Tag: literacy

Neil Gaiman on the future of reading & libraries [Article]

Neil Gaiman’s talk, [transcript here] is worth your time, if you care at all about nurturing the love of reading in the younger generation.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

Kids can’t (don’t know) use computers [Article]

Teacher Marc Scott finds, from his experience, that the accepted norm of teenagers being “tech-savvy” is not true. It’s a fairly long article, and Scott makes quite a few propositions, some practical, others not. I agree with him whole-heartedly on this point:

Tomorrow’s politicians, civil servants, police officers, teachers, journalists and CEOs are being created today. These people don’t know how to use computers, yet they are going to be creating laws regarding computers, enforcing laws regarding computers, educating the youth about computers, reporting in the media about computers and lobbying politicians about computers. Do you thinks this is an acceptable state of affairs? 

It’s not an unique phenomenon: history is replete with these examples whenever new technology has gone mainstream (cars, printing, etc). But will we learn from history?

Teach yourself?

An ambitious experiment by the One Laptop Per Child organisation in two remote villages in Ethiopia is trying to see if see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs ,