How is digital media changing the way young children learn? Could the way young children learn be evolving to meet a new, dynamic digital media format?

Authors Jay Blanchard, a professor at Arizona State University, and Terry Moore ask these and other questions in their new report: “The Digital World of Young Children: Emergent Literacy” (PDF), out this week from the Pearson Foundation.

» via Hey Jude

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, and on a somewhat related note, The Little Professor and Undine (of Not of General Interest) point out a flaw in James McWilliams’s argument that universities would be justified in raising the tenure bar even higher, since, in his opinion, today’s technology actually makes conducting research so much easier than it was in the past (take that, young turks!). Although Undine admits that it’s certainly “easier to search for things electronically than to lug a stack of index cards to the long tables of reference books,” she rightly notes that many professors don’t have access to the kind of fabulous electronic databases McWilliams raves about (in fact, McWilliams got access to the historical database he describes through a friend at an Ivy League institution, since his own university can’t afford to subscribe to it): 

“These resources aren’t free and available to everyone, and access to them shouldn’t depend on being a faculty member at Moneybag$ University or on having an obliging and well-connected friend who doesn’t mind lending an access code.”

So much for that idea.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

In an online survey of 895 technology stakeholders’ and critics’ expectations of social, political and economic change by 2020, fielded by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center:

• Google won’t make us stupid: 76% of these experts agreed with the statement, “By 2020, people’s use of the Internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid.” Some of the best answers are in Part 1 of this report.

• Reading, writing, and the rendering of knowledge will be improved: 65% agreed with the statement “by 2020 it will be clear that the Internet has enhanced and improved reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge.” Still, 32% of the respondents expressed concerns that by 2020 “it will be clear that the Internet has diminished and endangered reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge.” Some of the best answers are in Part 2 of this report.

• Innovation will continue to catch us by surprise: 80% of the experts agreed that the “hot gadgets and applications that will capture the imaginations of users in 2020 will often come ‘out of the blue.’” Some of the best answers are in Part 3 of this report.

• Respondents hope information will flow relatively freely online, though there will be flashpoints over control of the internet. Concerns over control of the Internet were expressed in answers to a question about the end-to-end principle. 61% responded that the Internet will remain as its founders envisioned, however many who agreed with the statement that “most disagreements over the way information flows online will be resolved in favor of a minimum number of restrictions” also noted that their response was a “hope” and not necessarily their true expectation. 33% chose to agree with the statement that “the Internet will mostly become a technology where intermediary institutions that control the architecture and …content will be successful in gaining the right to manage information and the method by which people access it.” Some of the best answers are in Part 4 of this report.

• Anonymous online activity will be challenged, though a modest majority still think it will possible in 2020: There more of a split verdict among the expert respondents about the fate on online anonymity. Some 55% agreed that Internet users will still be able to communicate anonymously, while 41% agreed that by 2020 “anonymous online activity is sharply curtailed.”

» via Pew Internet

Heaven forbid that we would reallocate significant amounts of time and money from acquiring and managing access to information toward practices that would actually liberate knowledge for all.

Our values say people should have access to information. Our practices support that access in ways that we know are dysfunctional and limiting. We try to do “everything plus,” but some things are sacrosanct, so the solutions are underfunded, regardless of what we believe are best practices and what practices are quite thoroughly broken.

Such solutions are doomed to slow starvation from the moment they are born. We value access to information, but we only assign value to information that costs money. This is nuts!

» via Library Journal

“I think we’re all walking around in a big Saharan data sandstorm,” Jacobs said.

But it wasn’t always this way. People used to live in an “information monarchy,” where the New York Times, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and other top publications set the standard, Jacobs said.

“Now it’s more of an information democracy,” he added, “or maybe an information anarchy, which is great in some ways, since we have so much more information out there, but it brings with it a boatload of confusion and chaos and uncertainty.”

» via Live Science

For the literate elite—which includes everyone from Barack Obama to this spring’s MFA graduates—the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the demise of reading has become obligatory theater. Poets, writers, and teachers alike stand over the remains of a once-proud book culture like a Greek chorus gloomily crowded around a fallen king. How can it be that less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, or the percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled over a 20-year period (as measured by the NEA in 2007), or that 40 million Americans read at the lowest literacy level?

The answer that rises most immediately to meet this anguish is: the image makers. Television, the Pied Piper of the last century, has been joined in its march by video games, YouTube, and an assortment of other visual tempters that are ferrying Western culture further away from the nourishing springs of literature. The public appetite for images — scenes of war, staged or otherwise, music videos, game shows, celebrities roaming the streets of Los Angeles in a daze — seems both limitless in scope and apocalyptic in what it portends for the future.

To the literary eye, the culture of the image has grown as large as Godzilla, as omnipresent as an authoritarian government, and as cruel and erratic as the Furies. In our rush to blame the moving picture for the state of our cultural disarray, we’ve overlooked the fact that — as a carrier of data, thoughts, ideas, prayers, and promises — the image is neither as functional nor as versatile as text.

The real threat to the written word is far more pernicious. Much like movie cameras, satellites, and indeed television, the written word is, itself, a technology, one designed for storing information. For some 6,000 years, the human mind was unable to devise a superior system for holding and transmitting data. By the middle of this century, however, software developers and engineers will have remedied that situation. So the greatest danger to the written word is not the image; it is the so-called “Information Age” itself.

» via Encyclopedia Brittanica Blog