Teenagers are again destroying all moral value in society. Or are they just changing the values?

One of the top New York Times reads over the weekend has been an article that explores the pros and cons of online literacy. And though I've emailed the link to a few of you, I thought a more in-depth look at the article would be appropriate. I've pulled out a few key quotes or topics to highlight, since the article is, ironically, four web pages long:

1. "Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

This is a fundamental compromise I think a lot of parents are reaching these days when it comes to the Internet. They think that if their child is spending five hours on MySpace, at least they're chatting with friends from school and not potential child molesters (although 1 in 5 children under 18 will be solicited by a sexual predator online). The same applies to reading. They say "well reading Harry Potter is better than not reading at all." And while I agree that the world of Hogwarts has kept a lot of kids engrossed in a book, there are just as many books geared toward a teenage audience that have just as much intellectual or entertainment value.

2. "Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as they are tested on their print reading comprehension. Starting next year, some countries will participate in new international assessments of digital literacy..."

This is an interesting concept, although the article goes on to say such testing is not being explored in the United States. It's like taking a required keyboarding class to learn home row and pump out 60 words a minute. It might lose the art of putting a literal pencil to literal paper, but over time, typing has become essential to survival in the workplace or academic environment. I would be interested to see exactly how "digital literacy" is defined.

3. When a friend introduced Nadia to fanfiction.net, she turned off the television and started reading online.Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages. Many of them have elliptical plots and are sprinkled with spelling and grammatical errors...Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be...Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said."

I wonder what Nadia considers "published." I find it encouraging that an online storytelling site can encourage young people to become writers themselves. However, I still cannot ignore the fact that almost any professor or writer will tell you that the best way to become a good writer is to be a good reader. If all she is reading is online amateur works, regardless of length, she will never be exposed to the types of more formal and sophisticated works that she could potentially aspire to create herself. And her last statement just makes me want to smack her upside the head.

4. "Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book."

Well if this is true, I've read approximately three books a day this summer. But joking aside, I still wonder if this is actually comparable data. Growing up most of the books I read were fiction, or the occasional biography. The article goes on to talk about the plurality of ideas available through reading multiple websites on the same topic. And for things like politics or world affairs, it's true that I, an avid book lover, am more likely to skim headlines and commentary than I am to sit down with 400 pages on one topic in a bound edition. But again, the art of the fiction, or even non-fiction, novel cannot be equated to reading various blogs (unless Harper Lee has suddenly returned to the literary world via a daily short story posted online).

5. Some literacy experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures, they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem.

“Kids are using sound and images so they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t necessarily language oriented,” said Donna E. Alvermann, a professor of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia. “Books aren’t out of the picture, but they’re only one way of experiencing information in the world today.”

I won't go into this one a ton, except to say it's the classic struggle for educators and students alike, trying to find textbooks and materials that are both engaging and informative, without having to dumb down a lesson plan or find a way to make everything "fun." (That's for my dad, who always complains that his students expect every class to be entertaining.)

6. "When researching the 19th-century Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for one class, he typed Taney’s name into Google and scanned the Wikipedia entry and other biographical sites. Instead of reading an entire page, he would type in a search word like “college” to find Taney’s alma mater, assembling his information nugget by nugget."

All I can think is of a Whitworth professor's threat that she would haunt the dreams of any student who used Wikipedia for research purposes. And as the 2007 AP Stylebooks notes, the Internet is "1/4 wheat and 3/4 chaff." A little dramatic, but it gets the point across.