ABSTRACT
The Internet is transforming the experience of reading and learning-through-reading. Is this transformation effecting a radical change in reading processes as readers synthesize understandings from fragments across multiple texts? Or, conversely, is the Internet merely a new place to use the same reading skills and processes developed through experience with traditional print-based media? Are the changes in reading processes a matter of degree, or are they fundamentally new? And if so, how must reading theory, research, and instruction adjust?
This volume brings together distinguished experts from the fields of reading research, teacher education, educational psychology, cognitive science, rhetoric and composition, digital humanities, and educational technology to address these questions. Every question is not answered in every chapter. How could they be? But every contributor has many thoughtful things to say about a subset of these important questions. Together, they add up to a comprehensive response to the issues the field faces as it approaches what may well be—or not —a crossroads. A website devoted to extending discussion around the book in creative (and disjunctive) ways [readingatacrossroads.net] moves it beyond the printed page.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|50 pages
Setting the Stage
chapter 5|6 pages
All Bets Are Off
part II|76 pages
The Nature of Reading (and Writing) Online
chapter 6|12 pages
Purposeful, Critical, and Flexible
chapter 7|9 pages
From Computers and the Web to Mobile Devices AND e-Texts
chapter 8|15 pages
Reading at a Million Crossroads
chapter 10|11 pages
Building Coherence in Web-Based and Other Non-Traditional Reading Environments
chapter 11|12 pages
Disequilibrium.edu
part III|53 pages
Instruction