The Internet is transforming the experience of reading and learning-through-reading. Is this transformation effecting a radical change in reading processes as readers synthesize understandings from fragments across multiple texts? Or, conversely, is the Internet merely a new place to use the same reading skills and processes developed through experience with traditional print-based media? Are the changes in reading processes a matter of degree, or are they fundamentally new? And if so, how must reading theory, research, and instruction adjust? This volume brings together distinguished experts from the fields of reading research, teacher education, educational psychology, cognitive science, rhetoric and composition, digital humanities, and educational technology to address these questions. Every question is not answered in every chapter. How could they be? But every contributor has many thoughtful things to say about a subset of these important questions. Together, they add up to a comprehensive response to the issues the field faces as it approaches what may well be―or not ―a crossroads. A website devoted to extending discussion around the book in creative (and disjunctive) ways [readingatacrossroads.net] moves it beyond the printed page.

Product Description: Presenting cutting-edge studies from various countries into the theoretical and practical issues surrounding the literacy acquisition of at-risk children, this volume focuses specifically on the utility of technology in supporting and advancing literacy among the relevant populations...read more

Within community-based digital literacies work, a fundamental question remains unanswered: Where are the stories and reflections of the researchers, scholars, and community workers themselves? We have learned much about contexts, discourses, and the multimodal nature of meaning making in literacy and digital media experiences. However, we have learned very little about those who initiate, facilitate, and direct these community-based multiliteracies and digital media projects. In Community-Based Multiliteracies & Digital Media Projects: Questioning Assumptions and Exploring Realities, contributors discuss exemplary work in the field of community-based digital literacies, while providing an insightful and critical perspective on how we begin to write ourselves into the stories of our work. In doing so, the book makes a powerful contribution to digital literacies praxis and pedagogy – within and outside of community-based contexts.

This text is written for teachers, researchers, and students at all levels of experience. It begins with a reveiw of theory and methods from new literacy studies, narrative analysis, oral history, and life course development. This opening discussion provides background and examples for designing participatory projects, conducting interviews, creating transcripts, and using reflective, narrative analysis as an interpretive tool. The five literacy narratives at the book's center are co-authored by undergraduate researchers, and they showcase the kind of findings participatory studies can produce. Each chapter illustrates a different approach to narrative analysis, and builds a theoretical story to interpret relationships between story structures and literate identities.