New Literacies vs. Outdated Assessments

The more I delved in the 46 page article, (co-authored by our one-and-only Dr. Dana) on new literacies and it's affect on our mental processes, the more something I read recently itched at me as seeming very inconsistent. The article we read on Monday on reading comprehension dazzled me. I took so much from it and fully intend to spead around the teaching staff at my school. One of the things that reverberated through me as I read was this, "Students are asked to read a text in order to answer questions designed to do little more than test whether they have understood and remember the text read." (Pressley?) To me, this is the epitome of linear thinking-read this, answer these, no indepth thinking necessary! And doesn't this encapsulate the nature of standardized testing?

To be literate on the internet, as the article for this week states, you must be able to change and adapt. Very Darwinian. And in order to adapt to this, somewhere along the way, thinking and forming ideas went from a literal process (think/read this and come up with an answer- cause and effect) to cylindrical and tangential and utterly weblike. So how come our educational systems are still set up in a linear fashion? I don't know if what I'm pondering makes sense.

All of this makes me think of a now 6th grade student of mine. Let's call him Marvin. Marvin cannot spell to save his life. His writing is weak and while he is making leaps and bounds on his comprehension and high level thinking skills, when he came to me fresh out of Catholic school he hated reading and couldn't challenge text. So imagine my pleasant surprise to find out that Marvin is a faithful blogger on his MySpace page. I don't want to compromise his privacy and read his page, but I bet on MySpace, he is eloquent, thoughtful and highly literate. Because that arena is set up for casual expression, I'm guessing Marvin sees it as a way to shine without consequence, also using the tools so immediately at his disposal, like spell/grammar check. So who am I to say in a classroom that he's going to get a "c" in language arts because he doesn't study his spelling words, doesn't use appropriate figurative language in his writing, and hasn't shown that he's mastered the reading comprehension skills taught all year. Marvin is writing and publishing his work in the big wide world without me, without school AND without hitting the state standards. He's literate online.

Anyway, other things I was thinking when reading the article this week:

How does instantly recieving information affect our attention spans and level of patience when interacting with the real world?

With the new demands of information-age organizations, it becomes that much more necessary to teach critical thinking skills as opposed to question-answer reading comprehension.

Should I encourage the students to do more reading of texts online instead of paper-based reading? Also, how do I teach my students what are reputable texts online when information is always changing?