I have just returned from Lighting the Future conference #LTF12 for school and children’s librarians and the session which most inspired me was the one about Reading and Technology. I was particularly interested to hear Jonathan Douglas (@JDLiteracyTrust) from the National Literacy Trust explain that their annual survey about reading had revealed the fact that children’s reading of text was declining whatever the format -even e-text reading had declined by 10% since 2005. Jonathan very bravely went on to describe how young people were still accessing narrative and story but using visual formats like Youtube and that we all needed to take a look at the other “literacies” like visual, digital, information literacy as they were becoming so important for children.

For my own workshops sessions, where I looked at digital publishing and the future of libraries, I talked about how we are all publishers now and that many of the tools we can use allow us to access text in a very visual way e.g with story in Pixton a cartooning tool and displaying statistics or trends with Visual.ly or Wordle. Here’s the Prezi I made to share at the workshops: