Nancy Kaplan

Kaplan, Nancy (2006). "Literacy Beyond Books/Reading When All the World's a Web" in The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory; New York: Routledge, Chapter 11

Kaplan writes "We are, as always, in the midst of a literacy crisis." The hyperstimulation of commercials, games, television, the internet, etc. is a new phase in the fears we have that civilization is falling apart. Going further, she writes, "In elementary schools, the phonics and whole-language partisans battle to control literacy education at its most basic level, though neither side has ever advanced any sound empirical evidence in support of its case. In colleges and universities, the arena is even more vexed since it involves defending advanced literacy, always an imprecise and fungible concepts. According to many professors of literature, the field claiming ownership of advanced literacy, hypertext - especially in the ubiquitous form of the World Wide Web - threatens to erode the ability of young adults to read with acumen and insight"

Kaplan has an interesting point to make: "In this literacy debate, the threat to reading seems to originate in a form of mediation almost indistinguishable from the one that is threatened. In other words, critics of the Web fear that reading is at risk not because photographs or television or Hollywood films or computer games have seduced people away from verbal texts, but because a new and radically different form of verbal text may be taking over the cultural space that printed words have occupied."

Visual Literacy is a new reality and finding its way into the language literacy educators use: for a beginning discussion, see my Rethinking Validity notes. Researchers in Arts Based Research Methodology question the difference between textual semiotics and visual semiotics and offer alternative approaches to doing research and understanding in academic writing.

More to come.