This website has a dual mission.
First, it is a companion site to the volume, Reading at a Crossroads: Disjunctures and Continuities in Conceptions and Practices of Reading in the 21st Century, published by Taylor & Francis/Routledge, March 2015. As such, it will extend the book in various ways.
As might be expected, the site will contain discussion, both open and guided, of the book’s contents and the topics it addresses. Some of these discussions will be closely tied to the book, others more wide-ranging.
However, the site will also move in some new directions. It will include demonstrations and activities related to the book. The purpose of these activities will be to dynamically illustrate principles discussed in the book. What will be emphasized in many of these exercises will be new directions in literacy, literacy learning, and the teaching of literacy in new media contexts. There will be examples of media-supported nonlinear reading and writing that illustrate the theme of disjuncture found in many of the papers in the book. Often, the activities will utilize the content of the book itself as materials that can be developed further using the affordances of digital media to demonstrate how new understandings can be fostered in ways that would be difficult to achieve in traditional fixed formats.
With these discussions and activities, it is our goal to turn Reading at a Crossroads into a living work, constantly evolving, complementing the print volume, while going beyond it. We expect to see new connections continuously drawn across disparate parts of the book, a fluid internal remix, and generated from the book outward, both to literacy’s rich past and to its daily emerging future. We expect this to be a site of surprise, with new directions and ways of thinking spontaneously emerging. And this kind of emergence with new media is, of course, part of the McLuhanesque point: the flexibility of new media making possible new messages that are put to the test by an actively participating community of literacy theorists, researchers, and teachers.
The second mission of this website is continuous with the activity-oriented aspect of the book’s companion site and its goal of community-based generation – and test – of new ideas. Reading at a Crossroads will also be the site of a new, and new kind of journal, one that moves beyond the confines of fixed formats to capitalize on the affordances of digital media to allow for knowledge creation in motion, speeding up the development of a field by enabling it to take steps forward (and sometimes productively to the side) in real time, led by an advisory board of literacy leaders and contributing researchers and curated by the literacy community itself.
Visit the “Around the Corner” page for a more detailed roadmap to what’s next for the Reading at a Crossroads Project.