Who needs to read anyway?

What is the worth of words?  Will it matter if people can’t read in the future?
By Michael Rogers
Columnist
Special to MSNBC
Updated: 4:40 p.m. CT Sept 20, 2006

Excerpts:

December 25, 2025 — Educational doomsayers are again up in arms at a new adult literacy study showing that less than 5 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it...

It’s time to acknowledge that in a truly multimedia environment of 2025, most Americans don’t need to understand more than a hundred or so words at a time, and certainly will never read anything approaching the length of an old-fashioned book. We need a frank reassessment of where long-form literacy itself lies in the spectrum of skills that a modern nation requires of its workers...

There is no question that reading is a desirable and often enjoyable skill to possess. In 2025, tens of millions of Americans continue to enjoy books and magazines as recreational pursuits, and this happy habit will undoubtedly remain part of the landscape for generations to come. But just as every citizen is not forcibly trained to enjoy classical music, neither should they be coerced into believing that reading is necessarily pleasurable. For the majority of students, reading and writing are difficult enterprises with limited payoffs in the modern world...

Some positions in society do require significant literacy skills: senior managers, screenwriters, scientists and others need a highly efficient way to absorb and communicate abstract thought...But for the vast number of the workers who actually carry out those plans, the same skills are far less crucial. The nation’s leaders must be able to read; for those who follow, the ability should be strictly optional.

 Read it and weep... The best satire is that closest to reality.

Lesson learned

Yesterday I promised to report how my "Choose Your Own Presentation" went. Well...

What I did not factor in was speaking in a theater (for 2100) where the computer sat on a stage about 4 feet above the main seating area with no stairs from the floor to the stage. In such venues, I hate to stand on a stage when there are fewer a hundred folks attending.  Normally such a situation is not a problem. Jump down off the stage once and "Have remote. Will travel." In linear presentations one can easily click through the slides and move a fair distance from the computer.

In this case, when I needed to click on a particular object on the screen, I found my remote's cursor control is not that good, and I wound up leaping on and off the stage throughout the talk. (Why do our minds instist we are still in our 30s when our bodies argue we are a couple decades older?) I am sure it was vastly entertaining and bets were being place as to when I would slip, rip my trousers, or collapse from exhaustion. At least it kept people's attention - even if it was for the wrong reason.

Other than that, giving folks a choice seemed to work quite nicely.

Choose your own presentation

Good friend and fantastic presenter, Gary Hartzell, sent me this reference a few weeks ago:

 Lane, Robert (2006).  A Guide to Relational Presentations.  Aspire Communications.  http://www.aspirecommunications.com/   Accessed September 20, 2006.

 (Can you tell by the citation format Dr. Hartzell's been a college professor

Anyway, the concepts in Lane's 16 page booklet are very interesting and hearken back to the days of HyperCard and HyperStudio - multimedia that is structured on something other than the linear organization that PowerPoint begs us to use.

The authors encourage a more free-flowing type of presentation software use with hypertext links (within PowerPoint) that allow those who attend a presentation to help determine its path. And I think I've found a way to test this out.

I'm doing a new presentation today for the Georgia Council of Media Organizations in beautiful Athens called Libraries for the Net Generation. And in preparing it, I found there is simply TOO much information on the topic to fit the standard 50 minute time slot.

So what I've done is create what I call a "Choose Your Own Presentation" format. One slide, below, will link to 5 different areas of Net Gen attributes and the group attending will choose the areas we explore first.

For an old linear thinker/presenter, this goes against the grain, but we'll see what happens.

By the way, there are some tremendous resources on our current crop of learners. Among the things I've been reading in preparation are: 

• Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-19 Year-olds. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005 www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm
• Howe and Strauss, Millenials Rising. Vintage, 2000
• Oblinger and Oblinger, Educating the Net Generation, EDUCAUSE, 2005 www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen
• Pew Internet & American Life Project (various reports) www.pewinternet.org/
• Tech-savvy students stuck in text-dominated schools, education evolving, 2005 www.educationevolving.org/studentvoices/student_opinion_papers.asp

 The Olinger and Olinger work is a great place to start.

The handouts for my presentation with synthesize some of this work and attempt to relate it to school libraries can be found here. How do we as educators respond when kids are radically different in so many ways from us? Or do we try to make them change to fit our systems? I think we will be in a world of hurt even thinking that's possible.

Hope this old dog is up to some new tricks today.