Real men read

One of Minnesota's own, Tori Jensen, is getting national press for her "Real Men Read" project. A great summary can be found here on the Education World website.

This is very cool and should be a model for any school who may find that its male demographic reading scores could use a bump.

(That's Tori's superintendent in the poster at the right.)

Oh, I fixed the link to ALA's Read Poster generator. Find example and link here.

Rotarians come through!

This is why I like living in "small" town America...

Mankato–The Rotary Club of Mankato is providing every third grader attending Mankato Area Public Schools with a copy of Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. This decision comes after nine months of careful research and consideration on the best way to promote literacy within the community.

“As Rotary International closes in on achieving the goal of eradicating polio, a couple of global initiatives have been identified to direct our resources at going forward…one of those is literacy,” said Co-Chair of the Literacy Committee and Mankato Rotarian member Jonathan Zierdt. “We felt that by starting in our own community where literacy has been identified as a needed focus that we could not only bring results to children in our community, but may be able to establish a program other Rotary clubs could replicate.”

“Our ultimate goal is to establish this literacy initiative as an annual event,” said Mankato Rotary Club president Bob Weiss. “624 books will be handed out and we feel this is a very effective way to promote literacy within our schools and community.”

On Wednesday, April 23, members of the Mankato Rotary Club will visit each third grade classroom to distribute books. While in the classrooms, they will read popular poems from the book and reiterate the importance of literacy to the students. Each book will also include a written note and have been signed by various Rotary members.

“We are delighted that the Mankato Rotary Club has chosen this gift as part of their literacy initiative,” said Mankato’s Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Co-Chair of the Literacy Committee and Mankato Rotarian member Cindy Amoroso. “Reading poetry, especially the fun, wacky poems of Shel Silverstein, is a natural way for readers of all levels to develop language and literacy skills and makes the reading process enjoyable and rewarding. Mankato’s third graders are fortunate to receive their own copy of a Silverstein poetry collection!”

Silverstein, who passed away in 1999 at the age of 68, published Where the Sidewalk Ends in 1974. Since its publication, it has been translated into over 30 different languages and sold more than six million copies, making it the best selling children’s poetry book ever. His use of silly words and wacky approach captivate kids worldwide in each of the 130 poems.

Mankato Rotary is a volunteer organization of business and professional men and women who provide humanitarian service, and help build goodwill and peace in the world. For more information or to become a member, please visit www.mankatorotary.org.

It pains me as a Kiwanian to say this, but "GOOD JOB, ROTARIANS!"

I hope you all vote for our building referendum at the end of the month too. 

Even librarians reading less?

My professorial friend Mary Ann Bell sent an urgent notice out on both her blog and to LM_Net not long ago urging librarians to read Thomas Washington's editorial "Kids Reading Less and So Am I" that appeared in the February 9th Washington Post. In the piece, this school librarian reflects:

Who isn't having trouble concentrating [on reading] these days? Who doesn't find it nearly impossible to stick with a 450-page novel? I've come down with the same virus as the kids — the very group I criticize for ignoring the library's "new arrivals" book display.

I felt the same thing as blog reading became a habit and opined that I was reading differently in my column The Decline of Reading in October of 2006. As long ago as 1994, Birkerts in his book The Gutenberg Elegies complained that electronics was dooming reading and Professor Naomi Baron in a Los Angles Times opinion piece “Killing the written word by snippets” (Nov 28, 2005) bemoaned:

Will effortless random access [to snippets of books made available through Google Book Search] erode our collective respect for writing as a logical, linear process? Such respect matters because it undergirds modern education, which is premised on thought, evidence and analysis rather than memorization and dogma. Reading successive pages and chapters teaches us how to follow a sustained line of reasoning.

What looks like may be another nail in the coffin of sustained reading can be found in an observation in the British Library and JISC's study, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future. (All educators, not just librarians, should read this very interesting and well-done report.) Although the purpose of the study was to study the information habits of the "Google" generation, it also reported:

While we have highlighted differences amongst scholarly communities in this paper it would be a mistake to believe that it is only students’ information seeking that has been fundamentally shaped by massive digital choice, unbelievable (24/7) access to scholarly material, disintermediation, and hugely powerful and influential search engines.  The same has happened to professors, lecturers and practitioners.  Everyone exhibits a bouncing / flicking behaviour, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically.  Power browsing and viewing is the norm for all.

So young and old alike are changing their reading/research habits, perhaps as a technique to survive the information avalanche, the data tsunami, the ... well, supply your own natural disaster metaphor here.

To degree, my adult readers, do exhibit some of these behaviors outlined in the British Library's report?

The main characteristics of digital information seeking behaviour  in virtual libraries are:

• Horizontal information seeking A form of skimming activity, where people view just one
  or two pages from an academic site and then `bounce’ out, perhaps never to return. ...
• Navigation  People in virtual libraries spend a lot of time simply finding their way around: in fact they spend as much time finding their bearings as actually viewing what they find. 
• Viewers  The average times that users spend on e-book and e-journal sites are very short: typically four and eight
  minutes respectively.  It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, ....  It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. 
• Squirreling behaviour Academic users have strong consumer instincts and research shows that they will squirrel away content in the form of downloads, especially when there are free offers.  ... there is no evidence as to the extent to which these downloads are actually read. 
• Diverse information seekers Log analysis reveals that user behaviour is very diverse...:  One size does not fit all.
  Checking information seekers  Users assess authority and trust for themselves in a matter of seconds by dipping and cross-checking across different sites and by relying on favoured brands (e.g. Google).
  

Are you becoming more like the students you teach?  (Heaven help you, middle school teachers!) Without the ability or inclination to "to follow a sustained line of reasoning" is civilization going to hell in a hand basket? Or are we all just learning to snow plow through the knowledge blizzard?