Digital Youth

By Richard Carson, PhD, Senior Editor

To ground the description of my learning process about information technology, I often begin by stating that, up until a few years ago, I thought the Internet was a hairspray.

While my comment is obviously tongue in cheek, it might resonate with some who, like me, began a reading and writing life exclusively in print media. The explosion of electronic media requires those of us in this category to learn new skills, new vocabulary, and perhaps most importantly, a new way of thinking. While terminology and skill sets are new territory for us, they aren’t for many students, including students who may be struggling with traditional forms of reading and writing. As Sara Kajder notes in her book Adolescents and Digital Literacies: Learning Alongside Our Students (Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2010), “Reengaging reluctant readers requires that we create spaces for them to demonstrate the varied ways in which they are richly and flexibly literate (69).” It means, as Kajdar points out, that we have to supplement (not substitute) traditional reading and writing assignments with “multimodal literacies and practices as points of connection with the traditional curriculum.”

Creating those spaces and “points of connection” means recognizing what students know and what they need to learn. What they know is a wide variety of possibilities for presenting their ideas. Students can create and combine images with Photoshop, present narratives with iMovie, conduct interviews through Skype, offer reflections on VoiceThread, present ideas with PowerPoint, and exchange ideas on weblogs. While these possibilities assume a certain technical availability within a school or district, and a certain willingness on the part of administrators, they also challenge educators on every level to begin to “think digitally” as a way of devising lessons and texts.

In devising these plans, educators, including writers and editors, still need to remind students of traditional skills that emphasize an awareness of audience, the strategic organization and presentation of material, the systematic citation of sources, and recognizing the value of the interaction between website and printed texts. Lessons still need to remind students about being critical and deliberate, about using the wealth offered by the Internet and not being used by it. Lessons such as these, as Kajdar reminds us, offer possibilities about inclusiveness and the redefinition of literacy. In doing so, they teach values about collaboration and community, about discovering and rediscovering, about teaching and learning together.