Tips and resources to support children birth to age five
Playing Cat Piano by Eileen Simmons
A post from our partner, Eileen Simmons of Everett Library, a member of the Early Learning Public Library Partnership.I’ve been thinking about e-readers a lot lately—all those Kindles, Nooks, Sony Readers, and now iPads that seem to be taking over, if you believe Amazon’s report that they are now selling more e-books than hardbacks. As a librarian I’ve watched, with a great deal of interest, the marketplace’s efforts over the years to find an electronic device that people will embrace. I am trying to figure out what all this means for the future of libraries, of course, since many of the companies that manufacture these devices don’t show much interest in including libraries as part of their business strategy.
I especially wonder what electronic books, complete with hyperlinks, mean for our youngest readers. I recently read an article about schools loading textbooks onto e-readers for their students. The young student interviewed by the author was delighted with the fact that she could click on links in the text and go off on tangents of intellectual interest to her. Now most textbooks are pretty boring, so I can imagine that this capability greatly enhances the chances that any individual child will find something of interest that can then be easily explored in more detail via all those hyperlinks.
But do they become better readers and better students—or do these e-readers contribute to the kind of technological rewiring of our brains and fragmenting of our attention that Matt Richtel reported on in a widely circulated article entitled “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price?” (NYT, June 6, 2010) If I knew the answer to that question, maybe I could make money as a consultant somewhere, but it’s a fact that people really like their gadgets and the Internet, too, so it’s not as if we can press undo and go back to a time before any of this stuff existed.
Commerce and technology march on, and libraries try to figure out how to fit in. Some libraries actually do provide downloadable e-books (not audio-books, but books you can read on your Nook, for example (although not your Kindle or iPad). We don’t, yet. But I do know that my daughter-in-law downloaded an amusing app named Cat Piano onto her iPad, and my grandson, who is just 1 ½ years old, loves to “play” the piano that sounds like meowing cats. There will probably be a time in the not too distant future when you can download Where’s Spot? complete with illustrations for your toddler to enjoy on the family e-reader. My hope is that libraries will still be part of that future, even if it’s one where we all have iPads or Kindles.
Comment
-
Comment by Erin Okuno on August 13, 2010 at 10:21am -
Great blog post. I hope you will keep us up to date on the future of reading and technology. All of the babies born today will know what the internet is, phones are no longer connected to cords, and reading is more portable than ever. Has there been any research done on digitial readers and young children? I would be interested to know if they find any differences.
© 2012 Created by Foundation for Early Learning.
You need to be a member of Early Learning Community to add comments!
Join Early Learning Community