[Summary from the International Reading Association]

Educators today want to go beyond how-to manuals and publications that merely celebrate the many exciting new technologies as they appear in schools. Students are immersed in an evolving world of new technology development in which they are not passive recipients of these technologies but active interpreters of them. How do you help learners interpret these technologies as we all become immersed in the new information age?

Editor Bertram C. Bruce provides this collection of 32 Technology Departments from the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy covering the 1998 to 2002 volume years, which examines critical aspects of literacy in the new information age and the complex issues surrounding the use of new technologies. The pieces build on specific examples from classrooms, Web use, and other experiences with new digital information and communication environments.

Bruce has grouped the chapters conceptually rather than chronologically into the following six sections: Historical Perspective, New Media Practices, Personal Meanings, Ethical and Policy Issues, Learning Opportunities, and Community. The book also addresses issues such as credibility, access, and privacy, and most centrally an understanding of what new media mean for teaching, learning, and literacy development.

Educators feel the challenge of preparing students to live productively within this emerging world and deciding what learning experiences can best prepare students for becoming literate in today's world. This collection will provide the tools for you and your students to explore the way new literacies are evolving as they become ever more central in your lives.

This volume centers on the words and experiences of teachers and students who used QUILL — a software package developed by the authors to aid in writing instruction. It looks in detail at the stories of these early users and considers questions relevant for other teachers, students, researchers, and developers of educational innovations. Questions posed include:

• What does it mean to develop an environment for literacy in an actual classroom?
• How can a teacher create an environment in which students work together toward meaningful goals?
• How can a teacher promote the rich communication so necessary for developing language?
• What is the role of technology in the practice and development of literacy?

The examination of the QUILL experiences provides a fuller and more revealing account of what it meant to use QUILL than would have been possible through standard evaluation techniques. At the same time, the focus on the particulars also finds analogues in analyses of similar pieces of open-ended software or educational innovations in general.

See the Quill iLab.

Students in network-based classrooms converse in writing through the use of communications software on local-area computer networks. Through the electronic medium they are immersed in a writing community--one that supports new forms of collaboration, authentic purposes for writing, writing across the curriculum, and new social relations in the classroom. The potential for collaborative and participatory learning in these classrooms is enormous.

The book examines an important type of network-based classroom known as ENFI (Electronic Networks For Interaction). Teachers have set up ENFI or similar classrooms in elementary and secondary schools and at more than a hundred colleges and universities. In these settings, teaching and learning have been dramatically transformed, but the new technology has brought with it difficulties and surprises. The process of creating such a classroom raises important questions about the meaning and the realities of educational change.