By Teresa A. Martin
This week the Googleplex released its newest effort focused on ... literacy. That’s right, good ole basic reading. The target market? Anyone “interested in reading and education.”
The newest offering, at http://www.g oogle.com/literacy was developed in partnership with the Frankfurt Book Fair Literacy campaign (Litcam) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Its goal is to help people find everything – and this being Google, everything really means EVERYTHING – about reading and literacy. Resources, books, blogs, reading group, videos ... even a Google map of literacy organizations around the world.
I find two things about this especially striking. First is the way that Google and its partners continually reinterpret what “to find” and “to search” mean.
Until fairly recently, the notion of searching was pretty linear with most innovations targeted new techniques for mining a pile of data in creative ways.
For example, the concept of searching for roots of words, for synonym lists, and for patterns were all great break throughs in search technology. Over time, companies developed contextual search that tried to extract meaning and apply meaning to the results. They made faster engines. They made clever engines. They made search tools that could learn. But through this all the mindset of what search was about remained the same – see a bunch of data and find the needles from the hay.
What Google has done, and what a short time with The Literacy Project reminds us, is that search is way of interfacing with the world at many levels, not simply about finding a matching bit of data.
Of course technology is deployed well – but the biggest break through is a conceptual shift in thinking.
It’s sort of like the brains of UNESCO and Litcam and everyone they know are all virtualized and reachable. Not just searchable – but reachable and explorable and experiencable. It’s a multi-dimensional way of interacting with and around a topic, not simply a tool for finding references to “literacy research.”
The web is changing the world. Has already changed the world. Has already changed the way people think and interact.
The notion of hyperlinks is more profound that it seems on the surface – it’s the idea that all is interconnected in multiple directions. The Literacy Project lets us explore the world of reading and education from Point A to B to C, if that’s what we want. But it also lets you be at Point A and Dimension Z and Concept X all at the very same time, AND to connect with other humans who are doing the same thing.
In some ways, though, the Web has not changed the world. And that gets me back to the second striking thing about The Literacy Project, which is this: The need for The Literacy Project has never been stronger.
Contrary to what some popular thinking has said, technology has not eroded our need for literacy in the very traditional sense. Indeed, the need to read, comprehend, and access language is stronger than ever before.
Yes, we have multiple types of media. You can watch a video. You can listen to audio. But comprehension of these media types as well as the ability to access the tools for using them are all tightly coupled to reading.
Reading matters.
That’s not a new notion. It is not a gee-whiz notion. But it is one extremely critical notion.
The “high tech” Google et al project uses technology to deliver one way of exploring and supporting it, of driving conversation, connection, and action around it. It is not about the search -- it is about the creation of a community and resources for tacking the issue of literacy.
The Literacy Project combines technology tools, people with passion, and a few good ideas ... and along the way has created an example of the way technology can change the way we think, act, and be.
And in the end, that's the the coolest thing of all.
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