A new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project tells us that digital technologies are encouraging teenage students to write more creatively and to write more often. The study of middle and high school teachers focuses on the teachers’ perceptions of how student writing is affected by the Internet, search engines, social media, cell phones, and texting (what they call “digital technologies”).
The researchers found that teachers see these technologies as:
“generally facilitating teens’ personal expression and creativity, broadening the audience for their written material, and encouraging teens to write more often in more formats than may have been the case in prior generations. At the same time, they describe the unique challenges of teaching writing in the digital age, including the “creep” of informal style into formal writing assignments and the need to better educate students about issues such as plagiarism and fair use.”
This report is the third in a series of three studies on middle and high school teachers:
How Teens Do Research in the Digital World (November 2012)
How Teachers Are Using Technology at Home and in Their Classrooms (February 2013)
The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing is Taught in Schools (July 2013)
I find these reports fascinating and informative. They fascinate me because they offer glimpses into a world (secondary education) I know little about but that directly affects my work as an information literacy librarian at a university. The reports are informative about both my future students and, I suspect, my current students, assuming that the ways that high school students and college students use digital technologies are more similar than different. The reports generate a fistful of ideas for follow-up: How would professors at my university answer the questions posed to teachers in the most current study? Are the students at my school similar in key demographics to the study sample? Do the people running the Writing Center on my campus read these reports? Do the findings resonate with them? Should we collaborate to build on the positives and address the concerns from the findings?