Page 119 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

social media networks have boosted the importance and visibility of writing skills.
• Literacy is not solely an educational issue, but also a personal, economic, cultural and social one. Accordingly, in order to create broad ownership, a range of players in so- ciety – including businesses, media, NGOs, social partners, providers of non-formal learning and cultural institutions, as well
as social, employment and health services at local level – need to be involved in any initiatives to improve literacy levels.
In conclusion, digital reading needs to be taught
Digital reading requires training and the devel- opment of multiple literacy skills, as proposed by lecturers Araceli García Rodríguez and Raquel Gómez Díaz when they argue that
digital reading requires learning which combines the reading and writing skills characteristic of
the analogue environment with others that are digital-specific. These skills are increasingly com- plex and involve technological advances that offer a broad range of functions which are not always intuitive and, unless well designed and perfectly integrated into the story, have the opposite effect to that which they seek: they distract the reader from the reading process.37
In the abovementioned document, the Council of the European Union also drew attention to this aspect and warned of a shortfall in educa- tion that is urgent and necessary to correct:
The impact of new technologies on literacy has not been fully exploited by education systems. Re- viewing learning materials and methods in the light of increasing digitisation and supporting teachers in the use of new pedagogies can reinforce the motivation of learners.38
To emphasise that training is so important in the case of digital reading and to show that its non-existence can give rise to contradictory results in different studies, García Rodríguez and Gómez Díaz39 refer to two contrasting cases:
• The report entitled The Digital Reading Habits of Children40 states that children prefer print books to digital versions in varying percentages, depending on the target readers.
• In contrast, another report compiled by the National Literacy Trust41 states that 39% of those polled read on electronic devices and that only 28% continue to read in print.
What is the basic difference between the two studies? As García Rodríguez and Gómez Díaz argue, the difference lies in the training of the students who made up the samples on which the studies were based. In the first case they had received none, but for the second study a six- month training course had been held.
It is not exaggerated to suggest that training is an important variable that influences results. It is a weighty reason which, in the first case, tipped the scale of students’ preferences towards the known medium, print books, and in the second towards digital books.
This leads the lecturers to conclude in their article that “we may therefore affirm that when there is training the trend shifts towards the format with which we are more familiar, paper, a natural tendency of any species to choose the options that require less effort to adapt.”
The lecturer José Antonio Cordón reaffirms the same idea as his colleagues of the E-Lectra group at the University of Salamanca, García Rodríguez and Gómez Díaz, using different words: “Coming to terms with the device and training in digital reading are essential factors for its develop- ment.”42
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Readers in the digital age