nt/sitebuilderfiles/fig2_2.pdf). Students already have a very good understanding of the ins and outs of Facebook. Tell me, what might a Facebook page for Pecola look like? How about a MySpace page for her father? You can download a Facebook project template for use in the classroom here: http://techtoolsforschools.blogspot.com/2010/ 01/facebook-project-template.html. If we plan for two or three meaningful activities in a 90-minute block, then our students won’t have time to get bored. They’ll get the same dopamine fix that they get every time 55 Wisconsin English Journal
they reply to an incoming text. Compare this to what I saw in an English class last year: A teacher introduced a story, put a CD recording into the computer, and told the students to read along because a quiz would follow. The reading and assessment took the whole block. Needless to say, most students didn’t do well on the quiz because, according to the teacher, “they chose to sleep.” If even part of what the research says about our brains is true, then maybe sleeping isn’t a conscious choice at all. It’s how the brain
responds to a lack of stimulation, and plain text just doesn’t stimulate many of today’s kids. Of course, such negative encounters with the written word do more harm than good. Is it any wonder so many of our students say that they dislike reading? If our goal is to engage students in the great ideas expressed in text, then we do our profession a disservice if we fail to adapt our teaching to the needs of our students. Whether we like it or not, our understanding of literacy and of text is changing. More and more researchers are confirming what we already suspect: Our students are addicted to technology and their brains are changing as a result. Consequently, it’s worth the effort to try to use technology to engage our students in the books that we know will enrich their lives. If we all add one more interesting technology project to our repertoire, then maybe our students will be more likely to engage with the worthwhile ideas presented in the great works of literature. References Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains. W.W. Norton & Company. Cooper, R. Immersion. The New York Times Video Library. Retrieved from Volume 53, Number 2
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Technology and the Reading Habits of Our Students: Implications for the English Classroom
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/1 1/21/magazine/1194833565213/immersi on.html Nation shudders at large block of uninterrupted text (March 2010). The Onion. Retrieved from http://www.theonion.com/articles/natio n-shudders-at-large-block-ofuninterrupted-te,16932/ Richtel, M. Attached to technology and paying a price (June 2010) The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/t echnology/07brain.html Richtel, M. Growing up digital, Wired for distraction (November 2010). The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/te chnology/21brain.html?_r=2&ref=yourb rainoncomputers Schramm, K. Tecknowledgey teens, or just try thinking away from the box (April 2007). English Leadership Quarterly. Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain. HarperCollins. Your brain on computers. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://topics.nytimes.com/top/features/ timestopics/series/your_brain_on_com puters/index.html Hilve Firek is an Assistant Professor in the Education Department at Virginia Wesleyan College; email
[email protected]. Copyright © 2011 by the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English
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