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Learning To Read With Click and Jane
theodp writes "While earlier generations learned to Read with Dick and Jane, the NYT Magazine reports that today's tykes are getting their reading chops at online sites like Starfall (free) and One More Story (subscription). Quoting the Times Magazine: 'In their book "Freakonomics," Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt write that kids who grow up in houses packed with books fare better on school tests than those who grow up with fewer books.' So how will kids who learn to read online fare when they grow up?"
Hooked on Slashdot worked for me.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
LOL WTF OMG
This will be how kids speak if they learn to read only with the internet.
then again, some people already do.
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
I learned a lot of things by watching videos on Dick & Jane's paysite.
Correlation is not causation. Presumably, it is not the mere presence of the books, shooting off their "bookly cosmic rays," that is the causal force which leads to children doing better on tests. Rather, there are two presumable possibilities, both of which probably work concurrently:
1. The kind of parents who own a lot of books are generally of above-average intelligence, and hence produce offspring that are as well.
2. The kind of parents who own a lot of books are likely to either read books to their children, encourage their children to read themselves.
The medium through with the information is conveyed likely matters very little, if at all, and so long as the children receive adequate instruction on how to access materials to read, and encouragement to actually do so, they will fare just fine.
It's not the books that cause the kids to do better. It's the fact that type types of parents who stock their houses with books are those who will produce better children. In other words, the books don't cause the good output, they simply reflect the environment that causes the good output. Thus whether one learns to read via books or computers isn't important; it's mainly what the parents do.
Children who grow up with the web should read incredibly well. The web is a massive library and without being able to read you won't be able to do much in internet and computer land. It solves a huge problem for parents and that problem is getting children interested in reading in the first place.
That said, a child growing up on the internet will be exposed to improper punctuation and grammar more frequently than a child growing up reading proofread and edited printed materials. That is probably a good thing. Those children will be less pedantic, and have less difficulty discerning intent and meaning from written text.
This is no different than the gamer generation versus their parents. The problem was not merely that the parents had difficulty with electronic interfaces, the problem was they had difficulty adapting to varied interfaces. The gamer generation can hope between operating systems, not to mention individual applications for the same purpose without too much difficulty. Their parents could learn and master an OS or application but when confronted with something different had/have a great deal of difficulty.
Why? Because every console video game has a unique and non-standard interface. Instead of learning the interfaces themselves, gamers learn the common elements that need to be and should be present in all video game interfaces. When they pick up a new game they don't stare at the foreign interface confused they start by figuring out how to navigate and then immediately proceed to look for the elements they know should be there and take note of extras found along the way.
That difference in how a new (insert almost anything here) is viewed while minor gives amazing flexibility when presented with tasks and arguably is the difference between genius and ignorance.
OK, the whole point in the chapter in 'Freakonomics' was that while the number of books in a child's home IS CORRELATED with how well they do on school tests, IT IS NOT A CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP. Essentially, families that put an emphasis on learning tend to have both smart kids and a lot of books, but simply having a lot of books around does not appear to make children smarter. The person who quoted 'Freakonomics' in this article either intentionally misrepresented the point, or (more likely) completely missed the point. The point was that we should quit spreading the exact fallacy that is being spread here.
Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.
Who modded this comment 'interesting'? more like troll...
Your comment is total BS. 2nd generation 'working class', we get by paycheck to paycheck, and that didn't keep us from acquiring a 4000+ volume library over the years - some from my own childhood.
It has entirely to do with interest in knowledge, not wealth. If you were raised with that, you'll wind up with books.
An interest in money doesn't correlate at all with knowledge - look around at the economy today. It took some finely focused stupidity to create this mess.
Books are NOT expensive. Compared to the plethora of other ways to waste 10-30 bucks, a book is an investment. A GOOD book is a gem.
Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.
While I think it's true that the children of the wealthy are more likely to get a better education, I don't think that's the main force at work here.
Reading a book is a very different experience than reading something online. It requires a greater commitment/attention span, and the reward in return is a greater understanding of the subject (for non-fiction) or immersion in the story (for fiction). This is assuming the books are good, of course.
I suspect that children who "learn to read online" are going to have an even worse attention span than I do (and mine is pretty terrible). I also suspect that they will have a much more superficial understanding of the things they've read, and that their comprehension of spelling and grammar will be abysmal.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Or, a really good source of free children's books is the International Children's Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org). It has thousands of free (current and public domain) books from around the world, many of them available in multiple languages.
- Ben Bederson Professor Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction Lab University of Maryland
That may be true, but it's not enough to tell which is the cause and which is effect. It could be that money is needed to buy books, and maybe poor people would have other priorities.
An alternative explanation would be that intelligent people read more, and intelligent people are more likely to be wealthy, because few people like being poor and if one's intelligent enough one will find ways to avoid poverty.
It could be that having books is a consequence of being wealthy, or being wealthy is a consequence of having books, or they are both consequences of another factor.
And what if having kids that do well in school is a cause, not a consequence, of having books at home? Because if kids do well at school they will have an incentive to read more, and will ask their parents to buy more books?
Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.
I'd say that a family that has a lot of books in their house probably gives a shit about learning things whether they're wealthy or not. When I was a kid, we were frequently at or below the poverty line in terms of family income, and my parents had never been wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but we had thousands of books in the house--far more than any of my friends with wealthy parents.
I'm sure there's a correlation between wealth and academic performance, but it's probably two effects from the same cause in most cases: the parents have a habit of learning things, and that makes them more likely to have better jobs and children that care about learning.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
...the techs call this babysitware. it has nothing to do with education and everything to do with a teachers union who demands teachers "need a break". couple this with computer lab aides who get paid under 10 bucks an hour and aren't technically allowed to teach anything.
THL phish sticks
Reading a book is a very different experience than reading something online. It requires a greater commitment/attention span, and the reward in return is a greater understanding of the subject (for non-fiction) or immersion in the story (for fiction). This is assuming the books are good, of course.
I read books online at both the Baen free library http://www.baen.com/library/ and Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/. Other than being able to click directly to the chapter I'm at, and to scroll instead of turn the page, I don't consider it a "very different" experience. Perhaps you meant that short-form reading -magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, cereal boxes- is a very different experience from long-form reading. And most web material tends toward essays, articles and short blurbs. There's nothing about the words being displayed as pixels rather than blobs of ink that makes for a different experience, at least for me. I understand that some people find it more difficult to focus on a screen for long periods compared to paper. But then again, some people find glossy laptop screens to be annoying as well.
My mother also would often send me and my siblings to a local library after school so we would could get my homework done. In retrospect, that was one of the smartest decisions she ever made in raising me. It sure beat what I am sure is the insane cost of daycare, and it pretty much forced me to do my schoolwork. Even if for some reason I didn't want to do my homework, well, guess what, the only thing else to do at that point was read one of the hundreds of books sitting around me. Either way I ended up becoming a more educated individual, a definite win-win if there ever was one.
I have a 2.5 year old son. About 6-8 months ago, I sat him on my lap and I clicked through the ABCs of starfall every night. He would point to letters, laugh at cut scenes, and basically bond with me. I let him put his hand on mine as I navigated the site. Then I started letting him click the mouse to advance the letters and games. I would point to the mouse cursor as it moved across the screen with his hand on my hand as I moved the mouse. He made the connection and started taking over the mouse. His gross motor skills frustrated him when trying to do some of the finer details of the website, but that improved to the point where he could handle the website. Part of the site has a concentration-esque game of flipping over tiles and matching them. Well, my wife and I were in the bedroom watching TV with him in the same room as he was surfing Starfall. We look up to see what he is doing and he had accessed the game already matched two tiles. Flabbergasted. I watched him do it, and it was all random. Then, he started remembered the letters and would return to the correct tile when he saw it again. The progress he has made has blown my mind. He reads his letters and numbers. He has been on parts of Starfall I didn't know existed or how to get to! Also, every night I review the letters and numbers with him using ToddlerLock on my G1. He looks forward to it and scoots over in his toddler sized bad for me. I have to fold myself in half to position next to him. Good times. And my 9 month daughter is already taking an interest in the G1. I had to extract it from her mouth today, turn it off, and let the drool dry out! Ahhh, I love my kids.
It's not just the viewing experience. Computers almost always do something crazy to my attention span; I can read a book for a long time, but on a computer I'd struggle to concentrate. It happens with almost everything, watching movies, reading, writing on a computer - there's an overwhelming feeling that I could just be doing something else too. I'm just too weak willed and...
...people with money generally have more books than people without.
Within the context established by previous posts (where 'people without money' == 'working class'), above quote is a bald-faced assertion and more than likely wrong.
From what I've seen of middle class life styles in America, most people in the USA who have significant disposable income have more space devoted to their collections of CDs, DVDs, and computer games than they do in bookshelves. And then there is the camper with the water ski boat on the trailer, the TV in every room, the gaming computer for each family member, and the multiple iPods. With all that to play with, there is not a whole lot of time left for reading, so of course a big home library is not that important to the lifestyle.
A single bookcase in the study does not a home library make. A working class home with boxes of used paperbacks stacked in the corners of the living room and the bedrooms, brought home from the Goodwill Store, is a more literate home.
There are an awful lot of people in the USA who are living close to the hand to mouth level who are more literate than most of the upper middle class. Books, especially used paperbacks, are cheaper and in many ways much more satisfying entertainment than the unaffordable toys of the middle class.