In a tradi-tional research writing paradigm, such forms of information might be dismissed as unreliable or lacking in rigor. Singer rejects such a view, arguing that they can be useful if students know how to use them. Toward this end, she presents her students with a simple “rhetorical chart,” which asks them to consider the genre, purpose, audience, role, and rhetorical situation of each text they encounter.

Once constructed, schemas need to be tested. Thus, students in a networked reading-informed research course would be given the time and opportunity to return to previously examined texts and reflect on how (and why) their understanding has evolved. Through this recursive process, they could practice self-monitoring and hone their questioning abilities.

A more involved activity may entail providing students a certain document and reading context and asking them to formulate a set of reading goals and identify the work necessary to accomplish those goals. They could then consider how outside resources might assist such work.

nstructors may also feel that they don’t have much expertise to impart. These challenges can be overcome by urging students to reflect on and share their existing supplemental tools and techniques.

If we accept the value of networked reading, the next step is to determine where and how to teach it. As to the first question, a case can be made that any teacher who expects students to read complex digital documents needs to teach networked reading habits. This means, at the most basic level, explicitly encouraging students to use outside resources to supplement comprehension.

One might argue that to teach networked reading is to turn reading instruction into research instruction. There’s truth to this claim. My analysis indicates that the best digital readers, through mastery of common digital tools, seamlessly blend reading and research.

Of course, given the tools at David’s disposal, he has access to an innumer-able number of potentially useful information sources. My claim is that reading pedagogy should help him recognize and take full advantage of them.

instruction in genre or reading strategy should be supplemented with activities designed to help students think beyond the page.

Kohnen and Mertens find that apart from being intellectually promiscu-ous and skilled at questioning and self-monitoring, expert generalists are also skilled at synthesis, defined as the act of looking “across information sources” to identify “patterns and contradictions” (291).

As they gather information, Kohnen and Mertens write, expert generalists constantly “[monitor] their own comprehension” (291). When reading, this means recog-nizing what one doesn’t know, what one doesn’t understand. It means asking if one’s reading goals are being achieved and, if not, why not. What does this word mean? Why is the author making this claim?

expert generalists are particularly adept at asking questions: of themselves, of others, and of information resources. For these learners, “questioning [is] a mul-tifaceted process,” the researchers write, one that includes both “knowing how to ask a question and knowing what to ask of whom (or what)” (291). Facility in questioning is underpinned by dispositional tendencies, such as curiosity, skepti-cism, and a commitment to accuracy.

The modern information landscape, as Kohnen and Mertens argue, is uniquely dy-namic. Tools, genres, and information channels change rapidly, and what works one day, in one context, may not work in another. Expert generalists are able to thrive in such an environment. They are not content specialists, but expert learners. Comfortable with the unfamiliar, they can readily find and organize bits of data to move from knowing to understanding, as Lynch and Carillo define these terms. In an age defined by decontextualization and fragmentation, this is an essential skill.

Digital reading experts, the evidence indi-cates, are indeed active meaning makers. They also display a degree of humil-ity. Digital reading experts know that they can’t approach a complex text on an unfamiliar topic cold and expect to accomplish their goals

Why did the students fail to look beyond the text? Ellen Carillo suggests that it is because they did not see themselves as active meaning makers. Carillo claims that high school reading pedagogy promotes an uncritical “reverence for texts” (“Navigating” 145). The contribution of the reader to the meaning-making process is obscured and thus readers become passive, unable to question or chal-lenge what they read.

the expert digital reader is one who intuitively looks beyond the target text

while both digital experts and digital novices used shortcuts, or heuristics, to facilitate comprehension, the experts’ heuristics were better suited to the digital environment. Specifically, while the novices’ default moves looked tothe text (e.g., checking for references), the experts’ default moves looked beyondthe text (e.g., “taking bearings” and “lateral reading”). The experts’ heuristics were thus tailored to engage the most powerful affordance digital technology offers: information access. Relatedly, once beyond the text, the digital experts could make sense of what they found there. They possessed “knowledge of sources, knowledge of how the Internet and searches are structured, and knowl-edge of strategies to make searching and navigating effective,”

Lateral reading, in the context of the study, entailed opening a series of web browser windows in addition to the target text. Within these windows, the fact-checkers performed research to contextualize the target.

For internet-based documents of unknown provenance, such as the ones in the study, “taking bearings” means looking beyond the text at hand, and doing so before reading, so that one can understand what one is reading.

When the reality of information abundance is acknowledged, as we have seen, it is usually approached through the lens of distraction. Information access, in this formulation, rather than be-ing a resource, is a liability. A strategy of hypermediacy, the sort of strategy I wish to pursue, inverts this dynamic.

certain disciplinary practices—like the historian’s tendency to seek out primary sources—might be a hinderance in this new space.

reading well with books and printed pages does not necessarily equate to reading well on screens and within networks.

That said, it appears to me that, so far, this new wave of reading scholarship has yet to seriously engage the unique affordances of digital space.

She believes that we need to make clear to students that meaning is never in the text, but instead results from an active process of negotiation.

By teach-ing students to see themselves as designers and drawing attention to the formal features of texts and how those features shape the reading process, she believes we can help students read more deliberately, resulting in increased comprehension.

Miller, for his part, advocates instruction in “slow reading,” the goal of which is to help students escape cultural acceleration and open “a mental space for deliberation, speculation, reflection, meditation” (156–7).

She argues that digital devices and omnipresent connection promote “a passive model of reading” in which readers are positioned as “downloaders” of mean-ing, rather than active meaning makers (“Navigating” 141).

Rodrigue echoes Richard Miller, who claims that speed, distraction, and the urge to multitask are the defining features of digital reading. Both scholars position these digital reading practices opposite “deep reading,” or sustained attention to a single text, behavior presumably necessary for comprehension.

Attention to this scholarship, I will argue, reveals that digital information experts are networked readers. They intuitively recognize that no idea exists in isolation, and thus, the best way to understand a text is often to look beyond it.

Digital reading, within this emerging paradigm, entails engagement with both textual and non-textual modes. It entails reading and understand-ing, of course, but also the ability to locate and evaluate documents in light of broader discourses and personal needs.