I recently read an article in eSchool News Online titled, "Scientists: Is technology rewiring our brains?", that I found very interesting. The part about whether the social skills of teens could be harmed by being online so much wasn't of so much interest to me as the question Wolf raises about whether young children, learning to read, will have brains that do not follow "normal reading pathways" because those pathways take more time, which is not accorded in Internet reading.
I'll be interested in following this research. I'm currently taking Reading Apprenticeship training, which has taught me that I need to teach my students how to read a Web page. Apparently they don't know how to look for keywords and key ideas as they read, and they don't read the details that are laid out in the sentences before their eyes. Those of us who learned to read text in books before the age of the Internet do not have the same problems reading a Web page that school students who are "digital natives" have.
