Chapter 4: Tpack And New Literacies Of Online Reading Comprehension: Preparing Today’s Teachers for Tomorrow’s Readers

Technology has always changed literacy. Yet, until recently, this change has moved forward gradually. For example, cave paintings dominated the world stage for 30,000 years. Oral language and the stories told passed along walls rose as literary practices and for eons no other encoded text rose to dominance. Thus reading comprehension involved recognizing social norms and a few symbols. Then, along came cuneiforms, which, after a few thousand years, were supplanted by scrolls. Already the rate of change quickly sped up, but texts were still not a major literary practice, and reading comprehension was a habit of the wealthy classes. Then, in the 15th century Gutenberg developed the printing press, which only held dominance for a meager three centuries. Yet the decoding of texts and making meaning with those symbolic forms of meaning suddenly became a central literary practice. Next the typewriter exploded on the scene, and for the first time popular culture texts became a dominant source for literary practices. A little less than a century later, the word processor took center stage. Suddenly change began to happen at blistering speeds.