In early August, I’m giving one of the plenary/keynote papers at the IASL Conference where I’ll be talking about Reading Websites. So, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how I, as an educated adult, reada website, so that I can think about how school students might read online material. One the readings I’ve come across – and yes, read digitally – is Reading Digital Material which looks at how students might be taught how to obtain meaning from text, images and sounds. One of the key messages from this article is that while there is much attention paid to teaching reading early in the student’s school career, this is not followed up later. There’s a good checklist in the article for TLs and teachers (and others) to use when encouraging students to gain meaning from what they read digitally.
On the fiction front, I have just finished Dark Fire by C J Sansom, featuring the lawyer/detective Matthew Shardlake. The novel is set in the time of Henry the Eighth – if you don’t think you like historical novels, don’t look away now – and is a novel, a crime novel and a historical novel all rolled into one. Shardlake is an interesting character who is disillusioned with much of what he sees in his society, especially the political and religious controversies of the time. What Sansom manages to create in this novel is the atmosphere of the time and you can almost smell the unpleasant odours of the back streets of London. This is the second of C J Sansom’s historically set novels I’ve read and he is worth seeking out.
