The Digital World’s Place in Education
The director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, Maryanne Wolf, ponders at what point children should be introduced to online tools in a Boston Globe piece.
"More specifically, in the expert reading brain, the first milliseconds of decoding have become virtually automatic within that circuit. It is this automaticity that allows us the precious milliseconds we need to go beyond the decoded text to think new thoughts of our own - the heart of the reading process."
"The act of going beyond the text to think new thoughts is a developmental, learnable approach toward knowledge."
"Children need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves, to develop an expert reading brain, before the digital mode dominates their reading. The immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge."
(Are op-eds—whose name is considered to be short for opposite the editorials—still called op-eds in the online world?)
