With so much information on the Internet and so many web sites to find it on, it's almost no wonder how important the Internet and the many resources have become for teaching and learning. However, even though a reader may be very "book smart" and proficient in finding information in a text there are, "new types of reading strategies necessary to learn within this interactive, informationally rich, and relatively new text environment (pg 217)." Even though a student could find important information within an informational or narrative text, using a computer and the Internet to find information is much more complex; students need to know how to navigate a search engine to search for what they need, how to scan through the sites to determine if the information is pertinent, and how to connect the information. So, naturally, "reading comprehension becomes an important issue to study because new comprehension skills, strategies, and dispositions may be required to generate questions, and to locate, evaluate, synthesize, and communicate information on the Internet (pg 217)." Since children and adults have more difficulty reading informational text than reading narratives, "the processes and strategies readers employ as they interact with informational texts also differ from those they employ while reading narrative texts (pg 217)." Not only do we now have to take into account the different skills needed to evaluate and analyze the information found in informational texts, we have to employ those skills and more to analyze and decode information found on websites and search engines. I think this is even more difficult for people to handle, because most of the information found on the Internet is more informational text than narrative, and now people need to incorporate their 21st century skills to find the information within the text and hyperlinks. When all these skills come into play, I definitely think that readers don't forget one of the most important skills when reading: prior knowledge. "Readers who draw on prior knowledge of a topic and prior knowledge of text structure are most able to mentally organize and remember the ideas gained from information text (pg 219)." While the study part of the article was a little confusing, all in all I thought this article was very informative and instructional on how to incorporate the skills necessary for finding information in informational texts and how to apply it to the Internet and websites while using the 21st century skills to navigate through different sites and hypertexts to find what is needed.
Research on Instruction and Assessment
One thing I agreed with right off the bat with this article is that "proficient readers offline are not always proficient readers online (pg 2)." I think this could be because a lot of students aren't exposed to computers, much less the Internet, so they don't have the skills necessary to read and look for information as they're surfing the Internet. While I knew a lot of people have Internet access, the actual statistics that were shown in the article were a little surprising to me. A lot of classrooms and colleges use the Internet for homework and other assignments, but I had no idea that more than 90% of adolescent students in the US are using the Internet for homework (pg 3). That showed me that a lot of schools are making the effort to be online and do more with technology, and that can be very useful and helpful for teachers and students alike. I think a huge part of using the Internet correctly and proficiently, especially for readers, is locating information, as shown on page 4. "Locating information online is another aspect of online reading comprehension. It also requires new online reading comprehension skills such as using a search engine, reading search engine results, or quickly reading a web page to locate the best link to the information that is required." When a reader doesn't know how to narrow down their searches when using a search engine, they won't get the information they're looking for, or will find out more than they need. When teachers give out an assignment, it seems that a lot of them just assume the students know how to correctly use the Internet to find what they're looking for. Instead of just assuming, teachers should run through a quick tutorial on how to properly locate information to help the students with their assignments.
Expanding the New Literacies Conversation
I definitely think the Internet has become a huge highway for communication and information gathering. Not only can we find information on a subject we're looking for, we can even put in our own information on the Internet on that subject. While using the Internet and different literacies and technologies in the classroom is useful and effective, I think many schools are hesitant for many reasons. For one thing, the districts don't have enough money or funding to pay for these new literacies, with many classrooms staying with textbook-based instruction. Another reason is that the Internet can be seen as a literacy issue, especially when students don't know how to navigate the Internet to look for important information when doing an assignment. I think that the phrase "new literacies" can be somewhat intimidating to teachers and school officials, but we need to be able to think outside the box and look into what can help our students, since many of them are exposed to new technologies outside of school and can use them quite proficiently. Since students with cell phones are texting and emailing and surfing the Internet on these different devices, they must have some knowledge about the literacy skills needed to read the information they're receiving. When we have students using different devices outside of class, I think teachers should learn about the skills the students use to read the information they get from their devices and enhance them in the classroom with the Internet and search engines. This way, the students will be working on their online reading comprehension skills for when they need to use computers to do assignments for school.
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