Why reading matters even more in the digital age

I was planning what to talk about for an invited ECOO presentation next year and was thinking about the issue of technology in preservice education, particularly what are the most useful kinds of technology related knowledge and experiences could we offer to our preservice candidates that would let them go out and teach effectively. One of the big issues to me is digital literacy–not just computer basics of email, chat and surfing, but really good critical search and retrieval skills. Things to include would be evaluating websites, their credibility and sources of information, comparing the value of information from different sites; searching effectively and so on. To do this well requires sophisticated reading comprehension skills–but different ones than may be required for more traditional print sources. There are different tools–like the meta-web that lets you id sites and the links to them, to give you a sense of the context of this website and so on.

Some resources for this stuff include Alan November’s site: http://www.novemberlearning.com

and a recent copy of Educational Leadership on Reading Comprehension
http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/ascd/menuitem.a4dbd0f2c4f9b94cdeb3ffdb62108a0c/ which touches on some of these issues.

A couple of other resources I found are circa 2001–apparently a time when this issue was hot for the first time:
This is an article by November in TechLearning
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/200103/webliterate.html

and this presentation from the University of Delaware on being a web-literate educator.
http://www.udel.edu/sine/five/

A link from Wendy on writing and blogging: http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/2005/09/12/participation-as-competence/