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Hello and welcome to the NT English Team's blog! We'll keep you up to date with our publishing activity and any other English-related bits and bobs catching our interest!


Monday 12 July 2010

Our stand at NATE!

Hello! Hope any of you NATE delegates enjoyed the weekend of seminars and workshops. Becky L and I attended from the Publishing team, along with colleagues from Marketing and Sales. It was good to have the chance to see some of our authors again - Lindsay, Trevor, Tom, Dan, Judith and Heather - and we met lots of other great people! We also were very lucky to catch Pete Postlethwaite's engaging talk about his career, teaching and Shakespeare, which included a spontaneous performance of a snippet from Macbeth using an unwitting OCR spokesman as an impromptu extra!
Emma & Becky

Thursday 1 July 2010

ICT and literacy

Are you going to NATE next weekend (9th-11th July)? Becky L and I will be at the Nelson Thornes stand so do pop by and say hello! Lots of interesting seminars on the programme, including sessions on interactive ways of teaching Shakespeare, and ICT in literature - things we’re thinking about a lot here as our kerboodle platform develops. In the first blog I wrote here, back in March, I mentioned my experimentation with an eReader. Almost five months on and I have to say I haven’t used the eReader again once, yet I’ve got through many paperbacks in that time. I now have a shiny new iPhone and am discovering ‘apps’ – including the Apple iBooks app, and an app for screen-friendly scrolling Shakespeare texts, where the scrolling slows if you tip the phone forward and speeds up if you tip it back. Witchcraft, I tell you. (Aside: I still don’t understand how the Wii knows you’re hitting an invisible ball in golf/tennis etc. Definitely black arts.)

You may have the impression that I’m not very technical by now. Not strictly true – I embrace technology, just slightly slower than my peers, who have been amused by my old-fashioned paper-and-pen diary technique for well over a year now. I’m easily wowed by fancy features, oh and I really, really want an iPad. I digress. In contrast to having to hook the eReader up to my PC to download books, my iPhone allows me immediate access to the Apple iBook store, which is visually very appealing with its fancy bookshelf design and familiar functionality. I've just downloaded a sample of a book for free. It's easy to read with fast page turns at a touch of the screen – far less clunky than my old eReader – and there’s an handy link for me to buy the whole book if I want to. I can change the font, adjust the brightness, the size of the text and the look of the page, look up words in a dictionary, add bookmarks, read ratings and add my own, browse charts... all on the move. Brilliant. I can definitely see myself using this more than the eReader. I'm never without my phone so I don't have to remember to pack another device, or ensure I've pre-loaded it with books.


In a recent article the author Tom Stoppard expressed a fear that reading is on the decline because of moving images taking over children’s lives. I disagree - surely students engage more with writing and reading now than ever before, through emailing, texting and MSN? Students can blog, post reviews, and even engage with collaborative creative writing online - I think it's easier to engage with writing and reading now. In March 2010, the number of iBook apps surpassed the number of game apps for the first time (see here). Whether that relates to children reading iBooks I don’t know, but surely making books more available, more dynamic, more portable, and more easily personalized, with the opportunity to read samples of new writers without risking the wrath of the Waterstone’s bookseller or the ridicule of your mates if they catch you in the Sci-Fi section (no offence, Sci-Fi fans), will only serve to encourage new readers? And students are challenged on their personal responses to texts – by engaging with the text in the way that best suits them, surely they’ll be better placed to respond effectively?

The thing I’m most excited about is the way the iBook is becoming so much more than just a digital version of the printed book – it can be dynamic with audio, video, links and supplementary information, and so on. Author David Eagleman hit the nail on the head:

An electronic version of a book merely grants portability. But a thoughtful app can open new inroads to explore the material, as well as ways to keep the material updated and fresh … By having the option to explore a book beyond the original text — by dint of videos, living links, and so on — it becomes a living, breathing, updating organism, just like the rest of our technology.

The Guardian, Mon 28 June 2010

According to a 2004 review of the impact of ICT on literacy in students, the “introduction of ICT into literature teaching improves motivation, but the duration of exposure to a technology can affect this. There may be a connection between de-motivation and the cognitive aspects of readers' engagement with digital texts.”

I wonder if the same is true six years on, when technology is even further ahead than it was in 2004, and we’re working with a generation of students who may have written a thousand emails but never handwritten a letter, and whose primary understanding is that of the screen rather than the page. Do they have more tolerance for sustained digital learning? Perhaps I’ll find out at NATE…

Emma