High school students now have their own laptops and can keep any number of applications running without a teacher's supervision. It is still a long way to go before one can say that schools make full use of the opportunities that digital resources provide. PhD research fellow Arne Olav Nygard (right) at the University of Stavanger says schools must become more preoccupied with organising knowledge in new contexts that have consequences for how we think about reading and writing.

How can one teach students who can hide behind their PCs and switch between Word, Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter? The ordinary day for teachers has been completely transformed during the last five to ten years.

"There are great differences between the classroom situation ten years ago and today. High school students now have their own laptops and keep any number of applications running without the teacher's supervision. Schools today lack understanding and tools, including support in curricula and exam regulations, to meet the expanding digital text culture," says Nygard.



He currently observes students and their use of digital texts at two different high schools in Norway. He has conducted several interviews and monitors a selection of students by means of social media like Facebook and blogs.

Among other things the researcher has noticed is that the students shift between many different reading and writing situations during an ordinary school day. The student can answer a question from the teacher, then launch a message on Facebook followed by a text to his father in rapid succession.

"When the student writes an answer to her teacher, she observes the academic value systems and style that she has learnt at school. When she writes a message on Facebook, it is with short comments, abbreviations and smileys. And when she writes home, it is often without a smiley and with very different codes from the ones she uses to friends. We are talking about three different texts written in three different situations during the same class. But only one of them is directly connected to the class and recognised by the teacher," says Nygard.

He points out that schools have traditionally distinguished between good and bad reading and writing. How this is perceived is linked to values and technology.

"It is high time that schools change their views on the use of texts. The concepts from the time of texts on paper do not apply any longer. Schools must become more preoccupied with organising knowledge in new contexts that have consequences for how we think about reading and writing," he observes.

Schools lack the language of today
The researcher is particularly concerned with the students' participation in a large and rich text culture that the school has no language for today.
"We cannot view text and knowledge as something immutable, the way it has been with storage and dissemination as printed material," he argues.

Today storage and dissemination are done digitally, digital texts are characterised by being flexible and changeable. Nygard mentions Wikipedia, which is user driven and where anybody can define and cooperate in generating knowledge over time.

"Cut and paste are normal text procedures among young people today. This should not be regarded as bad use of text, but instead be taken seriously, by giving students the right challenges.

"If you ask them to write an analysis of A Doll´s House by Henrik Ibsen, you know what you will get. But teachers of Norwegian can consider other types of assignments, eg tasks where the students must evaluate and compare. Here they cannot reproduce old lore", says the researcher who has lectured on the new digital text culture for teachers around the country the last two years.



Nygard kills the myth of teachers becoming old fogies in a digital world.

"The students do not enter the classroom and get the better of their teacher. Most students are good within a very restricted field. They can play some games and are quick participants in social media. But if you ask them to solve a problem where they have to use sources, they may not know how a search engine works.

"One cannot Google one's way to all the knowledge in the world. If one is to become a competent seeker of information, both linguistic precision and general knowledge are required. This is where the teacher comes in with his or her expertise," he says.

Nygard knows several teachers who are actively employing the new digital area of knowledge. He is more critical of the exam in Norwegian, which he thinks is an anachronism.

"When sitting for an exam in Norwegian, students are locked up in a room for five hours and asked to solve a complex problem without any input or discussion with other people. The school measures how well the students manage a fictitious genre, but doesn't determine the importance of text competence, ie the ability to find information, critical use of sources, combining text in an appropriate manner and cooperating about the text.

"Text and text generation are social dimensions that disappear in the exam paper. The school can no longer overlook the fact that writing and reading are linked to social, technological and historical areas," he concludes.