Enacting Change: A Study of the Implementation of E-Readers and an Online Library in Two Canadian High School Classrooms

Patterson et al. write about their project that ”combined (1) information literacy issues, (2) pedagogy and e-pedagogy, and (3) computational modeling activities founded on a productive confluence of these perspectives all situated at the intersection of pertinent theories and practices pertaining to each”(p.66). After the project was completed they found that:

"Inclusion of new technologies such as e-readers and online libraries directly impacts learning and teaching. As witnessed throughout this study, the development and implementation of e-readers and online libraries are an important step in addressing the gap between born-digital learners’ personal contexts and the learning contexts of contemporary classrooms. Unique understandings of born-digital students’ changing literacies have been arrived at through this study, alongside clear evidence of the complications that arise through the development, implementation, and integration of new literacy technologies and environments such as e-readers and online libraries. Yet such an effort and understanding is needed. Throughout this study, there emerged the need for re-inventing reading and learning spaces to address the changing reading patterns and epistemologies of born-digital students as they navigated through ideas and information from page to screen. Importantly, this re-invention can only occur through a co-authoring of the reading and learning spaces of born-digital students by those very students, their teachers, the online library developer, and others such as experts in digital corpora” (p.79).

To make a long conclusion short, they found:

• They have a direct impact on learning
• An important step in addressing the gap between difital readers and the general classroom
• There are complications in developing a new technology into the classroom
• Effort and understanding of these complications is needed in order to successfully incorporate technology readers
• Supported the idea of reinventing reading
• For re-invention of reading to occur, everyone in the school must be on board

Link to the article:http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/articles/000491/article.pdf