Mobile Phones for Literacy

Teens love their mobile phones. Whether my students are talking, texting, or accessing the internet, it is clear that, to them, mobile phones play a huge role in staying connected to the world around them. Sometimes in education we take an adversarial role toward the mobile phone; using the phone is something the student is doing instead of homework or reading. Steve Vosloo, however, is exploring use of the mobile phone as a possible tool for promoting literacy.

The May 26th Edutech podcast (available at edutechpodcast.com), a regular podcast devoted to trends in educational technology, features an interview with Vosloo, who heads the m4lit project in Capetown, South Africa. Vosloo states that one of the problems with literacy in South Africa is that children don't have ready access to books. Only 7% of public schools have a functional library. Mobile phone adoption, however, has been high - up to 90% for urban youth. The idea of the m4lit project was to examine whether these mobile phones could be used to promote longer-form reading with teenagers. A story that would be appropriate for the mobile format was commissioned and episodically (initially) made available for download. Additionally, a social component was incorporated, allowing the students to make comments and offer suggestions for a sequel. Although there was a significant drop-off in readers after the initial chapters, Vosloo says that there were still 17,000 downloads of the final chapter.

Vosloo says he loves books and he doesn't see the format as replacement, but rather, a complement to traditional books. "You basically have got to go fishing where the fish are, right? Kids have got cell phones; they love them and they've got them, and if that's a way to reach them and if that gets them reading, maybe they'll go and take a book out of the library, or maybe they'll read a newspaper whereas before they didn't."

Information about the project is available at http://m4lit.wordpress.com/ and at Steve Vosloo's website http://vosloo.net/.

Beyond Paper Books

In searching (via Google) for further information about multimedia teen literature, I came across an interesting blog posting by Regina Brooks on huffingtonpost.com called "KidsLit: Beyond Paper Books", in which she describes some of the up-and-coming "multi-platform books":

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/regina-brooks/kids-lit-beyond-paper-boo_b_464130.html

I also found an interesting article titled "The Future of Children's Publishing" by Stephen Lowman (Washington Post) which talks about some of these new forms of delivery for children's literature:

"...entertaining the kids with the printed page seems to grow more difficult by the year. Children's appetite for cell phones, computers, video games and television far exceeds that for books. In January, a Kaiser Family Foundation report found that the time spent on all entertainment by kids from 8 to 18 rose from 6.5 hours a day five years ago to 7.5 hours a day. But only 25 minutes were typically spent reading a book. The Department of Education found that in 1984 only 8 percent of 13-year-olds and 9 percent of 17-year-olds reported that they 'never or hardly ever' read for fun on their own. By 2008, the percentage had jumped to 24 percent for both groups."

"Publishers are trying to entice kids to read books by offering companion Web sites that are graphic-rich and able to plunge young readers into the story. Along with the tale on the page, kids can dip into online videos and games, win prizes, create Internet identities and get into social networking. It is a tricky gamble for publishers, one requiring a deep commitment of time and money."

"The question remains whether all these multimedia add-ons to the reading experience will pay off. 'At the heart, you still have to have good storytelling,' Kinney said. 'You can't resort to gimmickry and hope to retain an audience.'"

Introduction

As a middle school reading teacher, I often encounter those students commonly classified as "reluctant readers". For these students, reading is not the enjoyable, enriching experience that I know it to be. They will frequently express to me that reading is "boring" and that they would rather watch a film, view a television show, listen to music, browse the internet, etc. Finding ways to get these students interested in reading is a constant challenge (but also one of my favorite things about teaching).

For the past two years I have ended the school year by reading one of the Skeleton Creek books by Patrick Carman. If you are not familiar with these books, they are multimedia productions that include text, internet, and video components. Ryan, the protagonist of the book, keeps a written journal documenting the mysterious goings-on in his hometown of Skeleton Creek. This is the text portion of the narrative. Meanwhile, his partner-in-crime Sarah records video of her own investigations and sends Ryan passwords whereby he is able to view her video clips via an internet website. Thus the story is carried along through the text portion (Ryan's journal) as well as through video (Sarah's clips). Both years, this combination of medias has been a big hit with my students. After finishing them, I always have many students (including those aforementioned reluctant readers) asking to check out my copies of the other book in the series, or putting it on hold through our district library system.

As a future secondary school librarian, I am very interested in the ways teen and young adult literature and its modes of delivery continue to evolve, and the possibilities this creates to motivate reluctant readers. In this blog I would like to explore some of these "new directions" in teen and young adult reading.