روزنامه خوان

• Do students have to learn how to read?
• Are there different ways to read material?
• Is reading a passive skill?

Make notes on these questions, trying to think of different ways in which we read, and of what skills might be needed in different circumstances.

We might set out to find different things:

• what time a TV programme is on,
• or read a love letter,
• or read War and Peace ,
• or follow a recipe.

We read the Radio Times quickly, a love letter over and over again, War and Peaceslowly, a recipe in sections with stops for working out weights and amounts-

These are different skills

Readingas Active

You might be surprised to think of reading as an active skill; but we read to assimilate information or follow instructions, so in a very practical way, reading is active. Also, reading can make us laugh or cry, and anything that brings our emotions into action must mean that reading cannot be a passive skill.

We try out words, we have to perceive meanings. We learn to recognise a mode or genre of writing in order to understand it.

The key difference between ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ sources lies in your ability to critically evaluate evidence contained in them. In all ‘academic’ sources it must be possible for a reader to check the facts, statements and other evidence presented by the author(s). Unfortunately, very few ‘non-academic’ sources allow you to check the evidence in this way.

Many of these ‘non-academic’ sources can be useful in other ways, for instance as background reading. However, you must be very careful when relying on them for evidence in your own arguments.

For example, the phrase “Web 2.0” is cropping up with increasingly regularity in both the popular and more technical press. If we wanted to understand what this phrase actually means, we could start with a web site aiming to give a basic understanding of the term. However, this page gives only the most cursory understanding of the basic technologies and principles involved:

Web 2.0 is all about you and me and how WE can create content, merge ideas, and in essence milk every last drop of usefulness out of the Web that we can get. The Web is no longer a spectator sport — it’s all about people, ideas, and collaboration.

Reading this statement critically, we can find quite a few unqualified statements and assumptions. For instance, who said that “Web 2.0 is all about you and me”? Is this simply the authors opinion, or is this an accepted fact (in which case it should be easy to find an authoritative source saying so)? Who said the ‘original’ web was a “spectator sport”? Indeed if you read Tim Berners-Lee papers and discussion of his first web browser (e.g. here), you would know that ease of editing has always been a fundamental goal of the web; at least for the original inventor.

If we were looking for a more authoritative definition of “Web 2.0”, we might start with some of the more popular web sites including technical content. Wikipedia is a popular destination, and if we search for “Web 2.0” we can find this article. This article gives us a few more clues, but how do we think critically about what we have just read?

For academics, the significant problem with Wikipedia is the very openness valued more generally. Anyone can create and edit Wikipedia content — but this also makes it impossible to check many of the statements and facts contained in its articles. So while you might find Wikipedia useful, you should not be using its articles directly to support your own arguments.

That does not mean to say you can’t use Wikipedia indirectly, just as you would with any other background source. Some Wikipedia articles do include references to the primary literature, and by reading these you can find material and evidence that will support your own arguments.

For instance, if you look at the list of citations in the Wikipedia article, you will find a reference to the O’Reilly Open Source conference. Digging around a bit, you should be able to find sources telling you the term “Web 2.0” originated at this conference. So if we pull up a discussion of this conference from the conference notes, we can now at least get a better sense of what the original authors wanted (this source is a primary source because it tell us what happened, in the words of people at the conference, and written at the time). If we were looking to define the term “Web 2.0”, this would be a much better place to start.