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Dawn of the digital natives - is reading declining? | Technology | The Guardian

A number of people wrote in late last year to ask what I thought of the NEA report on declining literacy, To Read Or Not To Read, in the light of my arguments in Everything Bad Is Good For You. I actually jotted down some pretty extensive notes about it, either for a blog post or an op-ed, but it was right before Christmas, and so they ended up sitting on my hard drive. But the other day, the Guardian asked me if I had anything to say about the issue, so I went back and wrote up this little essay that's running today in the Guardian. Here's a quick taste of it:

The NEA makes a convincing case that both kids and adults are reading fewer books. "Non-required" reading - ie, picking up a book for the fun of it - is down 7% since 1992 for all adults, and 12% for 18-24 year olds.

The subtitle of the NEA report - A Question Of National Consequence - would lead you believe this dramatic drop must have had done significant damage to our reading proficiencies as a society. And indeed, NEA chair Dana Giola states boldly in his introduction: "The story the data tell is simple, consistent and alarming." But then the data turns out to be complex, inconsistent and not really that alarming at all. As Giola puts it, in the very next sentence: "Although there has been measurable progress in recent years in reading ability at the elementary school level, all progress appears to halt as children enter their teenage years."

What was that again? There's measurable progress in two of the three age groups reviewed? Actually, it's more than just measurable: if you look at the charts, the single biggest change - either positive or negative - is the spike upwards in reading abilities among nine-year-olds, which jumped seven points from 1999.

But at least there must be an "alarming" drop in reading skills among those 17-year-olds to justify this big report. And there it is: the teenagers are down five points from 1988. But wait, this is all on a scale of 0-500. If you scored it on a standard 100-point exam scale, it's the equivalent of dropping a single point. Not exactly cause for national alarm.

Outside.In Lets People Use The Internet To Communicate With Each Other!

So we finally launched discussion boards at outside.in. It's taken us a while, but I'm really excited about the way we've put them together. As you might imagine, we've built discussion boards with state-of-the-art geo-targeting that happens pretty much transparently. My colleague John Geraci wrote a great post about this on the outside.in blog:

Discussion threads get associated with each individual place they reference.  So, say you’re talking about the evictions that just took place at 475 Kent Avenue in Brooklyn.  If that place has been referenced before in our system, the discussion boards will detect it and associate your post with the outside.in page for that place. If it’s not in our system, we invite you to give it a place manually (which takes about ten seconds), and thereafter it IS in our system as a place, with your Discussion post attached. All of these different levels of locality then stack up vertically - place, neighborhood and city all nested together. So if you post a question about a restaurant in Hayes Valley, SF, it not only shows up on the Hayes Valley discussion board, it shows up on the San Francisco discussion board, as well as on the page of the restaurant itself - where other people interested in that restaurant can find it and learn from it, or post their own response to it. In other words, the conversation gets indexed at all of the different levels of zoom that are relevant to it.

As John mentions, we're automatically detecting place and neighborhood names in the posts, and geo-tagging the posts appropriately based on those associations.  (And we built a brain-dead-simple UI for adding a place manually.) It's a pretty cool system.

Of course, online discussion boards take time to build, so we're trying to seed the conversation a bit by asking questions of the entire outside.in community. (We're calling these outside.inquiries.) The first one is pretty fun: "What local building would you most like to demolish?" (I went with the Atlantic Center Mall.)

So if you've got a chance, go check out our Discussions -- and even better, jump into a thread.