Books & Reading

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Is It Real – Or Is It Spark Notes?

Vicki Sherouse posted a request for help today on LM_NET.

Our curriculum office wants our English teachers no longer to teach entire novels, just excerpts. Needless to say, the teachers are horrified. They have been given articles to read that support this idea. Does anyone know of books or articles that support the now “crazy” idea of reading the whole book rather than passages!!!!!!!!!!! As librarians, this is particularly ironic–our selection review process requires objectors to read the whole book, rather than excerpts!

I was horrified by this situation. As much as I LOVE the new web 2.0 technologies, web research and broad access to multi-media – I have always feared that people will become so used to the lack of depth in internet articles, videos, video games, excerpted works of fiction, spark notes et al, that they will no longer be able to follow a line of reasoning or a plot presented in book length. We are dumbing down the curriculum big time in this country.

Here are some quotes from an intriguing book – Killing Time by Caleb Carr:

“The human brain adores it [Information] – it plays with the bits of information it receives, arranging them and storing them like a delighted child. But it loathes examining them deeply, doing the hard work of assembling them into integrated systems of understanding. Yet that work is what produces knowledge… The rest is simply – recreation.” (p.235)

Some more lines taken from a section where the characters are talking about societal changes brought about by the internet:

“The flood gates were thrown open, and human society, already saturated with information, began to drown in it…. And the very nature of that technology means that there is no real knowledge anymore…because what those custodians do allow to slip through their deliver systems is utterly unregulated and unverifiable. Mistaken facts – or, worse yet, deceptions on a simple or a grand scale, supported by doctored evidence and digitally manipulated images – become commonly accepted wisdom before there’s even been a chance to determine the validity of their bases. And remember that we’ve now raised not one but several generations of children who have been exposed only to that kind of questionable data” (p.62-63)

I hope Vicki & the English teachers are able to convince the “powers that be” to drop this terrible idea.

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The Future of Books?

Note to Gananda Teachers:
If you are looking for the summer reading link I emailed you about – just scroll down the page to the next post. Before you go – hopefully you will also read this post.

BluePencil BluePencil

Will Richardson asks the question “What Will Happen To Books?” And his speculations make for fascinating reading – along with the link to a recent New York Times Magazine article – Scan This Book.

Will has some interesting questions to ask about the future of books and reading in a Web 2.0 world.

“Should we be thinking about how to prepare our kids for a linked, tagged world?”

“What strategies do we need to develop to read and write in linked, tagged world?”

“How do we best harness the potential of a world where knowledge is easily connected and, therefore, increasingly overwhelming and, as my wife pointed out, perhaps paralyzing?”

Will invites people to join the conversation at What Will Happen To Books?

A comment on the above blog post points to an article about the downside of linked/tagged reading:
<!– after publication. –>

Something will be lost if everything we read is linked and tagged and we no longer immerse ourselves in the journey the author intends for us to take.

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi877.htm

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Serendipity

The endangered joy of serendipity: The modern world makes it harder to discover what you didn’t know you were looking for By William McKeen, St. Petersburg Times, March 26, 2006

I worried about this back when “pushing content” became the next big thing. It never lived up to its hype in those early days. When was that…. 1998ish? And then, along comes blogging, RSS and Web 2.0 and now it all seems like the cure for our information overload nightmares…..

Is it?

Every “cure” comes with a price. And this is it. Diminished opportunities to “discover” something you never knew you did not know. Focused web searching, periodical databases, blogging and other Web 2.0 tools all contribute to this loss. Even search tools such as Yahoo have made their browsing features less prominent. We can probably blame Google’s nice uncluttered interface for that.

As teachers and teacher-librarians we spend a lot of time teaching students how to “tighten up” their searches. How should we teach them to browse and be open to looking for information they don’t even know they want? In a “flat world” we are going to need every ounce of creativity we can muster. And serendipity is the “stuff” of the creative and inventive mind. Let’s not lose that.

P.S. My friend Holly Wolf just started a blog – Electronic Pencil@High School Library. I know it will be a “must read” in the …. get ready …. biblioblogosphere.

Meanwhile – let’s remember what J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:

“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost”