Amazon Kindle

This week Newsweek covered the Amazon Kindle a new e-reader, in an article entitled "The Future of Reading".

What makes this e-reader different than others is it has wireless access. You can look things up on Wikipedia, Google and other website. It beams newspapers to you and updates of your favorite blogs. Amazon is calling it the “iPod of Reading”. “Google’s people have though about how this connectivity could actually affect how people read” (p. 62).

I think it is ironic that this new device is being released in the same week that the NYT wrote an article entitled, “Study links drop in test scores to a decline in Time Spent Reading”.

With the emergence of ultraportable devices such as the $100 laptop I don’t think it is that far out until students have wireless devices which will contain both traditional media (such as e-text books) and connectivity to new media forms. I think this will cause a lot of tension in school systems that only value traditional forms of literacy and teachers who are trying to hold onto a teacher as expert and disseminator of information pedagogy. As Mark Warschauer, asks in the preface of his book, Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom (2006), “What happens, then, when one of the most disruptive technologies of communication in history is placed in the hands of every student a classroom, grade, or school? When the irresistible force, as it were, meets the immovable object? How do students’ literacy practices in school change, or not change, when every student throughout the school day has a mobile personal computer wirelessly connected to the Internet?” (p. ix).