unlimited amount of online information

A process by which students construct and redesign knowledge by actively encoding and decoding meaning through the use of ever-shifting mul-timodal tools.

A group of lo-cal or global learners who arrive at a common outcome via multiple pathways of knowledge.

The three strands of the Web Literacy Map are intertwined.

The community of volunteers, teachers, and industry leaders continue to define and sustain the Map construction and development in the open. In fact, work of the next version has begun, and the com-munity will continue to openly iterate on the map.

In school he was often dismissed for his creative mind.

His teachers did not see the value Garth found in exploring, building, and connecting online.

At the very least they may demand an argument for “Why school?”

In an affinity space no one is stopped from gaining intensive knowledge because someone else thinks they are “my low students” or “struggling.”

and race, class, gender, and disability are often much more foregrounded than they are in an affinity space

They involved the use of multiple sorts of mediating devices (computers and email to outside experts), distributed knowledge as students worked in teams with those mediating devices, dispersed knowledge as students drew on expertise outside the classroom, intensive knowledge as individual students chose to “major” in some aspect of the curriculum and help other students in that respect, and extensive shared knowledge as the students taught each other different parts of a common curriculum (via the jigsaw method, Aronson 1978).

Businesses in the new capitalist era (Gee et al. 1996) of cross-functional, dispersed, networked teams and project-based work often seek to create affinity spaces to motivate, organize, and resource their “partners” (they seek to avoid the term “worker” which implies a traditional boss-worker relationship in which one party “bosses” the other).

This feeling of the game being highly challenging, but ultimately doable, gives rise to a feeling of pleasurable frustration, one of the great joys of both deep learning and good gaming.

The Quick Start tutorial is a sandbox. The sandbox feels like the real world to a child, but is guaranteed not to destroy the child’s trust and ego before he or she is strong enough to face more significant challenges.

This is all “at risk” needs to mean in schools too, though there it often means giving “at-risk” learners a special dumbed-down curriculum meant to catch them up on “basic skills”—a curriculum that all too often is a bad learning experience for these students.

So when I say it was “too hard,” what I really mean is that I failed to engage with it in a way that fully recruited its solid design and learning principles.

In the end, I hope to convince you that today’s young people often see deeper and better forms of learning going on in the games they play than in the schools they attend.

How do children learn how words and grammar line up to express particular perspectives on experience? Here, interactive, intersubjective dialogue with more advanced peers and adults appears to be crucial.

Even words that seem so clearly to have clear definitions, like the word “bachelor” that we used as an example at the beginning of this section, do not. Meaning is not about definitions, it is about simulations of experience.

To pretend that the school phonics instruction—something which contributed only to the tip of that iceberg—was responsible for him becoming a reader is a crime. It is yet worse to pretend that the tip can make up for the whole iceberg for those children who come to school without it.

“winners”, i.e. people who can repeat back verbal details they remember well when they don’t fully understand them in any practical way.

Such literal understandings are precisely what kids who fuel the fourth-grade slump have.

knowing the general meaning is nearly worthless, unless you can recognize the word’s applications in specific cases.

So, poor readers cannot become good ones unless they improve their vocabularies. They can’t improve their vocabularies unless they read a lot, but reading a lot is not a particularly effective way to increase one’s vocabulary. So what, for heaven’s sake, can be done? Are poor readers just fated to stay poor readers?

It’s the situation that counts.

So what is this early language ability that seems so important for later success in school? According to the report, it is indicated by things like vocabulary (receptive vocabulary, but more especially expressive vocabulary, p. 107); the ability to recall and comprehend sentences and stories; and the ability to engage in extended, connected verbal interactions on a single topic.

The “fourth-grade slump” (Chall et al. 1990) is the phenomenon where some children seem to acquire reading (i.e. pass reading tests) fine in the early grades, but fail to be able to use reading to learn school content in the later grades, when the language demands of that content (e.g. science) get more and more complex.

Learners are given continual verbal and behavioral feedback for their efforts

Even when instruction is good, we find a pattern in such cases where a small number of people succeed quite well and a far greater number succeed much less well. Every human is built to learn a native language well; not everyone is built to learn physics well.

In fact, it seems a bit strange—creepy even—to claim that an African-American child or a poor child might be inherently less able to engage with Pokémon than white or rich children. We do not, however, find such thoughts strange when we think about school learning, though we should.

Why should being poor or a member of a particular social group have anything whatsoever to do with learning to read in school? Isn’t the whole purpose of public schooling to create a level playing field for all children?

Discussion in which stu-dents show a good understanding of and critical thinking about the text often includes listening and linking to others’ ideas, providing evidence from the text to support one’s thinking, and regular student participation

Also, students sometimes forget a lesson overnight or over a weekend, at least temporarily, so when they return to school, they may not remember how to independently enact the strategy they were using effortlessly the previous school day.

The model we recommend for teaching any comprehension strategy is the gradual release of responsibility

Instruction that includes hands-on activities, opportunities to engage in reading for authentic purposes, and texts with a clear structure and vivid, concrete examples is associated with motivated engagement and, subsequently, better recall and learning

Words are not the point of words; ideas are.

we use our knowledge along with our perceptions of what we think the text says to literally build, or construct, mental representations of what the text means.

both models carve out a central role for readers’ prior knowledge in the comprehen-sion process

Many students who appear to be learning to read well in the early years of school cannot read to learn by the fourth grade.

The digital gap: Access to digital media is important, but perhaps more important is access to adult mentoring in the use of digital media. Students need adults to help them learn to leverage technological “know-how” to learn content, produce knowledge, and develop high-level expertise.

Phonemic awareness supports reading develop-ment only if it is part of a broader program that in-cludes—among other things—development ofstudents’ vocabulary, syntax, comprehension,strategic reading abilities, decoding strategies, andwriting across all content areas.

10 minutes to 30 minutes per session

phonemic awareness instruction foryoung children should be playful and engaging,interactive and social, and should stimulate cu-riosity and experimentation with language.

Every ChildReading: An Action Plan of the Learning FirstAlliance(1998) identifies phonemic awarenessas one of the most important foundations of read-ing success and recommends that its developmentbe addressed in prekindergarten and kindergarten.

Phonemicawareness—a subset of phonological aware-ness—refers to a sensitivity to and control overthe phonemes.

Mothers cook without written recipes most of the time; if ( \ they use a recipe from a written source, they do so usually only after confirma­!lon and alteration by friends who have tried the recipe,

Children are not encouraged to move their understanding of books into other situational contexts or to apply it in their general knowledge of the world abour them,

in Traekton especially, children have a keen sense thM reading is something one does to learn something one needs to know

Knowledge was not a singular construct, but existed in diverse forms and inter-active dimensions

From detection of the universal laws of learning, the goal became the de-scription of the “ways of knowing” unique to particular social, cultural, and ed-ucational groups

The top-down perspective of the ho-listic Gestalt modality was evident in the orientation to reading development heldby those Chall (1967) identified as “linguistic” proponents, who emphasizedwhole-word recognition, the importance of context in comprehension and wordidentification, and the consideration of reading as a unique human activity withits own definitive characteristics.

Moreover, de-spite the claims of some within the reading research community that little ofsignificance occurred in reading until the 1960s (Weaver & Kintsch, 1991), the con-tinued influence of behaviorism on educational practice remains evident today

With this analyticview, there was a growing tendency for problems in the reading act to be looked onas deficiencies in need of remediation, just as physical ailments require medicalremedies. Indeed, it was a medical metaphor of reading, with its diagnosis, pre-scription, and remediation, that came to the foreground in the 1950s.

Skinnerian behav-iorism