4.+Online+Reading+&+Writing

==//  __Should the paper-based reading and writing so valued by the Educational establishment and high-stakes testing be supplemented or largely replaced in the curriculum by online reading and writing?__//==

It is a matter of time before paper-based reading and writing will be largely replaced with online reading and writing. The writing is already on "the virtual wall" of the Internet of the transition of many print-based mediums moving to online spaces. The largest obstacle to moving the paper-based system is a matter of the monetary means school districts have around the country. National statistics certainly show a large jump in the number of computers in households and schools but disadvantaged school districts are not able to keep up with the use of technology at home (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2005: Leu, et al., 2009). There still exists a significant of students in rural and urban districts who do not have a computer at home. However, this is not stopping even these students from reading and writing online.

Globalization requires students to have what many are referring to as 21st Century Skills that allow them to be life-long motivational learners with the ability to effectively locate, evaluate, communicate, and synthesize information through the Internet (New London Group, 2000; Leu & Hartmann, 2007). The various information and communication technologies that are continually evolving and arriving through the Internet require a skill set different from that of the print-based world. For example, what is the appropriate communication technology to use when desiring to ask a health-related question on the Internet? Depending on the context and available communication tools there can be many different ways in which to answer this question. What is the appropriate discourse to use when communicating with individuals working in the professional/business world? Is it the same as the discourse most commonly used by the majority of young people who are used to communicating via tweets, facebook, and myspace? Each of these questions are uniquely different from the print-based world (Rand Reading Study Group, 2000).

Additionally, the scientific community has become increasingly online-oriented, as is evident with any of the myriad online journals and rich, online-based scientific databases. With hyperlinked bibliographical references, readers can quickly move from one paper to another, quickly and easily covering a tremendous breadth of research that would have been much more cumbersome in pre-online publications. With tools like RefWorks, the creation of bibliographies is not only made easier, but also more deeply integrated as references no longer need to be a tedious last step for students. Beyond the benefits to bibliographies, electronic articles can now include multimedia data that would have been impossible to include in paper versions; some examples include, but are not limited to: video of an experiment being run, Powerpoint presentations, presentation of stimuli, and video/audio responses from participants (with the appropriate waivers, of course).