digital age essay in english

Reflections on the digital age: 7 improvements that brought about a decade of positive change

The new digital age enabled billions of people to collaborate and mobilize to fight climate change. Image:  Photo by kazuend on Unsplash

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Don Tapscott C.M.

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September 2030 . The early 2020s were full of dramatic turning points in global history.

Powerful new technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain, the internet of things and the metaverse upended traditional systems, institutions and ways of life. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-22 accelerated these trends as people everywhere moved much of their lives online. The pandemic also exposed deep problems in our governments and systems for everything from supply chains to public health data.

Moreover, the early 2020s were jolted by political upheaval. Notably, in January 2021, the American election was challenged, exacerbating deep fissures in the United States and emboldening populists and extremists around the world. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, global sanctions and significant disruptions to food supplies further convulsed the global economy and exacerbated tensions. These challenges, among others, created a perfect storm and resulted in extraordinary social anxiety and unrest.

Fortunately, a miracle of sorts occurred. Driven by a deep hope for a brighter future, people everywhere began to reimagine the relationship between government and civil society, ushering in a new societal framework for the digital age. This was not some kind of academic process but rather the result of mass mobilizations around broad change.

Reflecting on the digital age

Today, looking back a decade, let’s examine seven key improvements that stemmed from this period of positive change:

1. New models of prosperity and work

Given the bifurcation of wealth and structural unemployment in many economies engendered by the new digital age, expectations of employment shifted, with people understanding that the private sector cannot provide jobs and prosperous life for all. New rules and regulations were instituted that created a strong social safety net for workers. These reforms helped mitigate the gross inequality that plagued the early years of the 21 st century. New technologies also brought more underserved people into the global economy and readied workers for lifelong learning.

2. New models of digital identity

New regulations allowed individuals to own and benefit from the digital data they create. This ended the era of “digital feudalism,” which was characterised by a centralized group of “digital landlords” who collected, aggregated and profited from the data that collectively constituted our digital identities. Furthermore, Web3 gave people the ability to harvest their data trail and use it to plan their lives, enhancing their prosperity and protecting their privacy.

3. More informed digital age society

Through public and private partnerships, media systems were rebuilt in ways that safeguarded independence and free speech. New tools were implemented that enabled citizens to track the veracity and provenance of information. This helped reduce the ability of bad-faith actors to spread false information about everything from climate change to public health. Clear rules were also set that ensured large media companies were prohibited from supporting hate on their platforms in the digital age. These reforms helped us rebuild public education systems to ensure that every young person can function fully, not just as a worker or entrepreneur, but as a citizen. Media literacy programs were also introduced into schools to help young people develop their capabilities to handle the onslaught of information and discern the truth.

4. Renewed trust in government and democracy

Innovative technologies and other modern reforms enabled us to create a new era of democracy based on public deliberation, transparency, active citizenship and accountability. Technology also helped to embed electoral promises into smart contracts that allowed citizens to track and engage in their democracies through the mobile platforms they use every day. These reforms helped boost trust in politicians and the legitimacy of our governments as leaders are now more beholden to the people and not the powerful interests that funded their campaigns in the years prior. Moreover, these improvements helped stifle radical populists and extreme politicians on both the right and left.

5. A new commitment to justice

It was clear that new technologies exacerbated racial divides, so governments and organisations throughout civil society committed to ending racial inequities. In the United States, action was taken to end the era of mass incarceration and the financial hamstringing of minority groups. The criminal subjection of indigenous peoples as evidenced by Canada’s “Residential School System” was also readdressed. These steps helped move racism, class oppression and subjugation of all peoples into the dustbin of history, along with those who perpetrate these vile relics of the past. The reforms also went past the tropes about bad apples and forgiveness. They recognized that racism and oppression are systemic and must be addressed society-wide.

6. A deep commitment to sustainability

Through major reforms, the world is now on track to reduce carbon emissions by 90% by the year 2050. The new digital age enabled billions of people to collaborate and mobilize to fight climate change. This included not just governments but businesses large and small, commuters, vacationers, employees, students, consumers – everyone – from every walk of life. Public pressure and new regulations have also forced business executives to participate responsibly in the reindustrialization of our planet and embrace carbon pricing.

7. Global interdependence

The crises of the past decade—the COVID-19 pandemic, the political legitimacy crisis, the war in Ukraine and the climate catastrophes—demonstrated that no country could succeed fully in a world that is in trouble. And while significant national differences remain, countries have embraced common interests and an understanding of a common fate. The new way of thinking also allowed governments, companies and NGOs to better organise around solving major problems like public health, education, social justice, environmental stability and peace.

These positive changes did not bring about a utopia. But they were improvements—and ones that were achieved through bottom-up struggle.

Victor Hugo said there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. In our case, there was nothing so powerful as ideas that had become necessities.

The World Economic Forum’s Platform for Shaping the Future of Digital Economy and New Value Creation helps companies and governments leverage technology to develop digitally-driven business models that ensure growth and equity for an inclusive and sustainable economy.

• The Digital Transformation for Long-Term Growth programme is bringing together industry leaders, innovators, experts and policymakers to accelerate new digital business models that create the sustainable and resilient industries of tomorrow.
• The Forum’s EDISON Alliance is mobilizing leaders from across sectors to accelerate digital inclusion . Its 1 Billion Lives Challenge harnesses cross-sector commitments and action to improve people’s lives through affordable access to digital solutions in education, healthcare, and financial services by 2025.

Contact us for more information on how to get involved.

This article is abridged from an major essay written by Don Tapscott called “A Declaration of Interdependence: Towards a New Social Contract for the Digital Age” and a recent short essay entitled “ Why We Built a Social Contract for the New Digital Age.”

Don Tapscott is author of 16 widely read books about technology in business and society, including the best-seller Blockchain Revolution , which he co-authored with his son Alex. His most recent book is Platform Revolution: Blockchain Technology as the Operating System of the Digital Age. He is Co-Founder of the Blockchain Research Institute , an Adjunct Professor at INSEAD, and Chancellor Emeritus of Trent University in Canada. He is a Member of the Order of Canada and drafted a framework for “ A New Social Contract for the Digital Economy.”

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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Digital Era — The Digital Information Age

The Digital Information Age

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Published: Jun 5, 2019

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Our tools shape our selves

For bernard stiegler, a visionary philosopher of our digital age, technics is the defining feature of human experience.

by Bryan Norton   + BIO

It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.

But for the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, one of the earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to move beyond the standard view of technology. Stiegler believed that technology is not just about the effects of digital tools and the ways that they impact our lives. It is not just about how devices are created and wielded by powerful organisations, nation-states or individuals. Our relationship with technology is about something deeper and more fundamental. It is about technics .

According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), which used the German term Technik instead of Technologie in the original title: the ‘essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ This aligns with the history of the word: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us back to something like the ancient Greek term for art – technē . The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.

This is Stiegler’s legacy. Throughout his life, he took this idea of technics, first explored while he was imprisoned for armed robbery, further than anyone else. But his ideas have often been overlooked and misunderstood, even before he died in 2020. Today, they are more necessary than ever. How else can we learn to disentangle the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences? How else can we begin to grasp the history of our strange reality?

S tiegler’s path to becoming the pre-eminent philosopher of our digital age was anything but straightforward. He was born in Villebon-sur-Yvette, south of Paris, in 1952, during a period of affluence and rejuvenation in France that followed the devastation of the Second World War. By the time he was 16, Stiegler participated in the revolutionary wave of 1968 (he would later become a member of the Communist Party), when a radical uprising of students and workers forced the president Charles de Gaulle to seek temporary refuge across the border in West Germany. However, after a new election was called and the barricades were dismantled, Stiegler became disenchanted with traditional Marxism, as well as the political trends circulating in France at the time. The Left in France seemed helplessly torn between the postwar existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the anti-humanism of Louis Althusser. While Sartre insisted on humans’ creative capacity to shape their own destiny, Althusser argued that the pervasiveness of ideology in capitalist society had left us helplessly entrenched in systems of power beyond our control. Neither of these options satisfied Stiegler because neither could account for the rapid rise of a new historical force: electronic technology. By the 1970s and ’80s, Stiegler sensed that this new technology was redefining our relationship to ourselves, to the world, and to each other. To account for these new conditions, he believed the history of philosophy would have to be rewritten from the ground up, from the perspective of technics. Neither existentialism nor Marxism nor any other school of philosophy had come close to acknowledging the fundamental link between human existence and the evolutionary history of tools.

Stiegler describes his time in prison as one of radical self-exploration and philosophical experimentation

In the decade after 1968, Stiegler opened a jazz club in Toulouse that was shut down by the police a few years later for illegal prostitution. Desperate to make ends meet, Stiegler turned to robbing banks to pay off his debts and feed his family. In 1978, he was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to five years in prison. A high-school dropout who was never comfortable in institutional settings, Stiegler requested his own cell when he first arrived in prison, and went on a hunger strike until it was granted. After the warden finally acquiesced, Stiegler began taking note of how his relationship to the outside world was mediated through reading and writing. This would be a crucial realisation. Through books, paper and pencils, he was able to interface with people and places beyond the prison walls.

It was during his time behind bars that Stiegler began to study philosophy more intently, devouring any books he could get his hands on. In his philosophical memoir Acting Out (2009), Stiegler describes his time in prison as one of radical self-exploration and philosophical experimentation. He read classic works of Greek philosophy, studied English and memorised modern poetry, but the book that really drew his attention was Plato’s Phaedrus. In this dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, Plato outlines his concept of anamnesis , a theory of learning that states the acquisition of new knowledge is just a process of remembering what we once knew in a previous life. Caught in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, we forget what we know each time we are reborn. For Stiegler, this idea of learning as recollection would become less spiritual and more material: learning and memory are tied inextricably to technics. Through the tools we use – including books, writing, archives – we can store and preserve vast amounts of knowledge.

After an initial attempt at writing fiction in prison, Stiegler enrolled in a philosophy programme designed for inmates. While still serving his sentence, he finished a degree in philosophy and corresponded with prominent intellectuals such as the philosopher and translator Gérard Granel, who was a well-connected professor at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail (later known as the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès). Granel introduced Stiegler to some of the most prominent figures in philosophy at the time, including Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida . Lyotard would oversee Stiegler’s master’s thesis after his eventual release; Derrida would supervise his doctoral dissertation, completed in 1993, which was reworked and published a year later as the first volume in his Technics and Time series. With the help of these philosophers and their novel ideals, Stiegler began to reshape his earlier political commitment to Marxist materialism, seeking to account for the ways that new technologies shape the world.

B y the start of the 1970s, a growing number of philosophers and political theorists began calling into question the immediacy of our lived experience. The world around us was no longer seen by these thinkers as something that was simply given, as it had been for phenomenologists such as Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. The world instead presented itself as a built environment composed of things such as roads, power plants and houses, all made possible by political institutions, cultural practices and social norms. And so, reality also appeared to be a construction, not a given.

One of the French philosophers who interrogated the immediacy of reality most closely was Louis Althusser. In his essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ published in 1970, years before Stiegler was taught by him, Althusser suggests that ideology is not something that an individual believes in, but something that goes far beyond the scale of a single person, or even a community. Just as we unthinkingly turn around when we hear our name shouted from behind, ideology has a hold on us that is both automatic and unconscious – it seeps in from outside. Michel Foucault , a former student of Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, developed a theory of power that functions in a similar way. In Discipline and Punish (1975) and elsewhere, Foucault argues that social and political power is not concentrated in individuals but is produced by ‘discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’. Foucault’s insight was to show how power shapes every facet of the world, from classroom interactions between a teacher and student to negotiations of a trade agreement between representatives of two different nations. From this perspective, power is constituted in and through material practices, rather than something possessed by individual subjects.

We don’t simply ‘use’ our digital tools – they enter and pharmacologically change us, like medicinal drugs

These are the foundations on which Stiegler assembled his idea of technics. Though he appreciated the ways that Foucault and Althusser had tried to account for technology, he remained dissatisfied by the lack of attention to particular types of technology – not to mention the fact that neither thinker had offered any real alternatives to the forms of power they described. In his book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2008), Stiegler explains that he was able to move beyond Foucault with the help of his mentor Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon . In his essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1972), Derrida began developing the idea as he explored how our ability to write can create and undermine (‘cure’ and ‘poison’) an individual subject’s sense of identity. For Derrida, the act of writing – itself a kind of technology – has a Janus-faced relationship to individual memory. Though it allows us to store knowledge and experience across vast periods of time, writing disincentivises us from practising our own mental capacity for recollection. The written word short-circuits the immediate connection between lived experience and internal memory. It ‘cures’ our cognitive limits, but also ‘poisons’ our cognition by limiting our abilities.

In the late 20th century, Stiegler began applying this idea to new media technologies, such as television, which led to the development of a concept he called pharmacology – an idea that suggests we don’t simply ‘use’ our digital tools. Instead, they enter and pharmacologically change us, like medicinal drugs. Today, we can take this analogy even further. The internet presents us with a massive archive of formatted, readily accessible information. Sites such as Wikipedia contain terabytes of knowledge, accumulated and passed down over millennia. At the same time, this exchange of unprecedented amounts of information enables the dissemination of an unprecedented amount of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and other harmful content. The digital is both a poison and a cure, as Derrida would say.

This kind of polyvalence led Stiegler to think more deliberately about technics rather than technology. For Stiegler, there are inherent risks in thinking in terms of the latter: the more ubiquitous that digital technologies become in our lives, the easier it is to forget that these tools are social products that have been constructed by our fellow humans. How we consume music, the paths we take to get from point A to point B , how we share ourselves with others, all of these aspects of daily life have been reshaped by new technologies and the humans that produce them. Yet we rarely stop to reflect on what this means for us. Stiegler believed this act of forgetting creates a deep crisis for all facets of human experience. By forgetting, we lose our all-important capacity to imagine alternative ways of living. The future appears limited, even predetermined, by new technology.

I n the English-speaking world, Stiegler is best known for his first book Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994). In the first sentence, he highlights the vital link between our understanding of the technologies we use and our capacity to imagine the future. ‘The object of this work is technics,’ he writes, ‘apprehended as the horizon of all possibility to come and of all possibility of a future.’ He views our relationship with tools as the determining force for all future possibilities; technics is the defining feature of human experience, one that has been overlooked by philosophers from Plato and Aristotle down to the present. While René Descartes, Husserl and other thinkers asked important questions about consciousness and lived experience (phenomenology), and the nature of truth (metaphysics) or knowledge (epistemology), they failed to account for the ways that technologies help us find – or guide us toward – answers to these questions. In the history of philosophy, ‘Technics is the unthought,’ according to Stiegler.

To further stress the importance of technics, Stiegler turns to the creation myth told by the Greek poet Hesiod in Works and Days , written around 700 BCE . During the world’s creation, Zeus asks the Titan Epimetheus to distribute individual talents to each species. Epimetheus gives wings to birds so they can fly, and fins to fish so they can swim. By the time he gets to humans, however, Epimetheus has no talents left over. Epimetheus, whose name (according to Stiegler) means the ‘forgetful one’ in Greek, turns to his brother Prometheus for help. Prometheus then steals fire from the gods, presenting it to humans in place of a biological talent. Humans, once more, are born out of an act of forgetting, just like in Plato’s theory of anamnesis. The difference with Hesiod’s story is that technics here provides a material basis for human experience. Bereft of any physiological talents, Homo sapiens must survive by using tools, beginning with fire.

Factories, server farms and even psychotropic drugs possess the capacity to poison or cure our world

The pharmacology of technics, for Stiegler, presents opportunities for positive or negative relationships with tools. ‘But where the danger lies,’ writes the poet Friedrich Hölderlin in a quote Stiegler often turned to, ‘also grows the saving power.’ While Derrida focuses on the ability of the written word to subvert the sovereignty of the individual subject, Stiegler widens this understanding of pharmacology to include a variety of media and technologies. Not just writing, but factories, server farms and even psychotropic drugs possess the pharmacological capacity to poison or cure our world and, crucially, our understanding of it. Technological development can destroy our sense of ourselves as rational, coherent subjects, leading to widespread suffering and destruction. But tools can also provide us with a new sense of what it means to be human, leading to new modes of expression and cultural practices.

In Symbolic Misery, Volume 2: The Catastrophe of the Sensible (2015) , Stiegler considers the effect that new technologies, especially those accompanying industrialisation, have had on art and music. Industry, defined by mass production and standardisation, is often regarded as antithetical to artistic freedom and expression. But Stiegler urges us to take a closer look at art history to see how artists responded to industrialisation. In response to the standardising effects of new machinery, for example, Marcel Duchamp and other members of the 20th-century avant-garde used industrial tools to invent novel forms of creative expression. In the painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2 (1912), Duchamp employed the new temporal perspectives made possible by photography and cinema to paint a radically different kind of portrait. Inspired by the camera’s ability to capture movement, frame by frame, Duchamp paints a nude model who appears in multiple instants at once, like a series of time-lapse photographs superimposed onto each other. The image became an immediate sensation, an icon of modernity and the resulting entanglement of art and industrial technology.

Technical innovations are never without political and social implications for Stiegler. The phonograph, for example, may have standardised classical musical performances after its invention in the late 1800s, but it also contributed to the development of jazz, a genre that was popular among musicians who were barred from accessing the elite world of classical music. Thanks to the gramophone, Black musicians such as the pianist and composer Duke Ellington were able to learn their instruments by ear, without first learning to read musical notation. The phonograph’s industrialisation of musical performance paradoxically led to the free-flowing improvisation of jazz performers.

T echnics draws our attention to the world-making capabilities of our tools, while reminding us of the constructed nature of our technological reality. Stiegler’s capacious understanding of technics, encompassing everything from early agricultural tools to the television set, does not disregard new innovations, either. In 2006, Stiegler founded the Institute for Research and Innovation, an organisation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris devoted to exploring the impact digital technology has on contemporary society. Stiegler’s belief in the power of technology to shape the world around us has often led to the charge that he is a techno-determinist who believes the entire course of history is shaped by tools and machines. It’s true that Stiegler thinks technology defines who we are as humans, but this process does not always lock us into predetermined outcomes. Instead, it simultaneously provides us with a material horizon of possible experience. Stiegler’s theory of technics urges us to rethink the history of philosophy, art and politics in order that we might better understand how our world has been shaped by technology. And by acquiring this historical consciousness, he hopes that we will ultimately design better tools, using technology to improve our world in meaningful ways.

This doesn’t mean Stiegler is a techno-optimist, either, who blindly sees digital technology as a panacea for our problems. One particular concern he expresses about digital technology is its capacity to standardise the world we inhabit. Big data, for Stiegler, threatens to limit our sense of what is possible, rather than broadening our horizons and opening new opportunities for creative expression. Just as Hollywood films in the 20th century manufactured and distributed the ideology of consumer capitalism to the rest of the globe, Stiegler suggests that tech firms such as Google and Apple often disseminate values that are hidden from view. A potent example of this can be found in the first fully AI-judged beauty pageant. As discussed by the sociologist Ruha Benjamin in her book Race After Technology (2019), the developers of Beauty.AI advertised the contest as an opportunity for beauty to be judged in a way that was free of prejudice. What they found, however, was that the tool they had designed exhibited an overwhelming preference for white contestants.

The digital economy doesn’t always offer desirable alternatives as former ways of working and living are destroyed

In Automatic Society, Volume 1: The Future of Work (2016), Stiegler shows how big data can standardise our world by reorganising work and employment. Digital tools were first seen as a disruptive force that could break the monotonous rhythms of large industry, but the rise of flexible forms of employment in the gig economy has created a massive underclass. A new proletariat of Uber drivers and other precarious workers now labour under extremely unstable conditions. They are denied even the traditional protections of working-class employment. The digital economy doesn’t always offer desirable alternatives as former ways of working and living are destroyed.

A particularly pressing concern Stiegler took up before his untimely death in 2020 is the capacity of digital tools to surveil us. The rise of big tech firms such as Google and Amazon has meant the intrusion of surveillance tools into every aspect of our lives. Smart homes have round-the-clock video feeds, and marketing companies spend billions collecting data about everything we do online. In his last two books published in English, The Neganthropocene ( 2018 ) and The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism ( 2019 ), Stiegler suggests that the growth of widespread surveillance tools is at odds with the pharmacological promise of new technology. Though tracking tools can be useful by, for example, limiting the spread of harmful diseases, they are also used to deny us worlds of possible experience.

Technology, for better or worse, affects every aspect of our lives. Our very sense of who we are is shaped and reshaped by the tools we have at our disposal. The problem, for Stiegler, is that when we pay too much attention to our tools, rather than how they are developed and deployed, we fail to understand our reality. We become trapped, merely describing the technological world on its own terms and making it even harder to untangle the effects of digital technologies and our everyday experiences. By encouraging us to pay closer attention to this world-making capacity, with its potential to harm and heal, Stiegler is showing us what else is possible. There are other ways of living, of being, of evolving. It is technics, not technology, that will give the future its new face.

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What is the digital age and what does it mean.

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The Digital Age

As books like Dignity In The Digital Age (Simon & Schuster) 2022) by Congressman Ro Khanna begin to appear, as talk of “the digital age” becomes commonplace, and as executives  grapple with “digital disruption” as their top management challenge, it can seem odd that no one seems to know what exactly is “the digital age”, or what it means.

The Birth Of The Industrial Era

Some light can be shed on the cause of this silence by looking at the arrival of the last great age, the Industrial Era, some 250 years ago. Even in retrospect, there is no agreement among historians as to what we are talking about with “the Industrial Era”.

Some historians see it primarily as an economic phenomenon that began in Britain, starting with mechanized spinning in the 1780s, and only reaching the rest of Europe by the mid-19th century . Others see it as an engineering and technological phenomenon, starting with mechanized spinning in the 1780s with high rates of growth in steam power and iron production occurring after 1800. Some see it as the beginning of management as a kind of expertise. Some writers see it as an offshoot of improved agricultural productivity that freed up agriculture workers to be employed elsewhere the economy. Others adopt a gradualist perspective and suggest that there was no sudden transformation at all, but rather a confluence of many factors. Each discipline tends to pursue its own perspective  as “the” way to understand the era, to some extent distracting from the fact that the era was the result of “all of the above.’

Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations (1776)

Back then, in the 1770s, describing all the implications of the new era would have been like trying to tell the lords and ladies living in luxury on their  grand manors and agricultural estates, with all their tenant farmers touching their forelocks as these aristocrats drove by in their grand horse-drawn carriages, that they were going to be replaced by crass upstart businessmen, who would be tearing their aristocratic world apart, driving their tenant farmers off their estates and into the cities to undertake boring repetitive work known as "jobs.” Even less plausible would be telling the lords and ladies of their eventual destiny in the new era as tour guides of their grand manors for the hoi polloi. It would have been a story that would have been too complex and too horrible to contemplate, let alone write about.

The Scottish philosopher and economist, Adam Smith, took a stab at it, but even he could only see or tell part of the story in his masterwork, The Wealth of Nations (1776). There was only so much news that was fit to print. And a lot of the big things had yet to happen. A factory that made pins more efficiently than before hardly seemed like headline news.

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Even so, Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) covered a lot of ground. It was part economics textbook, part management textbook, part finance textbook, part social commentary on how this was all playing out, and part an example of early futurology. That combination was possibly the best that could be done at the time with the onset of a phenomenon as vast as a new age.

Almost by definition, any book that tried to describe the whole shebang would not have fitted into any existing category of book. If The Wealth of Nations book had been shoehorned into any existing category of book, it would never have had the impact that it did have. It was because the book was multi-faceted that readers could begin to grasp the enormous implications of what had begun to happen.

After a few decades, the landscape became clearer. For those with eyes to see, the era felt like a revolution. Thus in 1813, the Scottish statistician Patrick Colquhoun wrote in “ A Treatise on the wealth, power and resources of the British empire ” (London, 1813): “It is impossible to contemplate the progress of manufactures in Great Britain within the last thirty years without wonder and astonishment. Its rapidity, particularly since the commencement of the French revolutionary war, exceeds all credibility. the improvement of the steam engines, but above all the facilities afforded to the great branches of the woolen and cotton [manufactures] by ingenious machinery, invigorated by capital and skill, are beyond all calculation, these machines are rendered applicable to silk, linen, hosiery and various other branches.”

Thus, by the early 1800s, the well-to-do could now begin to experience the impact of the new era, though it would be another half century before the average citizen would see major gains.

Explaining the Digital Age

Today, with the emerging new age, which is most commonly—and inaccurately—called “the digital age” , each book or article has so far covered tiny fragments of the whole. There is writing on the amazing new technologies that are now available. There is writing on how our lives are being transformed . There is writing on aspects of the management changes that are needed to succeed with those technologies. There is writing on how corporate finance has been transformed. There is writing on how individual sectors have been affected. There is writing on the potential gains that are available, as well as on the failure of many existing firms to take advantage of those opportunities, resulting in “digital disruption .” There is writing on the need to update the foundations of economics to incorporate what is happening. There is writing on the missteps of the digital winners and the risks of the new age, as well as what should be done to regulate or ameliorate some of the negative impacts. There is futurist writing that talks about where this is all heading .

What is lacking, and what is needed, is writing that presents a coherent picture of all the various aspects of the new age in a way that it can be understood, and dealt with, rationally, in its entirety.

And read also:

Microsoft CEO Nadella’s Brilliant Depiction Of The Digital Age

How To Thrive Amid Digital Disruption

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Student Writing in the Digital Age

Essays filled with “LOL” and emojis? College student writing today actually is longer and contains no more errors than it did in 1917.

“Kids these days” laments are nothing new, but the substance of the lament changes. Lately, it has become fashionable to worry that “kids these days” will be unable to write complex, lengthy essays. After all, the logic goes, social media and text messaging reward short, abbreviated expression. Student writing will be similarly staccato, rushed, or even—horror of horrors—filled with LOL abbreviations and emojis.

In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. Students in first-year composition classes are, on average, writing longer essays (from an average of 162 words in 1917, to 422 words in 1986, to 1,038 words in 2006), using more complex rhetorical techniques, and making no more errors than those committed by freshman in 1917. That’s according to a longitudinal study of student writing by Andrea A. Lunsford and Karen J. Lunsford, “ Mistakes Are a Fact of Life: A National Comparative Study. ”

In 2006, two rhetoric and composition professors, Lunsford and Lunsford, decided, in reaction to government studies worrying that students’ literacy levels were declining, to crunch the numbers and determine if students were making more errors in the digital age.

They began by replicating previous studies of American college student errors. There were four similar studies over the past century. In 1917, a professor analyzed the errors in 198 college student papers; in 1930, researchers completed similar studies of 170 and 20,000 papers, respectively. In 1986, Robert Connors and Andrea Lunsford (of the 2006 study) decided to see if contemporary students were making more or fewer errors than those earlier studies showed, and analyzed 3,000 student papers from 1984. The 2006 study (published in 2008) follows the process of these earlier studies and was based on 877 papers (one of the most interesting sections of “Mistakes Are a Fact of Life” discusses how new IRB regulations forced researchers to work with far fewer papers than they had before.

Remarkably, the number of errors students made in their papers stayed consistent over the past 100 years. Students in 2006 committed roughly the same number of errors as students did in 1917. The average has stayed at about 2 errors per 100 words.

What has changed are the kinds of errors students make. The four 20th-century studies show that, when it came to making mistakes, spelling tripped up students the most. Spelling was by far the most common error in 1986 and 1917, “the most frequent student mistake by some 300 percent.” Going down the list of “top 10 errors,” the patterns shifted: Capitalization was the second most frequent error 1917; in 1986, that spot went to “no comma after introductory element.”

In 2006, spelling lost its prominence, dropping down the list of errors to number five.  Spell-check and similar word-processing tools are the undeniable cause. But spell-check creates new errors, too: The new number-one error in student writing is now “wrong word.” Spell-check, as most of us know, sometimes corrects spelling to a different word than intended; if the writing is not later proof-read, this computer-created error goes unnoticed. The second most common error in 2006 was “incomplete or missing documentation,” a result, the authors theorize, of a shift in college assignments toward research papers and away from personal essays.

Additionally, capitalization errors have increased, perhaps, as Lunsford and Lunsford note, because of neologisms like eBay and iPod. But students have also become much better at punctuation and apostrophes, which were the third and fifth most common errors in 1917. These had dropped off the top 10 list by 2006.

The study found no evidence for claims that kids are increasingly using “text speak” or emojis in their papers. Lunsford and Lunsford did not find a single such instance of this digital-era error. Ironically, they did find such text speak and emoticons in teachers’ comments to students. (Teachers these days?)

The most startling discovery Lunsford and Lunsford made had nothing to do with errors or emojis. They found that college students are writing much more and submitting much longer papers than ever. The average college essay in 2006 was more than double the length of the average 1986 paper, which was itself much longer than the average length of papers written earlier in the century. In 1917, student papers averaged 162 words; in 1930, the average was 231 words. By 1986, the average grew to 422 words. And just 20 years later, in 2006, it jumped to 1,038 words.

Why are 21st-century college students writing so much more? Computers allow students to write faster. (Other advances in writing technology may explain the upticks between 1917, 1930, and 1986. Ballpoint pens and manual and electric typewriters allowed students to write faster than inkwells or fountain pens.) The internet helps, too: Research shows that computers connected to the internet lead K-12 students to “conduct more background research for their writing; they write, revise, and publish more; they get more feedback on their writing; they write in a wider variety of genres and formats; and they produce higher quality writing.”

The digital revolution has been largely text-based. Over the course of an average day, Americans in 2006 wrote more than they did in 1986 (and in 2015 they wrote more than in 2006). New forms of written communication—texting, social media, and email—are often used instead of spoken ones—phone calls, meetings, and face-to-face discussions. With each text and Facebook update, students become more familiar with and adept at written expression. Today’s students have more experience with writing, and they practice it more than any group of college students in history.

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In shifting from texting to writing their English papers, college students must become adept at code-switching, using one form of writing for certain purposes (gossiping with friends) and another for others (summarizing plots). As Kristen Hawley Turner writes in “ Flipping the Switch: Code-Switching from Text Speak to Standard English ,” students do know how to shift from informal to formal discourse, changing their writing as occasions demand. Just as we might speak differently to a supervisor than to a child, so too do students know that they should probably not use “conversely” in a text to a friend or “LOL” in their Shakespeare paper. “As digital natives who have had access to computer technology all of their lives, they often demonstrate in theses arenas proficiencies that the adults in their lives lack,” Turner writes. Instructors should “teach them to negotiate the technology-driven discourse within the confines of school language.”

Responses to Lunsford and Lunsford’s study focused on what the results revealed about mistakes in writing: Error is often in the eye of the beholder . Teachers mark some errors and neglect to mention (or find) others. And, as a pioneering scholar of this field wrote in the 1970s, context is key when analyzing error: Students who make mistakes are not “indifferent…or incapable” but “beginners and must, like all beginners, learn by making mistakes.”

College students are making mistakes, of course, and they have much to learn about writing. But they are not making more mistakes than did their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Since they now use writing to communicate with friends and family, they are more comfortable expressing themselves in words. Plus, most have access to technology that allows them to write faster than ever. If Lunsford and Lunsford’s findings about the average length of student papers stays true, today’s college students will graduate with more pages of completed prose to their name than any other generation.

If we want to worry about college student writing, then perhaps what we should attend to is not clipped, abbreviated writing, but overly verbose, rambling writing. It might be that editing skills—deciding what not to say, and what to delete—may be what most ails the kids these days.

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How the Digital Age Is Affecting Students

Five books that give insight into how social media and technology are shaping today’s students and their learning.

Teachers don’t have to look far to see how changes in technology and social media are shaping students and influencing classrooms. We watch kids obsess over the latest apps as they chat before class. We marvel at the newest slang edging its way into student essays, and wonder at the ways constant smartphone communication is shaping students’ friendships, bullying, and even study habits.

To understand the internet-savvy students who fill our classrooms and the changing landscape of social media they inhabit, we need more than hot new gadgets or expensive educational software. The book list below is a starting point if you’re looking for insight into how the digital age is shaping students and ideas about how you can respond in the classroom.

Each book was chosen for its combination of research, story, and applicability to the classroom. Grab one or two to help you invent new strategies to reach students or reimagine your application of technology in your classroom.

Social Media

If you’ve ever wondered what students are doing with all their time on the internet, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens  is for you. Author danah boyd dissects how and why kids rush to the online world. Using student interviews and stories, boyd describes the ways youngsters use social media to connect, escape, and eke out a little privacy away from their parents and teachers. She includes a chapter on how the internet has shaped young people’s understanding of personal and public spaces. Read this book if you want to help students optimize the knowledge and skills they already have as digital natives.

A clinical psychologist and researcher at MIT, Sherry Turkle isn’t against the smartphones our students love so much. But she is worried that the obsession with phones—and the texting and social media posting they enable—is impacting in-person discussion and deep conversation. In her book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age , Turkle claims that students’ communication skills have changed. Her suggestions for taking back in-person conversation in a digital world can shape collaborative classrooms and guide teachers on how to help students improve peer-to-peer interactions.

Social media and the free flow of information have also influenced the language we use every day. In A World Without ‘Whom’: The Essential Guide to Language in the Buzzfeed Age , Emmy Favilla lays out a case for language shaped by the internet. This entertaining and informative 2017 book is peppered with pop culture examples ready for use in class, though like all pop culture references they’ll quickly become dated. Favilla’s writing is pragmatic; she offers advice on where to hold the line on traditional language and when readability and appeal to a new generation might be more important. As Favilla puts it, “We’re all just trying to be heard here.” The book is a timely reminder that social-media-fueled language innovation deserves some classroom discussion.

If you’re eager to understand larger trends affecting young students, pick up Jean Twenge’s iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood . Drawing from large data sets and longitudinal studies, Twenge examines everything from SAT scores to rates of loneliness. Her research-heavy book offers helpful hints about the impact of technology and other cultural changes. Read this book if you want to brainstorm about how to adapt classes and school structures to meet student needs. To bring students in on the conversation, consider using Twenge’s easy-to-read graphs as discussion kick-starters or as a way to provide historical context to current trends.

If you want to reimagine the way computers and video games might be used in the classroom, check out David Williamson Shaffer’s book How Computer Games Help Children Learn . A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Shaffer believes that video games can help schools foster creative thinking, problem solving, and strategic decision making. After all, making mistakes and trying out innovative strategies are less risky in a game than in real life. And even reluctant learners will often dive eagerly into video games. A lot has changed since the book’s publication in 2007, but its ideas—about what students can learn from video games, how video games engage students, and what issues to avoid—can guide you toward thoughtful, effective video game use.

Our students are steeped in the internet, social media, and all types of technological innovations, and it’s time for schools and teachers to carefully examine how these things interact with curriculum and learning.

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Reading in a digital age

By Naomi S. Baron | Oct 9, 2017 | Feature Article

Even millennials acknowledge that whether you read on paper or a digital screen affects your attention on words and the ideas behind them.What are the implications for how we teach?

The digital revolution has done much to reshape how students read, write, and access information in school. Once-handwritten essays are now word-processed. Encyclopedias have yielded to online searches. One-size-fits-all teaching is tilting toward personalized learning. And a growing number of assignments ask students to read on digital screens rather than in print.

Yet how much do we actually know about the educational implications of this emphasis on using digital media? In particular, when it comes to reading, do digital screens make it easier or harder for students to pay careful attention to words and the ideas behind them, or is there no difference from print?

Over the past decade, researchers in various countries have been comparing how much readers comprehend and remember when they read in each medium. In nearly all cases, there was essentially no difference between the testing scenarios. (See Baron, Calixte, & Havewala, 2017 for a review.) However, such findings need to be taken with a grain of salt. These studies have typically focused on captive research subjects, mostly college students who commonly are paid to participate in an experiment or who participate to fill a course requirement. Ask them to read passages and then answer SAT-style comprehension questions, and they tend to do so reasonably carefully, whether they read on a screen or on paper. Under those conditions, it’s not surprising that their performance would be consistent across platforms.

But the devil may lie in the details. When researchers have altered the testing conditions or the types of questions they ask, discrepancies have appeared, suggesting that the medium does in fact matter. For example, Ackerman and Goldsmith (2011) observed that when participants could choose how much time to spend on digital versus print reading, they devoted less to reading onscreen and had lower comprehension scores. Schugar and colleagues (2011) found that participants reported using fewer study strategies (such as highlighting, note-taking, or bookmarking) when reading digitally. Kaufman and Flanagan (2016) noted that when reading in print, study participants did better answering abstract questions that required inferential reasoning; by contrast, participants scored better reading digitally when answering concrete questions. Researchers at the University of Reading (Dyson & Haselgrove, 2000) observed that reading comprehension declined when students were scrolling as they read, rather than focusing on stationary chunks of text.

What about research with younger children? Schugar and Schugar found that middle grades students comprehended more when reading print than when using e-books on an iPad (Paul, 2014) — interactive features of the digital platform apparently distracted readers from the textual content. However, the same researchers observed that among K-6 readers, e-books generated a higher level of engagement (Schugar, Smith, & Schugar, 2013). Working with high school students in Norway, Anne Mangen and her colleagues (2013) concluded that print yielded better comprehension scores. Mangen argues that print makes it easier for students to create cognitive maps of the entire passage they are reading.

For educators, though, the real question is not how students perform in experiments. More important is what they do when reading on their own: Do they take as much time reading in both media? Do they read as carefully? In short, in their everyday lives, how much and what sort of attention do they pay to what they are reading?

Questions about reading in a digital age

History is strewn with examples of people worrying that new technologies will undermine older skills. In the late 5th century BC, when the spread of writing was challenging an earlier oral tradition, Plato expressed concern (in the Phaedrus) that “trust in writing . . . will discourage the use of [our] own memory.” Writing has proven an invaluable technology. Digital media have as well. These new tools make it possible for millions of people to have access to texts that would otherwise be beyond their reach, financially or physically. Computer-driven devices enable us to expand our scope of educational and recreational experience to include audio and visual materials, often on demand. But as with writing, it’s an empirical question what the pros and cons are of the old and the new. Writing is a vital cultural tool, but there is little doubt it discourages memory skills.

When we think about the educational implications of digital reading, we need to study the issue with open minds, not make presuppositions about advantages and disadvantages.

To help forward this exploration, my own research has been tackling three intertwined questions about reading in a digital age. First, what do readers tell us directly about their print versus digital reading habits? Second, what else do readers reveal about their attitudes toward reading in print versus onscreen, and what can we infer about how well they pay attention when reading in each medium? The third question is more broad-stroked: In the current technological climate, are we changing the very notion of what it means to read?

Students are more likely to multitask when reading onscreen than in print — especially in the U.S. where 85% reported multitasking when reading digitally, compared with 26% for print.

I’ve been investigating these questions for about a half-dozen years, beginning with some pilot studies in the U.S. (Baron, 2013) and continuing with surveys (between 2013 and 2015) of more than 400 university students from the U.S., Japan, Germany, Slovakia, and India. Participants were enrolled in classes taught by colleagues, or they were classmates of one of my research assistants. Everyone was between age 18 and 26 (mean age: 21). About two-thirds were female and one-third male. (For study details, see Baron, Calixte, & Havewala, 2017.) Though my study participants were university students, I suspect that most issues at play are relevant for younger readers who have mastered the skills we would expect of middle-school students and above. Use of digital technologies is now ubiquitous among both adolescents and young adults, and teachers at all levels are increasingly assigning e-books (or online articles) rather than print.

The study consisted of three sets of questions. In the first set, we asked students:

• How much time they spent reading in print versus onscreen;• Whether cost was a factor in their choice of reading platform;
• In which medium they were more likely to reread;
• Whether text length influenced their platform choice;
• How likely they were to multitask when reading in each medium; and
• In which medium they felt they concentrated best.

In the next set, we asked what students liked most — and least — about reading in each medium. Finally, we gave participants the opportunity to offer additional comments.

Print versus digital reading habits

Here are the main takeaways of what students in the study reported in the first set of questions about their reading habits:

Time reading in print versus onscreen

Overall, participants reported spending about two-thirds of their time reading in print, both for schoolwork and pleasure. There was consider-able variation across countries, with the Japanese doing the most reading onscreen. In considering these numbers, especially for academic reading, we need to keep in mind that sometimes reading assignments are only available in one medium or the other, so students are not making independent choices.

More than four-fifths of the participants said that if cost were the same, they would choose to read in print rather than onscreen. This finding was particularly strong for academic reading and especially high in Germany (94%). Students (and for that matter, K-12 school systems) often cite cost as the reason for selecting digital rather than print textbooks. It’s therefore telling that if cost is removed from the equation, digital millennials commonly prefer print.

Not everyone in the study reread — either for schoolwork or for pleasure. Among those who did, six out of ten indicated they were more likely to reread print. Fewer than two out of ten choose digital, while the rest said both media were equally likely. Rereading is relevant to the issue of attention since a second reading offers opportunities for review or reflection.

Text length

When the amount of text is short, participants displayed mixed preferences, both when reading academic works or for pleasure. However, with longer texts, more than 86% preferred print for schoolwork and 78% when reading for pleasure. Preference for reading longer works in print has been reported in multiple studies. As Farinosi and colleagues (2016) observed, “If the text requires strategic reading, such as papers, essays, books, the paper version is preferred” (p. 417).

Multitasking

Students reported being more likely to multitask when reading onscreen than in print. Responses from the U.S. participants were particularly stark, with 85% indicating they multitasked when reading digitally, compared with 26% for print. The detrimental cognitive effects of multitasking are well known (e.g., Carrier et al., 2015). We can reasonably infer that students who multitask while reading are less likely to be paying close attention to the text than those who don’t.

Concentration

The most dramatic finding for this set of questions came in response to the query about the platform on which students felt they concentrated best. Selecting from print, computer, tablet, e-reader, or mobile phone, 92% said it was easiest to concentrate when reading print.

Paying attention to reading

Students provided open-ended comments to the second set of questions, which asked what they liked most and least about reading in print and onscreen. In these responses, students praised the physicality of print but grumbled that it was not easily searchable. They complained that reading onscreen gave them eyestrain but enjoyed its convenience.

They also had telling things to say about the cognitive consequences of reading in hardcopy versus onscreen. Of all the “like least” comments about reading digitally, 21% were cognitive in nature. Nearly all these comments talked about perceived distraction or lack of concentration. U.S. students were especially vocal: Nearly 43% of their “like least” comments about reading digitally concerned distraction or lack of concentration. When asked what they “liked most” about reading in print, respondents said, “It’s easier to focus,” I “feel like the content sticks in the head more easily,” “reading in hardcopy makes me focus more on what I am reading,” and “I feel like I understand it more [when reading in print].”

In their additional comments (the last question category), study participants wrote about how long it takes to read the same length text on the two platforms. One student observed, “It takes more time to read the same number of pages in print comparing to digital,” suggesting that the mindset she brings to reading print involves greater (and more time-consuming) attention than the one she brings to reading digitally. In fact, in an earlier pilot study, one student griped that what she “liked least” about reading hardcopy was that “it takes me longer because I read more carefully.”

Unexpectedly, several students said reading in print was boring. In response to the question of what they “liked least” about reading in print, one participant complained that “It becomes boring sometimes,” while another wrote, “it takes time to sit down and focus on the material.” Common sense suggests that if students anticipate that text in print will be boring, they will likely approach it with reduced enthusiasm. Diminished interest sometimes translates into skimming rather than reading carefully and sometimes not doing the assigned reading at all.

Is the nature of reading changing?

The biggest challenge to reading attentively on digital platforms is that we largely use digital devices for quick action: Look up an address, send a Facebook status update, grab the news headlines (but not the meat of the article), multitask between online shopping and writing an essay. When we go to read something substantive on a laptop or e-reader, tablet, or mobile phone, our now-habitualized instincts tell us to move things along.

Coupled with this mindset is an evolving sense that writing is for the here-and-now, not the long haul. Since written communication first emerged (in different places, under different circumstances, at different times), one of its consistent attributes has been that it is a durable form of communication that one we can reread or refer to. Today, a nexus of forces is making writing seem more ephemeral.

A recent Pew Research Center study of news-reading habits (Mitchell et al., 2016) reported that among 18- to 29-year-olds, 50% said they often got news online, compared with only 5% who read print newspapers. While some of us save print news clippings, few archive their online versions. Vast numbers of students choose to rent textbooks (whether digitally or in print), which means the book is out of sight and not available for future consultation after the semester ends. True, K-12 students have long been giving back their print books at the end of the year, and college students have commonly sold books they don’t wish to keep. But my conversations now with students who are dedicated readers indicate they don’t see their college years as the time to start building a personal library.

If cost is removed from the equation, digital millennials commonly prefer print.

What about public or school libraries? Increasingly, budgets are being shifted from print to digital materials. The three primary motivations are space, cost, and convenience. To grow the collection, you don’t need to build another wing. Digital is (commonly) less expensive. And users can access the collection any time of day and anywhere in the world with only an internet connection.

All true. But there are consequences. When I access a library book digitally, I find myself “using” it, not reading it. I make a quick foray to find, for instance, the reference I need for an article I’m writing, and then I exit. Had I held the physical book in my hand, it might have taken longer to find the reference, but I probably would have read entire paragraphs or chapters. Microsoft researcher Abigail Sellen has made a related observation. In studying how people perceive material they read (or store) online, she says they “think of using an e-book, not owning an e-book” (cited in Jabr, 2013).

Savvy students are aware of how the computer FIND function lets them zero in on a specific word or phrase so as to answer a question they have been asked to write about, blithely dismissing the obligation to actually read the full assigned text. Using, not reading. The more we swap physical books for digital ones, the easier it is for students to swoop down and cherry-pick rather than work their way through an argument or story.

Finally, contemporary digital technology is altering the role of reading in education. Film strips of old have been replaced by far more engaging (and educationally enriching) TED Talks and YouTubes, podcasts and audio books. The potential of these digital media is extraordinary, both because of their educational richness and the democratic access they provide. Yet at the same time, we should be figuring out the right curricular balance of video, audio, and textual materials.

Implications for educators

The most important lesson I have learned from my research on reading in print versus digitally is the value of asking users themselves what they like and don’t like — and why — about reading in each medium. Students are acutely aware of the cognitive tradeoffs that many perceive themselves to be making when reading on one platform rather than the other. The issue is not that digital reading necessarily leads us to pay less attention. Rather, it is that digital technologies make it easy (and in a sense encourage us) to approach text with a different mindset than the one most of us have been trained to use while reading print.

We need to ask ourselves how the digital mindset is reshaping students’ (and our own) understanding of what it means to read. Since online technology is tailor-made for searching for information rather than analyzing complex ideas, will the meaning of “reading” become “finding information” rather than “contemplating and understanding”? Moreover, if print is increasingly seen as boring (compared with digital text), will our attention spans while reading print generally diminish?

Conceivably, we might progressively abandon careful reading in favor of what has been called “hyper reading” — in the words of Katherine Hayles (2012), reading that aims “to conserve attention by quickly identifying relevant information so that only relatively few portions of a given text are actually read” (p. 12). To be fair, even academics seem to be taking less time per scholarly article, particularly online articles, than they used to (Tenopir et al., 2009). When it comes to using web sites, studies indicate (Nielsen, 2008) that on average, people are likely reading less than 30% of the words.

The issue of sustained attention extends beyond reading onscreen to other digital media. Patricia Greenfield (2009) has observed that while television, video games, and the internet may foster visual intelligence, “the cost seems to be deep processing: mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.”

Returning to the physical properties of print: If fewer young adults are building their own book collections and if libraries are increasingly going digital, will writing no longer be seen as a durable medium? Yes, we could always look up something again on a digital device, but do we? If audio and video are gradually supplanting text as sources of education and personal enrichment, how should we think about the future role of text as a vehicle of cultural dissemination?

Digital technology is still in its relative infancy. We know it can be an incredibly useful educational tool, but we need much more research before we can draw firm conclusions about its positive and negative features. In the case of reading, our first task is to make ourselves aware of the effect technology potentially has on how we wrap our minds around the written word when encountered in print versus onscreen. Our second task is to embed that understanding in our larger thinking about the role of writing as a means of communicating and thinking.

Ackerman, R. & Goldsmith, M. (2011). Metacognitive regulation of text learning: On screen versus on paper. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 17 (1), 18-32.

Baron, N.S. (2013). Redefining reading: The impact of digital communication media. PMLA , 128 (1), 193-200.

Baron, N.S. (2015). Words onscreen: The fate of reading in a digital world. New York, NY: Oxford.

Baron, N.S., Calixte, R.M., & Havewala, M. (2017). The persistence of print among university students: An exploratory study. Telematics & Informatics, 34, 590-604.

Carrier, L.M., Rosen, L.D., Cheever, N.A., & Lim, A.F. (2015). Causes, effects, and practicalities of everyday multitasking. Developmental Review, 35, 64-78.

Dyson, M.C. & Haselgrove, M. (2000). The effects of reading speed and reading patterns on the understanding of text read from screen. Journal of Research in Reading , 23 (2), 210-223.

Farinosi, M., Lim, C., & Roll, J. (2016). Book or screen, pen or keyboard? A cross-cultural sociological analysis of writing and reading habits basing on Germany, Italy, and the UK. Telematics and Informatics, 33 (2), 410-421.

Greenfield, P. M. (2009). Technology and informal education: What is taught, what is learned? Science, 232 (5910), 69-71.

Hayles, K. (2012). How we think: Digital media and contemporary technogenesis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

Jabr, F. (2013, April 11). The reading brain in the digital age: The science of paper versus screens. Scientific American.

Kaufman, G. & Flanagan, M. (2016). High-low split: Divergent cognitive construal levels triggered by digital and nondigital platforms. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY: ACM, pp. 2773-2777.

Mangen, A., Walgermo, B.R., & Brønnick, K. (2013). Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension. International Journal of Educational Research, 58, 61-68.

Mitchell, A., Gottfried, J., Barthel, M., & Shearer, E. (2016, July 7). The modern news consumer: News attitudes and practices in the digital age. New York, NY: Pew Research Center. www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/the-modern-news-consumer

Nielsen, J. (2008, May 6). How little do users read? Fremont, CA: Nielsen Norman Group. www.nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/

Paul, A.M. (2014, April 10). Students reading e-books are losing out, study suggests. New York Times.

Schugar, J.T., Schugar, H., & Penny, C. (2011). A Nook or a book? Comparing college students’ reading comprehension levels, critical reading, and study skills. International Journal of Technology in Teaching and Learning, 7 (2), 174-192.

Schugar, H.R., Smith, C.A., & Schugar, J.T. (2013). Teaching with interactive e-books in grades K-6. The Reading Teacher, 66 (8), 615-624.

Tenopir, C., King, D.W., Edwards, S., & Wu, L. (2009). Electronic journals and changes in scholarly article seeking and reading patterns. Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspective, 61(1), 5-32.

Citation: Baron, N.S. (2017). Reading in a digital age.  Phi Delta Kappan  99 (2), 15-20.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Naomi S. Baron

NAOMI S. BARON is a professor of linguistics, Department of World Languages and Cultures, American University, Washington, D.C.

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Students’ perspectives on academic writing in the digital age

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The Writing Process in the Modern Digital Age: A College Student’s Perspective

Adil is a Communications major living in Fall River, Massachusetts. Adil enjoys writing and reading, and for a long time he kept a daily journal where he vented about his days to the blank pages. He feels that many students his age have lost touch with writing and reading simply because schoolwork has tainted their views of it. He hopes “that people do not lose sight of their creative outlets and passions and hold on to them dearly.” Adil and his classmates created a survey about student writing habits because they felt it was “important to see where other peers were at in their writing careers.” In addition to reading and writing, Adil is interested in addressing the new problems that college students face in an era of digital distractions.

From a very young age to adulthood, reading and writing are skills that naturally stick with us. Being that a good portion of our lives are spent in an academic setting, honing these skills is essential to almost every student. From mastering the five-paragraph essay to learning how to sort through database articles in hopes of composing a research paper, as students, our writing has naturally evolved over the course of our academic lives. Eventually one’s writing habits, process, and theories begin to be set in stone whether or not you even enjoy writing in the first place. How often do you find yourself writing for either your own fulfilment or academic purpose? Whether you find yourself working best under pressure days before your assignment is due, or space out the work equally in the week , this all becomes curated into one’s own unique way of writing.

My writing process came to be in a very different way than most. While I certainly can’t lie and say most of my writing process was shaped in highschool through academics, a good chunk of it has come from my own interest in personal writing in my free time. Growing up with very strict Middle Eastern parents I found myself confiding into daily journal entries to express my frustrations. This journal developed into more than an angry thought collection, but rather into a daily check in with myself. Whenever I would write these short pieces I would always sit down at a desk in a well lit room – but not too bright. Most of the time I would require complete silence to the point where I could even hear a pin drop. However, sometimes, a nice calm instrumental beat would be nice to accompany me, especially in the dark hours of the night. These quirks I developed in my own personal writing style carried over when it came to writing an academic piece. The calm state of mind I curated when writing these journals helped me to feel less burdened with the assignment I was doing and approach it from the view of a student doing his best possible work and not from the view of a stressed student who would rather be doing anything else than writing. More importantly, I feel as if my personal writing helped me develop my own voice in my writing. Humbly speaking, a common compliment I have gotten on my writing pieces is that they always sound like me. I genuinely believe that my personal writing helped me to foster my own style and not sound so bland and monotone in my work. Unfortunately in comparison to my peers, I seemed to be the only one who did any sort of personal writing in leisure time. Was this because I was the only one who seemed to enjoy writing for what it is and what it can accomplish? Or perhaps my peers were writing in a different manner other than pencil and paper in a spiral notebook. In this day and age those fingers must be typing away at a keyboard on a laptop or a digital touch screen on a smartphone. But are they typing away in their Google Document or on their Twitter feed?

Analyzing writing processes is nothing new and has in fact been done on a much larger scale than what me and my fellow classmates have been able to do. In “The Writing Lives Of College Students” by Jeff Grabill, Stacey Pigg, et al., they take a closer look at analyzing the writing behaviors and practices inside and outside of the classroom. From the pool of 1366 students many of the authors findings along with the WIDE Research Center are certainly not surprising by any means in today’s standards despite this research being done in 2010. Seeing that the most written genre for students is text messaging goes along with the pattern that there is this wideshift spread of conforming to writing in a digital genre (Grabill, Pigg, et al., 5). Contrast this data with Carol Berkenkotter’s piece “Decisions & Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a Publishing Writer and Response of a Laboratory Rat: Or, Being Protocoled” in which her primary goal was to analyze the literary writing process of only Donald Muray, who was an English Professor at the University of New Hampshire. Through the use of audio tapes and physical observation Berkenkotter was able to piece together Murrays planning, editing and revising process and see how intricate one’s process can really be. When breaking down the transcripts of Muray’s audio of him thinking out loud , Berkenkotter sees how one’s initial writing plan led to multiple different sub plans (Berkenkotter, 161).

With technology advancing almost yearly and social media becoming even more of a time consuming distraction in our lives our writing habits and process have become affected by this whether we want to accept it or not. In this digital age rather than trying to adapt to our new landscape of smartphones and laptops instant access to almost anything we have instead seemed to be consumed by it. Thus, it is important to see how, if anything, has our writing processes and ideologies hold up in this new era when social media and technology is thrown into the mix.

Methodology In order to complete the task of analyzing current day writing habits by college students I, along with my fellow peers in my professor’s College Composition I course, created a short 10 question survey, titled “Students Writing Habits Survey”, in order to gather data and have the means to fulfill our goal. Many of our questions were influenced by the aforementioned studies. As Grabill & Pigg did with their questions, seeing what genres students are writing and how they are composing them can lead us closer to speculate what mindframe students find themselves in when they sit down to compose a piece. But it is also important to see the process itself and everything in between as Bekenkotter alluded to in her extensive survey process in which she accounted for every single detail and step of Murray’s writing process. Thus, questions that ask students what challenges they face on an assignment or how much time they spend writing a five-page essay can help us piece together what that student’s writing process may look like on the surface. Going further than just looking at one’s process, it is also important to see how students feel about reading and writing as a whole. Questions asking the respondents to rate themselves as a writer, asking what they do the most when writing or even if they enjoy writing are important pieces of data to have in order to see to make correlations between the actual writing process and the respondent themselves. For instance, a pattern I noticed in our own “Students Writing Habits Survey” was if a respondent considers themselves to be an under average writer or if they hate writing it is likely that they will have difficulty with drafting the actual assignment itself. With those two influences in mind along with multiple peers’ inputs a 10 question survey was made through Google Forms on November 25, 2019 and was kept open until December 1, 2019. The “Students Writing Habits Survey” was distributed, via a link to Google Forms, to either first or second year college students that were currently taking a writing intensive course or a composition course. This range meant that we had a realistic view of the age bracket of the respondents being somewhere between 18-20 years old. Other than this, except for asking the respondents what their intended major at the moment was, no personal questions or names were asked in order to be ethical and unbiased. In total there were 102 student respondents giving us a large enough data pool to see distinctions, patterns, and discrepancies in the data we collected.

Results As a first year college student myself, the data my peers and I gathered was not surprising to me in the slightest. Procrastination is a very common habit that students often do when they have a lot to do on their plate in order to temporarily alleviate any feelings of stress. So to see that 56 of the respondents (54.9%) claim that they leave all the work for the assignment the night before the deadline shown by figure one is not shocking. This may also correlate with how 39.2% of respondents claim that the biggest challenge they seem to face when doing their assignment is not getting distracted.

What these two pieces of data show is that students are not able to put in 100% of their efforts and ability into the assignment because of time. As full-time students our plate seems to often be full leaving little room for anything else. The problem is that academic work is not the only thing we as students, and human beings, have to deal with. Working part-time or full-time jobs are often common with students to have pocket money or to pay their tuition/housing bills. Some students may have extracurricular activities, sports or clubs that they participate in after classes in order to be involved in their communities. Like everyone, family obligations such as babysitting or running an errand with a parent takes precedence and only puts back writing that five-page paper farther down on your to-do list. Some students may have to deal with all of the above at the same time, and somehow juggle the academic responsibilities of assignments for five different classes, while just dealing with life. Being a student myself and having to help my dad at his job on just the weekends, this idea of students not having enough time is certainly a reality and is a common theme I found not just in these pairs of data, but throughout the survey. The way we spend our time seems to be directly linked to our writing process and how we feel about writing as a whole.

The way we feel about writing while being influenced by our academic work is certainly not just limited to that influence alone. We are constantly reading and writing on a daily basis a lot more than we realize. The different headlines and articles we see plastered all over our social media platforms, and the hundreds of texts we send our friends, are all a form of reading and writing we do just in a different context. Or at least that is what I had assumed, until I saw the statistic that despite spending a lot of time on their phones 54.9% students do not consider it to be reading or writing as shown in figure two. My best guess for this is that on social media we are not actively engaging with what we are reading and instead just skimming through what we see, hence why not many people seem to consider their time spent on their phones “reading.”

This statistic piqued my interest, other than Netflix or Youtube, surely whatever other online activity done requires some form of reading or writing, just not in an academic sense. But what really got me intrigued is this statistic is in direct conflict with another question previously asked on the survey in which respondents were asked to report what they read the most (Displayed in Figure 3). Again, not shocking to anyone, but social media posts once again ranks the top with 81 students (79.4%), followed by text messaging with 78 (76.5%), with the last being books with 30 (29.4%) of what students read the most. (Survey

Most likely students are doing one of these two things primarily on their smartphones, it is often very rare to see someone go on social media on a laptop over their phone, unless they happen to be distracted in class. Phones seem to be the medium of choice for social media due to how convenient and seamless it is to take out your phone and instantly open an app, rather than take out your bulky laptop wait for it to load up, then load up Google, proceed to type in your desired website of choice, and wait for that to load as well. Despite respondents claiming these are their most read genres, they completely contradict this statement (as shown in Figure 2) when the majority claim that the time spent on their phone is not “reading or “writing”; but as shown here it clearly is. But why is that? It could be for a number of different reasons, but being a student myself, I believe that since the prominent introduction of social media we have classified “reading and writing” to only be concerned with academic work since that is what we are used to doing in the first place. Another reason I found to be plausible is that when we are on social media, primarily, we are not reading, at least in an academic sense. With social media we just read a couple of sentences and then scroll past to the next thing in a matter of seconds. With academic reading we are forced to slow ourselves down and absorb the text and sometimes even to go back and reread certain portions if they don’t make sense. In short, these different nuances in “social media reading” and “academic reading” each have their very own distinct mindsets, to the point that we don’t even consider the other one to even be reading. As an active social media user, I also find myself skimming through sentences and headlines very often. Thus, it is easy to see how we consider this other form of rushed reading to be its own stand-alone thing. But what does this have to do with a student’s writing process? I believe that the mindset we apply to our social media reading is also being applied to our academic work, or is at least interfering with it. Perhaps this is the reason why we as students may struggle with longer forms of academic reading; we have become so accustomed to the skimming we do on social media.

From the survey we have established that students have difficulties finding the time or to even complete their assignments in a timely, efficient manner to produce a quality work, and that students spend a lot of time on their phones (primarily on social media) but do not consider it reading or writing in the context we are most accustomed to. Has the introduction of social media pulled students that far away from reading and writing in the traditional sense? The answer to that is yes, but it might not be our fault. Again, as shown in Figure 3, books and news articles ranked the lowest in the genres read by students. But once again, this contradicts another piece of data in our survey, represented by Figure 4, showing that 53.9% of respondents stated that reading is something they enjoy doing in their free time.

Figure 4 conflicts with Figure 3; if what this piece of data claims is true, then wouldn’t the percentage of books and articles be higher up on the list? Certainly with this question it should be made clear that “reading”, in this context, was meant to refer to books, and not social media posts. However with our findings, respondents do not seem to correlate reading with social media, creating once again another gap in our findings. This pattern is again seen in another set of data in Figure 5, when respondents were asked the type of writings they do. The top result for 80 respondents (78.4%) was texting, in contrast with creative and personal writing being at the bottom with 31 (30.4%). Yet in another question, respondents were asked what they enjoy most about writing, (shown in Figure 6) and the top responses were: getting to be personal/creative and being able to express emotions.

So we see that students enjoy reading, but they do not choose to do so. We see that students enjoy getting to be personal and emotional in their writings, yet creative/personal writing ranks the lowest. Perhaps these contradictions again correlate to the earlier claim that we, as students, do not have enough time to focus on our academic work, nevermind have enough time to partake in our own leisurely reading and writing. But as the previous data shows, we certainly seem to have a lot of time to spend on looking down at our phone screen.

Conclusion All of the data presented from the “Students Writing Habits Survey” shows a lot of similar patterns, despite seeming to be flawed on the surface in its data, especially towards the end. However, all of the information seems to be pointing in one direction; we as students are slowly becoming disconnected from the joys of reading and writing can bring while being further connected towards our smartphones. This in turn translates into our writing process, as we are becoming less and less distant from the practice of writing itself, we are not bettering ourselves as writers. It seems that we have latched onto social media so much that we have begun to let go of other things that can hold just as much fun and enjoyment. The drop off of physical mediums, such as books and news articles, have all been replaced by social media and Facebook articles, which arguably does not give nearly as much knowledge as the former does. In the end we are all guilty of this, as much as I would love to admit that I read self-help books about mental well being, the time I spend on Twitter and Instagram vastly outweighs the time I spend reading physical print material. Depending on who you ask, some people may find this to be horrific, and others may just see it as the shift into a more technology integrated world. Personally, for me, I think that finding a balance between physical and digital medium is necessary. Especially with technologies such as A.I. developing, who knows if from a decade from now we will be writing our own papers and not some automated program. Technology should be of aid to us, but only to a certain degree in which we are still in control and responsible for the works we produce.

In this day and age everything can be accessed almost instantly through just a few clicks or swipes on our phone. Reading a new book or writing a personal piece, on the other hand, is something that can’t be done instantly. It requires time, which is something that we seem to have very little of these days. The fact that we have become spoiled in this digital ecosystem of almost instantaneous access to everything has spilled over into our everyday lives, both in our academic lives and out. It means that we have become rather impatient and hasty, we want everything now, just like social media will give us instant news updates constantly. Unfortunately, some things can’t be done hastily in order to produce a quality product, and that includes one’s writing process. Every step must be done with a plan and purpose, driving it ultimately towards a final draft.

So how can this data be used to make a statement on a student’s current writing processes based on the data we have gathered? While we didn’t do anything to the extreme like Bekenkotter did, and go record students while they plan and revise their writing pieces, since that would take much more time and effort to do, in the short time frame we did this survey. But the patterns we have been able to see from the data provided by the respondents can certainly be of similar effect. In short, it seems that our writing processes are very rushed and not being brought out to the fullest it could be. Whether this is because of real life distractions or the inability to put down our smartphone screen, it seems that the problem we have is that we are too distracted, primarily by social media. Social media not only seems to be a hindrance in the actual writing process itself, but it also seems to be stripping us away from our roots of reading and writing, not only in the academic context, but also for leisure. Rather than reading a book for fun, we tune to Facebook and skim through the article headlines. Rather than indulge in a personal narrative on our downtime, we would rather spend the time to think of the best Instagram caption for our posts. Not only as students, but as human beings, we need to become better at limiting our time spent mindlessly on social media and more at what truly matters. As our lives are already busy enough with many responsibilities it is important to save time where we can. Cutting down our social media time can easily give us the extra time needed to be more productive and at least not have to rely on all-nighter to finish a big research paper due the next day.

Works Cited Berkenkotter, Carol and Donald M. Murray.. “Decisions & Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a Publishing Writer, and the Response of a Laboratory Rat: Or, Being Protocoled.” College Composition and Communication , vol 34, no. 2, 1983, pp. 156-172.

Grabill, Jeffrey, et al. “Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students.” The Writing In Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center , 2010, pp. 1-14.

ENGL 101 College Composition, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Prof. Brittanie Weatherbie Greco. “Students Writing Habits Survey.” Google Forms Survey. November 25, 2019 – December 1, 2019.

Communication – Communicating in the Digital Age Essay

Communicating in the Digital Age is an article by Roshong (2019) dedicated to the problem of adaptation of communication to modern technologies. The author points out the dramatic changes in work and life that the digital revolution has incurred. However, people do not yet realize how distracting the world of endless notifications and interactions is. Not only is work productivity hampered, but a person also has to spend time restoring focus and concentration. The article aims to show that the ability to work in a hustling and dynamic environment is an essential skill in the Digital Age. The intended audience is business managers and employees who are responsible for the organization of corporate communication. The author’s thesis is that it is imperative to ascertain effective communication means to help companies and employees achieve the intended results.

The article does not follow the standard study format, and it does not detail the employed research methods and chosen sample. However, the author offers practical implications, the first of which is understanding modern paradigm shifts in communication. Most importantly, user-centric communication has taken over one-way messages intended for large audiences. In practice, users decide what sort of information they receive and share and what platforms they use. Second, digitization has allowed alternative ways of data visualization to thrive. Whereas text and images comprised most of the information, now multiple multimedia options exist. Third, information flow has become continuous and transpires on a global scale, whereas previously, all information was periodic and specific to a particular region. All these tendencies signify the need for businesses to adapt and use digital capabilities to their advantage.

The second step is to prioritize means of communication that are both qualitative and fast to consume. For instance, a concise infographic is more effective than a text paragraph. The reason for it is that such data visualization conveys why the message is important and the content of the message itself. Meanwhile, reading a text paragraph takes more time and is less likely to keep the audience engaged. This does not imply that traditional means of communication are now obsolete. For example, phone calls and physical meetings can still be utilized. However, they should also be adjusted to the modern pace of communication.

The third step is to ensure that data is user-centric. Modern technology allows services to be customized to meet customers’ personal preferences. An especially important part of user-centric communication is feedback, which allows for making customer service more personalized. Meanwhile, the information itself should be dense, engaging, and easy to consume. There are numerous modern solutions that add agility and convenience to the exchange of data. Digital workspaces and data-sharing applications are tools that increase communication’s versatility. However, the more communication with customers is done, the more transparent the company that services these interactions has to be. Users have to be sure that their personal data is not compromised and that data privacy is protected.

The ultimate point of the article is that leaders cannot change the nature of modern communications, but they can adjust their leadership styles to the dynamic informational environment. Just as the abundance of digital noise can distract employees from working efficiently, proper use of means of data exchange can improve the quality of interactions with colleagues and customers. In order to properly adapt, it is essential to adopt a new communication style that is user-centric, respectful of personal preferences, and transparent at the same time. Combining these qualities with modern information technologies will produce effective and engaging communication, which will satisfy both customers and colleagues.

Roshong, M. (2019). Communicating in the Digital Age . Strategic Finance. Web.

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1. IvyPanda . "Communication – Communicating in the Digital Age." June 21, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/communication-communicating-in-the-digital-age/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Communication – Communicating in the Digital Age." June 21, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/communication-communicating-in-the-digital-age/.

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• Effective Human Relations Communications Style Self-Assessment
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Learning Goals

• ISTE - Creative Communicator: Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats, and digital media appropriate to th

Digital Age Skill: Language Arts - What Makes a Hero

Language arts - what makes a hero, description of the lesson.

Created by Emily Iverson for the Nebraska ESUCC Digital Age Skills Project.  

Students will create a documentary about their hero by writing in the third person point-of-view.

ISTE Standard

Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats, and digital media appropriate to their goals.

NE Standard

SL 10.3.1.a Communicate ideas and information in a clear and concise manner suited to the purpose, setting, and audience (formal voice or informal voice), using appropriate word choice,  grammar, and sentence structure.

DC 10.4.1.b Demonstrate ethical use of information and copyright guidelines by appropriately quoting or paraphrasing from a text and citing the source using available resources (e.g., online citation tools, publication guidelines).

FOC 501. Maintain a focus on discussing the specific issue in the prompt throughout the essay.

Rubric Used for Assessment

Example student artifact(s).

Student Example from Adobe Spark

Lesson Design Reflection

Lesson Design: 

HOOK/ATTENTION GETTER: 

• Pose the question: Do you have someone in your life that you look up to? What Makes them a Hero? After reading Rosa Park, do you think she was a Hero? Here is your opportunity to create a documentary depicting your own hero.
• Students will then be able to share elements they think you should include in a documentary.

DIRECT INSTRUCTION: 

• Introduction -   What Makes a Good Documentary (Links to an external site.)
• Project the information about documentary essentials.
• Students then research valid information on EBSCO for their Hero.

GUIDED PRACTICE:

• Show the students how to search credible sources using EBSCO. Then show them how to cite their sources. (extension is EasyBibliography)
• Then, refresh their memory about the Rosa Parks documentary as a guide for what theirs needs to look like.

INDEPENDENT PRACTICE:

• Students begin to write their documentary addressing the essential question.
• Student will turn their finished documentary
• Students will present their videos to the class. All audience members will share with students a connection to the Hero they presented. 

Dalrymple, James. "Digital Age Skill: Language Arts - What Makes a Hero". OER Commons. Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, 26 Jun. 2019. Web. 20 May 2020. <https://www.oercommons.org/authoring/55381-digital-age-skill-language-arts-what-makes-a-hero>.

Nebraska's College and Career Ready Standards for English Language Arts

Learning Domain: Speaking/Listening

Standard: Communicate ideas and information in a clear and concise manner suited to the purpose, setting, and audience (formal voice or informal voice), using appropriate word choice, grammar, and sentence structure.

Degree of Alignment: Not Rated (0 users)

Learning Domain: Multiple Literacies

Standard: Demonstrate ethical use of information and copyright guidelines by appropriately quoting or paraphrasing from a text and citing the source using available resources (e.g., online citation tools, publication guidelines).

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Language in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities at Kaunas University of Technology together with the Lithuanian Museum of Education are organizing a scientific research conference that is aimed to discuss various aspects and issues about the rapid development of language industry and possibilities of artificial intelligence application that change the turn of scientific research, methodological approaches and, at the same time, increase the access of the society to information in native and foreign languages. 

We are cordially inviting specialists and researchers in the area of Philology, Educational Sciences, language and technologies or other to share their experience and insights and take part in resourceful discussions about the use of artificial intelligence in the research of the Lithuanian language, didactics, the impact of machine translation on language, its ethical use, postediting and other. Moreover, debating about the impact of artificial intelligence and global society on the status of the state language and its prestige is planned as well as how to increase the access to language resources of the native language and contribute to the development of information and knowledge society.   

A parallel section in the English language will be also held with interpreting into the Lithuanian language, thus, researchers from other countries are also invited to take part and share their insights about challenges of the artificial intelligence on their native languages, its impact on the global society and research results obtained. 

AI applications in research of Lithuanian and other low-resourced or less-resourced languages; 

AI use in Lithuanian and other low-resourced language teaching; 

Impact of AI and global society for the status and prestige of the language; 

Aspects, trends and expectations of the use of modern languages in media and academic discourse; 

Impact of AI on machine translation, post-editing, ethics and other. 

Important dates:

Abstract submission until  10 April, 2024.

Notification of acceptance on  15 April, 2024. 

Participation fee: 

Abstracts can be submitted here:  https://ltech.ktu.edu/santrauku-pateikimas/

The conference is supported by the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language and the programme for the increase of the Lithuanian language prestige.  

The conference will take place on the 13–14th of June, 2024 at Kaunas University of Technology, the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities (A. Mickevičiaus g. 37) and the Lithuanian Museum of Education (Vytauto pr. 52). 

More information:  https://ltech-en.ktu.edu/