Reading in the Post-Gutenberg World: Solving Print Disabilities
David H. Rose, Sam Catherine Johnston, and Amy E. Vanden Boogart
PublisherPerspectives on Language and Literacy
Date2014
Abstract
In this article, the authors explore a changing educational and technological landscape that will radically change for the better how learners with "print disabilities"—people with dyslexia, for example—will learn in the near future.
Truly revolutionary technologies for teaching—already evident in many new online programs and apps—will look much more dynamic and responsive, more like guided apprenticeships or graduated simulations where students can conduct virtual experiments or create their own media: where they can engage in active discovery or challenging games that develop skills; where they can find models, demonstrations, and progressive scaffolding to support practice; where they can find many alternatives, adaptations, and accommodations to suit their personal abilities and backgrounds.
Learners will be able to find these technologies and use them, and, increasingly, they will be able to adapt, repurpose, and reinvent them. These new environments can already, and will more often in the future, calculate and extrapolate, track progress and adapt, illuminate cause and effect, provide instructive—and immediate—feedback. They will blur the line between teaching and learning.
This article was part of a two-issue series edited by the authors for the International Dyslexia Association's Perspectives on Language and Literacy.
Cite As
Rose D.H., Johnston, S.C., & Vanden Boogart, A. (2014). Canaries in the mine: Reading and its disabilities in a post-Gutenberg world. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, (40)1:41-44.