Scanners and Readers: Digital Literacy and the Experience of reading

Abstract

While heralding the positive learning outcomes of computer-aided instruction, rigorous assessment must also monitor the changes in literacy that accompany it and qualify the benefits of technical content delivery. A decline in literary reading, recently documented by a National Endowment for the Arts study, is a case in point. This chapter inquires as to whether the cognitive and cultural changes incurred by reading fewer books are significant relative to the overall gains yielded by technological change in the classroom learning environment. It argues that the impressive focus on multimodal literacy in classrooms from elementary levels through college, which seems to favor diversity of content, is prone to exclude the analytic challenges that literary reading and the growth of historical consciousness demand. This chapter presents evidence that suggests the indispensability of literary reading experience alongside technologically enabled or enhanced modes of learning.