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16Jan2013
Young people and literacy have changed their relationship status to ‘it’s complicated’

Posted by Guest blogger

By Cliff Manning, Communications Director at Makewaves

When I see reports that young people are reading less than ever, I must admit I get confused. On Makewaves, the safe social learning platform I help oversee, students regularly write over 2,000 blog posts and 30,000 comments a month. There are 55,000,000 Facebook status updates plus a further 50,000,000 tweets written every day. Now add in all the text messages, chats, blogs, websites and games read and written each day and the world seems more full of text than ever. Young people may not be reading as many print books or magazines but they must be reading something.

Online vs. offline

How young people are reading is changing from traditional books and magazine structures. Reading and writing for the web, which is less linear, often shorter, cross device and more interactive, may require a different set of skills to master than "traditional reading". One study suggests readers who struggle with offline reading fare better with online reading and in some cases outperform good offline readers. Many teachers who use Makewaves have reported that it has had the biggest impact on reluctant readers, particularly boys, and helped “uncover many enthusiastic bloggers”.

Perhaps how we measure and teach online reading needs to be distinct from offline reading? As education and jobs become increasingly digital, surely it becomes more important to recognise and support literacy of this kind somehow?

Reading is social

It could be argued that the "twitterisation" of writing is reducing narrative writing skills and removing the opportunity that books provide for young people to immerse themselves in and reflect on a text. This may be the case in some areas, however on Makewaves we see lots of innovation with this form. Primary pupils write serialised fiction for their readers to suggest what happens next or to write alternate versions. Boys are writing weekly blogs and engaging in long written debates and across them the passion for good stories seems undimmed.

The web can make reading incredibly social and collaborative allowing young people to move from consumer to creator to curator seamlessly. The Kindle allows readers to annotate and share their favourite passages with the world or to view notes by written by other readers alongside the text. Projects like Social Book go further with real time interaction between readers around a specific text. Discussing books is not new but the sheer scale of reach that the web offers creates a different dynamic and immediacy to it.

Monster reads

The power of peer recommendation has always been huge and physical books are great examples of early social media - consume something, add a comment in the margins and share it with a friend.

Your Monster Read, a new competition from National Literacy Trust and Oxford University Press, is great example of how schools can tap into social networking and digital technology to boost literacy in new ways. Five to 11-year-olds are invited to recommend a book they love and tell the world why they should read it. How they recommend it is up to them, it could be a blog, a song, an animation, a poster; whatever helps tell the story and convince others. There are prizes for the most creative entries as well as the most voted for by the community. Recognising that adults need these skills too - there’s also prizes for the best teacher entry. To help get started there are handy suggestions for using technology in 10 and 20-minute activities.

Innovation Workshops

Technology and culture have always shaped how we read. Books are a fairly recent, western innovation and reading aloud was once the accepted norm. It is only natural that reading and writing should adapt to the transmedia, cross-platform, connected technology of today. It’s also natural that the way young people consume, create and share will continue to adapt as technology develops. The question is, how can we support and challenge them in equally adapted ways?

I will be exploring this topic along with David "Quadblogging" Mitchell and many others at the Raising standards in boys' writing through innovation conferences from National Literacy Trust in February - book now to secure a place.

In the meantime, please also share your examples, comments and stories with me via twitter at @cliffmanning.