Three dimensional text

In Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century, Warlick (2004) talks about how the Internet and the structure of webpages necessitates a different way of reading because the structure of the texts themselves is different.  Warlick explains that "you and I were taught to read in two dimensions - across and down.  Our students are accustomed to reading in a third dimension: across, down, and deeper into the information" (p. 22).

To some extent I agree with Warlick.  Hyperlinks can often help students dig deeper into material they're reading about, but they can just as often be distracting, and before you know it, students are reading about meerkats instead of To Kill a Mockingbird (they both begin with "M" you know).  The Internet is awesome, and I mean that in the truest sense of the word: inspiring awe, not in the Bill and Ted sense of the word.  However, it's sometimes like a vortex that sucks us in.  We go online to find an answer to one question, and an hour and a few hundred clicks later, we have found that answer and a host of others to questions we didn't even know we had when we first sat down.  That's power.

That's also problematic.  Especially for students.  Even more so for students struggling with ADD, ADHD, or just plain adolescence.  Warlick seems to understand this as he reminds us that our students "need to learn to control their information in positive, productive, and personally meaningful ways - and this is what we need to be teaching them" (p. 22).

Ultimately, students need to be taught to be evaluative thinkers.  They need to be able to sift through the array of information at their fingertips in order to find that piece that is the most salient, the most pertinent, the most intriguing.  They need to learn how to make the connections between articles work for them instead of against them, which I often think it does.  The Internet's a very distracting place, even with the plethora or resources it provides.  So, yes, students need to learn how to read, not only in the traditional sense, but also deeper, through and across different but related and linked texts.  But they also need the skill of discernment and the ability to determine which links are helpful and which might be best saved for other times and purposes.  It's this sense of deliberateness that I think is lacking, and that's probably one of the hardest things to teach, because it's not really about the technology, but it's about making careful choices no matter which dimension you're in.