About

One of the most common concerns raised by many parents, teachers, and librarians is the apparent lack of reading done by many young people today. Parents and educators alike recognize the value of reading, the need for young people to practice their growing reading skills, and the pleasure and lifelong impact of well-developed reading habits (Cooper & Keiger, 2007). Schools build silent reading programs, book buddy reading programs, and a variety of incentive initiatives to encourage reading and build the reading habit. Teachers read aloud well-known books to motivate their young readers, and they work with their teacher-librarian to create an environment where reading is pleasurable and books and other reading materials are readily available. The school library often becomes the focal point for reading initiatives by hosting author visits, mounting displays to encourage reading, and providing teachers and students with quick access to a wide range of diverse and exciting reading materials. Parents, too, work with schools by taking part in home-reading programs, taking their children to local public libraries, reading at bedtime, and providing books in the home for their children. For many children, however, the love for reading is slow to start or it may never emerge as part of their adult life.

For many adults, the blame for this resistance to read by some young people lies in the pervasive and relentless influence of media and technology. The leading challenge has come from the growth and influence of the Internet and its many billions of websites, user-created and managed social networks (i.e. Facebook and MySpace), open source software (i.e. Drupal and Moodle), innovative virtual portals (i.e.About.com and Virtual Learning Portal), and a myriad of weblogs, wikis, and text-messaging tools. The power of the Internet has been in its capacity in combining text, images, sound, and video in ways that have led to the creation of whole new ways of learning, even suggesting that we are facing a whole new generation of learners (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003). These “new learners” have embraced digital technologies as the essential tools of their learning and living, leaving adults to either abandon their old goals of encouraging the lifelong reading habit or harnessing the energy and power of these new digital technologies to help them achieve these reading goals.

The goal of this project was to harness the intrinsic interest young people have in using online social networks and develop an engaging and motivating virtual environment for readers around the world to share and discuss their reading interests. This project saw the creation of an online social network called WorldReaders (and this supporting website), where young readers from around the world are able to join a virtual community of young people with similar/diverse reading interests and to engage in a social networking initiative with their peers and teachers. The research focused on identifying effective tools for encouraging participation, factors which influence reading interests, the most popular reading choices made by participants, the reactions of participants to their involvement with the network, and how the social networking phenomena influences and supports young readers.

This project also attempted to provide teachers and teacher-librarians with a successful example of how we can take the power of social networking and make it work to achieve our traditional literacy/library goals. Combining images, music, video, and student input through interactive tools in a secure online environment, the hope was that students would have opportunities to develop and share their reading interests in ways that reflect their intrinsic interest in the multimedia environments of social networks. In addition, the project also yielded information on what works best online and how educators can use similar strategies in their school library programs.