My mother was a professional worrier, one who might actually check the bathwater for stray babies. While I am something of an amateur in comparison, I still have my moments of anxiety, especially about the effects of educational technology. Granted, Ed Tech is my livelihood and I believe that great things can be and are accomplished as access to technology grows and teachers become more adept at integrating it into their curricula—but my passions in education remain reading, writing and critical thinking. 

Like most English teachers, I cherish the feel of a  book in my hands, the movement of ink over paper, and the sudden connections and insights that arise as I read and write.  I’m happy enough to research, write a report or create a spreadsheet using technology, but I worry about the future of reading and writing for pleasure and personal enrichment. Closing a window from a news website is a neutral act that can’t compare with turning the page of a book, and holding that book for a moment after all the pages have been turned.  Louise Rosenblatt’s seminal book, The Reader, the Text, the Poem, categorizes the reading task as either efferent or aesthetic. The reading we do as part of our jobs or studies is typically efferent—that is, the reading task is to access and understand information. In aesthetic reading, on the other hand, the reader interprets the text through the lens of experience and imagination that arrives at a personal vision. Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren draw the same distinction in How to Read a Book. Engaged, aesthetic reading, they say, is like reading a love letter in which every phrase and nuance is weighed and interpreted. I don’t know about you, but this is hard for me to do on a monitor, regardless of resolution.  

As a noted politician once said, “Think of the children.” Yes, let’s do. What happens when such early skills as turning pages left to right become a think of the past? How will that affect development? Will spelling bees disappear, deferring instead to contests of keyboarding? These anxieties may be trivial, I wonder too about the importance of letter formation, of “drawing words” with a Number 2 pencil so that they become encoded in more than one place in the brain. How will changes in technology affect literacy? Will we be able to think and develop thinking in the same way when all text is littered with hyperlinks intended to tangentialize information? Maybe it will all be for the best, as when Gutenberg let loose with moveable type. I don’t know. But someone had better worry about it, and it looks like me!