Sunday, February 17, 2008

Literacy in the Digital Age

I was having a conversation with my friends Goa and Jeff about this very issue just last night and, lo and behold, I came across this compelling article by Howard Gardener in the Washington Post today:

What will happen to reading and writing in our time?

Could the doomsayers be right? Computers, they maintain, are destroying literacy. The signs -- students' declining reading scores, the drop in leisure reading to just minutes a week, the fact that half the adult population reads no books in a year -- are all pointing to the day when a literate American culture becomes a distant memory. By contract, optimists foresee the Internet ushering in a new, vibrant participatory culture of words. Will they carry the day?

read the rest here.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Clearly the optimists are write, but weel let the pessimists have there say anyway.

Unknown said...

Seriously, though, I am in pretty much complete agreement with Gardner. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Bryan Coffelt said...

I don't think it's the death of literacy. I think it's the dawn of a doom-literacy. A gonzo literacy. A bizarro literacy.