Read Beyond the Lines

“I’ve heard the same statement in one form or another from hundreds of different teachers and librarians when they talk about the emergence of multimedia books: kids who weren’t reading are reading again. They’re coming back” (Carman, 2011, para. 12).

My current event for this week is a result of my LSA (Local Specialist Assoc.) connections.  My colleague Robin Van Gessel (a recent TLDL graduate) sent a message this morning to our local TL assocaition about an interesting article in the School Library Journal: The Digital Shift. Due to my newfound tech savvy, I was able to find the article, search for other related articles, and add an RSS feed to The Digital Shift to my Google Reader - yes, I am feeling very clever.
The article is "Read Beyond the Lines: Transmedia has changed the very notion of books and reading " by author Patrick Carman. Faced with audiences of students who spent increasing amounts of time texting, viewing and surfing online, and playing video games, Carman asked himself "What will make distracted kids turn more pages?" (2011, para. 11).  He decided to create multi-media books which included paper and online components (Skeleton Creek was his first experiment). It has been a great success. As Carman says "While it may be a difficult thing to pin down, one thing’s for sure: transmedia by any reasonable definition will play a critical role in the future of books." (2011, para. 17). This article and it's companion, "Transmedia Trailblazers", links beautifully with our class discussions about multiple literacies (Kist, 2010), new ways of reading, and integrating Web 2.0 into our teaching practice. I bought the first Skeleton Creek for my library a few years ago, but it has not circulated much.  I plan to give some book talks, including the online videos, for some of the transmedia trailblazers mentioned in The Digital Shift and see what reactions I get from my students. I wonder if these transmedia 'texts' will become the new graphic novels of our library practice - loved by kids, questioned by parents, defended by librarians.
References
Kist, W. (2010). The socially networked classroom:teaching in the new media age. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin.