God not another debate created by the digital shifts. I am too worried about the housing crisis, gas prices and what their meteoric rise will do to food prices, and wrapping my mind around the thought of Barack Obama as Commander in Chief to think about all these questions.

Are photographers really photographers if they digitally alter images in Photoshop?

Is it really a relationship if we have never met anywhere but through Chat?

Do the 4 thousand people listed on my Myspace page as friends really have my best interests at heart?

And Now does reading online count as reading?

These questions are quite simple to me.

No to the Myspace friends question, and a big No to the relationship question ( jesus christ get out a littlle will ya? ) , and as for the photography question, well you may not be Robert Capa, Ansel Adams or Ed Weston or Sebstian Salgado, or Cartier Bresson, but then who the hell is ?

So yes you are still a “real” photographer if you use the clone stamp.

But perhaps you are an artist, just availing yourself of the tools of the day , to express yourself. Anyway for ions photographers have gotten the short shift in the art world, in the beginning of the last century there was an ongoing debate about whether photography was art at all, so at least this is step up for photography, arguing about the tools you use to make an image, rather than whether or not the medium is a valid art form or not. (BTW photography is a valid art form, great photographs even hang in New York’s fabulous Cathedral to ” Real Art” the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for 20 years or more matter of fact, so there!)

But back to the questions, Does reading online count as reading? Simple answer: yes? Simple answer; Not exactly. Depends what you want to glean from reading.

Thing is photography is not painting, though they are both visual arts, relationships in the flesh are vastly different than online relationships though they both connect humans to one another in important ways, and reading online is not like reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, or the Sound and the Fury, or Dicken’s Great Expectations (three books that completely altered the way I saw adult life, the way the world worked, and human relationships when I was 14 or so) or any truly great book, but then what is?

The gist of the NYTimes article states that of course online reading is different than reading a book, but the important question for them and the educational world , the crux of the matter if you will is, does it help them score higher on the “Test” ? Ugh!!! Always comes back to the “Test:”

I am going to guess yes reading online does help them score higher on the “Test” but it does not change their life the way Faulkner’s, Dickens’s and a host of other author’s writing changed mine.

One interesting piece of the article:

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Brings up something I see in my teaching when we are reading together using remote desktop in my lab, we decide where we want the learning to go. If we are reading about a shipyard in Staten Island that built ships for WWII,( this happened the other day on our SI Northshore blog) we can then search more about the WWII, or submarines, specific types of ships. Learning is not confined by the authors conceived idea of what we need to know.

Another important point the article skates around istthat we need to teach this stuff,

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, but the United States, for now, will not.

In my classroom the when we read the article on Bethelam Steel I modeled for them what I do at home when I read an articles on the Internet.. I go to the hyperlinks, ( I hyperlinked WWII in the blog article) and I search for other terms I want to know more about using tabs on my browser. We need to teach/learn how to navigate the Internet for information.

I don’t care about evaluation. I care about teaching. Evaulation is just a fancy word for test, and if educational history has taught us anything it is that if you test for something, some slick grifter like McGraw Hill will figure out how to make a quick buck on products to help “pass the test”.

The big message is that it is changing, schools are not, at least not in pace with the world. No surprise there either.

Small pieced of advice; by all means encourage your kids to be smart avid internet consumers and producers of information. Teach them what a “good ” source of information is and try to give them the skills so they can do this for themselves.

In conclusion, reading online is important and like photography in art a major, viable shift that undoubtedly will prepare kids for an increasingly digital world.

Reading books is food for the soul, and in my estimation part of becoming human and cannot be replaced, and should not be missed.

I assert there is no reason to see either as mutually exclusive of the other. But I know how it works in education. This is exactly what will happen

Can I bring up Whole language Vs Phonics/Skill Based approach to teaching reading debacle that has been going on for 40 years or so? . A cadre of dolts have insisted for years that there is one “best way” to teach reading and these two approaches to reading can never be invited to the same party, as if their names were Capulet or Montague, or Hatfield or McCoy.

Rubbish, but many smart con artists have sold billions of dollars of products based on this pointless debate with the promise of the real “best way to teach reading” so the kids can pass the “Test”. Because it is all about the kids.

Ugh!!!!

In short read everything, everywhere savagely devour as much as your ape brain can manage and don’t miss Faulkner.