Maryanne Wolf -- Learning to think in a digital world
Maryanne Wolf is professor at Tufts University, where she is also director of the Center for Reading and Language Research. She is author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain." This oped piece first appeared in 2007.
Learning to think in a digital world
By Maryanne Wolf | Published on September 5, 2007
Aa parents invest in the latest academic software and teachers consider how to weave the Internet into lesson plans for the new school year, it is a good moment to reflect upon the changing world in which youths are being educated. In a word, it is digital, with computer notebooks displacing spiraled notebooks, and Web-based blogs, articles, and e-mails shaping how we read and communicate. Parents, teachers, and scholars are beginning to question how our immersion in this increasingly digital world will shape the next generation's relationship to reading, learning, and to knowledge itself.
As a cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading, I am particularly concerned with the plight of the reading brain as it encounters this technologically rich society. Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips. Over the last 5,000 years, the acquisition of reading transformed the neural circuitry of the brain and the intellectual development of the species. Yet, the reading brain is slowly becoming endangered - the unforeseen consequences of the transition to a digital epoch that is affecting every aspect of our lives, including the intellectual development of each new reader. Three unexpected sources can help us negotiate the historical transition we face as we move from one prevailing mode of communication to another: Socrates, modern cognitive neuroscience, and Proust.
Similarly poised between two modes of communication, one oral and one written, Socrates argued against the acquisition of literacy. His arguments are as prescient today as they were futile then. At the core of Socrates' arguments lay his concerns for the young. He believed that the seeming permanence of the printed word would delude them into thinking they had accessed the heart of knowledge, rather than simply decoded it. To Socrates, only the arduous process of probing, analyzing, and ultimately internalizing knowledge would enable the young to develop a lifelong approach to thinking that would lead them ultimately to wisdom, virtue, and "friendship with [their] god." To Socrates, only the examined word and the "examined life" were worth pursuing, and literacy short-circuited both.
How many children today are becoming Socrates' nightmare, decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their googled universes? Will they become so accustomed to immediate access to escalating on-screen information that they will fail to probe beyond the information given to the deeper layers of insight, imagination, and knowledge that have led us to this stage of human thought? Or, will the new demands of information technologies to multitask, integrate, and prioritize vast amounts of information help to develop equally, if not more valuable, skills that will increase human intellectual capacities, quality of life, and collective wisdom as a species?
There is surprisingly little research that directly confronts these questions, but knowledge from the neurosciences about how the brain learns to read and how it learns to think about what it reads can aid our efforts. We know, for example, that no human being was born to read. We can do so only because of our brain's protean capacity to rearrange itself to learn something new. Using neuroimaging to scan the brains of novice readers allows us to observe how a new neural circuitry is fashioned from some of its original structures. In the process, that brain is transformed in ways we are only now beginning to fully appreciate. 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.
Perhaps no one was more eloquent about the true purpose of reading than French novelist Marcel Proust, who wrote: "that which is the end of their [the author's] wisdom is but the beginning of ours." The act of going beyond the text to think new thoughts is a developmental, learnable approach toward knowledge.
Within this context, there should be a developmental perspective on our transition to a digital culture. Our already biliterate children, who nimbly traverse between various modes of print, need to develop an expert reading brain before they become totally immersed in the digital world. Neuroscience shows us the profound miracle of an expert reading brain that uses untold areas across all four lobes and both hemispheres to comprehend sophisticated text and to think new thoughts that go beyond the text.
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. As technological visionary Edward Tenner cautioned, "It would be a shame if the very intellect that produced the digital revolution could be destroyed by it." Socrates, Proust, and the images of the expert reading brain help us tothink more deliberately about the choices we possess as our next generation moves toward the next great epoch in our intellectual development.
Maryanne Wolf is professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University, where she is also director of the Center for Reading and Language Research. She is author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain."
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company
Learning to think in a digital world
By Maryanne Wolf | Published on September 5, 2007
Aa parents invest in the latest academic software and teachers consider how to weave the Internet into lesson plans for the new school year, it is a good moment to reflect upon the changing world in which youths are being educated. In a word, it is digital, with computer notebooks displacing spiraled notebooks, and Web-based blogs, articles, and e-mails shaping how we read and communicate. Parents, teachers, and scholars are beginning to question how our immersion in this increasingly digital world will shape the next generation's relationship to reading, learning, and to knowledge itself.
As a cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading, I am particularly concerned with the plight of the reading brain as it encounters this technologically rich society. Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips. Over the last 5,000 years, the acquisition of reading transformed the neural circuitry of the brain and the intellectual development of the species. Yet, the reading brain is slowly becoming endangered - the unforeseen consequences of the transition to a digital epoch that is affecting every aspect of our lives, including the intellectual development of each new reader. Three unexpected sources can help us negotiate the historical transition we face as we move from one prevailing mode of communication to another: Socrates, modern cognitive neuroscience, and Proust.
Similarly poised between two modes of communication, one oral and one written, Socrates argued against the acquisition of literacy. His arguments are as prescient today as they were futile then. At the core of Socrates' arguments lay his concerns for the young. He believed that the seeming permanence of the printed word would delude them into thinking they had accessed the heart of knowledge, rather than simply decoded it. To Socrates, only the arduous process of probing, analyzing, and ultimately internalizing knowledge would enable the young to develop a lifelong approach to thinking that would lead them ultimately to wisdom, virtue, and "friendship with [their] god." To Socrates, only the examined word and the "examined life" were worth pursuing, and literacy short-circuited both.
How many children today are becoming Socrates' nightmare, decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their googled universes? Will they become so accustomed to immediate access to escalating on-screen information that they will fail to probe beyond the information given to the deeper layers of insight, imagination, and knowledge that have led us to this stage of human thought? Or, will the new demands of information technologies to multitask, integrate, and prioritize vast amounts of information help to develop equally, if not more valuable, skills that will increase human intellectual capacities, quality of life, and collective wisdom as a species?
There is surprisingly little research that directly confronts these questions, but knowledge from the neurosciences about how the brain learns to read and how it learns to think about what it reads can aid our efforts. We know, for example, that no human being was born to read. We can do so only because of our brain's protean capacity to rearrange itself to learn something new. Using neuroimaging to scan the brains of novice readers allows us to observe how a new neural circuitry is fashioned from some of its original structures. In the process, that brain is transformed in ways we are only now beginning to fully appreciate. 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.
Perhaps no one was more eloquent about the true purpose of reading than French novelist Marcel Proust, who wrote: "that which is the end of their [the author's] wisdom is but the beginning of ours." The act of going beyond the text to think new thoughts is a developmental, learnable approach toward knowledge.
Within this context, there should be a developmental perspective on our transition to a digital culture. Our already biliterate children, who nimbly traverse between various modes of print, need to develop an expert reading brain before they become totally immersed in the digital world. Neuroscience shows us the profound miracle of an expert reading brain that uses untold areas across all four lobes and both hemispheres to comprehend sophisticated text and to think new thoughts that go beyond the text.
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. As technological visionary Edward Tenner cautioned, "It would be a shame if the very intellect that produced the digital revolution could be destroyed by it." Socrates, Proust, and the images of the expert reading brain help us tothink more deliberately about the choices we possess as our next generation moves toward the next great epoch in our intellectual development.
Maryanne Wolf is professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University, where she is also director of the Center for Reading and Language Research. She is author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain."
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company
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Breaking Down Barriers
Tufts literacy expert Maryanne Wolf has pioneered ground-breaking research that has led to advances in dyslexia testing and treatment.
In Finland, a child with dyslexia writes his name for the first time. In Israel, a four-year-old is tested for reading disabilities before entering kindergarten. In Somerville, Mass., a second-grader learns to read with the help of a new intervention program. Around the world, children are being tested and treated for dyslexia more successfully than ever before閠hanks in part to Child Development Professor Maryanne Wolf's ground-breaking work at the Tufts Center for Reading and Language Research (CRLR).
"Everything we do involves making knowledge come to life for children," says Wolf, who has directed the center隝hich is an affiliate of Tufts' Eliot Pearson Department of Child Development閙ince 1995. "We have a lot to learn from the dyslexic brain. It teaches us [what elements] have to be there in order to read."
"Everything we do involves making knowledge come to life for children."
— Maryanne Wolf
According to Wolf, the brain never evolved to read. Rather, reading reveals how the brain "rearranges older structures devoted to linguistic, perceptual and cognitive regions to make something new." Children with dyslexia have a range of difficulties that prevent this, but are often gifted in other areas, including all forms of pattern-finding, art and architecture. She points out that many successful artists, sculptors, radiologists and entrepreneurs have a history of dyslexia, and children and adults with dyslexia often think "outside the box."
At the center, Wolf develops and evaluates state-of-the-art intervention techniques to help children overcome barriers to reading. "All of us at the center want to understand what is the best possible set of interventions that we can possibly design for different children," she says.
Through two large grants from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, Wolf helped to develop the RAVE-O (Retrieval, Automaticity, Vocabulary, Engagement with Language, Orthography) Program, an experimental, research-based intervention program that is geared toward young elementary school children. The results, which will be released this year, show that this program is more effective than other programs in developing reading comprehension and fluency skills.
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"It is a singularly encouraging result after 10 years of work by all the members of the center," Wolf says.
A major direction for the center is to provide teachers from around the country with training workshops on these new methods. Another focus is to conduct brain-imaging studies of children with dyslexia before and after the RAVE-O intervention to study how they change as a result.
Another product of Wolf's research閠he Rapid Automatized Naming and Rapid Alternating Stimulus (RAN/RAS) Tests锝as become an important tool in detecting dyslexia.
"I've tested the RAN/RAS for almost 20 years now," she says about the assessment tool, which she developed along with a neurologist from Johns Hopkins University. The test, which uses letters, numbers, colors and objects to determine if a child is at risk for a reading disability, is "a powerful predictor" of dyslexia, according to Wolf. "It's become a prototype for many other tests."
Wolf explains that these tests and tools are being used in numerous literacy programs around the world to help children who speak languages as diverse as Hebrew, Greek, Chinese, German, Finish, Dutch and Spanish. But some of the center's most interesting work, she points out, takes place in communities nearby Tufts, where undergraduates are tutoring school children.
According to Wolf, members of the Tufts Literacy Corps铘n organization that sends tutors to local schools铘re trained in cutting-edge dyslexia testing and treatment methods, including RAVE-O. (Read more about the Tufts Literacy Corps)
Wolf points out that because they learn RAVE-O principles, undergraduates in the Tufts Literacy Corps know a great deal more than the average tutor. "This is really solid training," she says.
The initiative dovetails with a broader institutional goal of lending support to local communities and fits with the mission of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. .....(continued
Breaking Down Barriers
(Page 2 of 2)
CONTINUED
"We're always working with Medford, Somerville and Malden. We are extremely interested in taking the kids in the community who are failing and figuring out whether we can teach teachers or do tutoring. Whatever we can do, we try," Wolf explains.
For nearly a decade, the center has run the Malden Summer Literacy Enrichment Program, which helps severely impaired young readers. A partnership between the City of Malden and the Tufts center, this four-week reading intervention program includes enrichment based on RAVE-O that is designed to improve literacy and language. Results have been very positive, Wolf notes, with some children who were in danger of being retained able to go onto the next grade.
While the summer program aims to help local kids, it also opens its doors to teachers from outside Boston and provides them with an opportunity to learn RAVE-O techniques.
"The most important goal is to help the kids," Wolf emphasizes. "The second is to train teachers in new methods," she says, adding that she hopes to "harness the beautiful idealism of teachers and tutors and show them how these new methods give them toolboxes they never would have had before."
As the newly appointed John DiBiaggio Chair in Citizenship and Public Service铘 position sponsored by Tisch College鏆olf now has added support for her work in the community.
"Having this chair will promote the concept of citizenship, public service and scholarship as being intrinsically interwoven and that will be a wonderful thing," Wolf says. "It's what Tufts does so beautifully."
While Wolf's work at Tufts supports local communities, her efforts extend to other areas as well. In Arizona, Wolf and colleagues such as Dr. Gil Noam of Harvard Medical School recently helped establish after-school programs at several elementary schools to help students, many of whom were learning English as a second language, deal with the emotional repercussions of dyslexia.
"Dyslexia is not a sickness, but a different arrangement of the brain's circuits. In pre-literate times, people with dyslexia were the heroes, the builders. In contemporary times, the child who cannot read feels like they are totally different than the rest of the world," Wolf says. "Our job is to rescue the original child," she adds, noting that identifying dyslexia early can help ward off childhood depression. The most important goal, she explains, is to "preserve children's belief in themselves, so they can go on to contribute their many gifts to society."
Wolf's practical experience in creating community programs informs her classroom teaching. She brands herself as "a teacher infused with the latest research" and says that she and her colleagues "are researchers who teach with a vengeance."
According to Wolf, the introductory child development course that she's taught for the past 20 years is an opportunity to pass on a wealth of knowledge to more than 100 students each semester. She hopes to give her students a better understanding of children and encourage them to "participate in the formation of the next generation." Teaching, Wolf explains, is a "vehicle to help change happen."
Wolf, whose book about the brain and reading will be published in 1997, remains excited about her teaching and research ?and the fact that she knows her work is far from done.
"I think we have made great inroads in diagnosis笋nd in our new interventions, we are in the first stages of learning how to simulate the brain when it reads a word," she says. "But we are nowhere close enough to being able to say [our work] helps all children to the degree we wish. We need to work more on that."
And that's exactly what Wolf plans to do.
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