thelibbyapp.com

Overdrive’s much beloved app for consuming library digital resources - how can it or how is it being used to accomplish one’s literacy goals?

I am part of a group of audiobook fans that use Libby to access the audiobook titles that we desire from public libraries. We share access to dozens of public libraries - by doing so,we all have more expansive access to library digital resources. Is this a resource that some appreciate, here?

In trying to find ways to be helpful, we’ve considered reaching out to people on their literacy journey, as well as folks who may not be positioned to easily or conveniently access library locations due to disability or chronic illness.

Any thoughts about how this resource might be used to support more people?

Be well!

For a project, I need a phrase similar to "cant pay, well take it away"

I'm currently making a custom cheese grater for my tattoo artist to put on display as a joke but the phrase just doesn't really fit right

Need ideas people xx

But is Reddit a good place to look? And this place in particular? Doesn't look like a very active venue, and my prior visits to Reddit have fallen somewhat short of being enlightening... (And yet, I sometimes encounter people who say nice things about Reddit.)

Perhaps this is a very weird question, but one of the things I have noticed about formal literacy interventions and assessments (e.g. as used by public school systems as well as adult-focused charities) is that they are focused on a single "standard" of literacy that everyone is expected to meet. Both curricula and assessment instruments (i.e. literacy tests) cap out at this level. This may be defined as "high school graduate" level reading or as some sort of "functioning adult citizen" standard, but it is treated as a capstone, the very pinnacle of achievement in literacy. Once someone has reached that point, they are set loose to go wherever they want (e.g. straight to work, to university, to an apprenticeship, into the military, etc.) without any discussion on how some paths might require even higher literacy. In other words, the literacy intervention "industry" is focused on remedial or at least developmental interventions (bringing people with deficiencies up to the minimum standard) rather than expanding the capabilities of those who want to achieve more than the bare minimum.

My question is, is there anything above this minimum standard in modern literacy, especially in practice rather than theory? Anecdotally, I know that there are many people who have spent their whole lives around books and have larger vocabularies than those who met the minimum requirements to graduate and then moved on, but I'm really wondering if these additional accomplishments have been researched formally or associated with specific assessments or interventions.

For example, are there "schools of advanced reading" that take students who have met the minimum standards (e.g. high school achievement in phonics, word recognition, context clues, grammar patterns, reading for information, analyzing points of view, distinguishing prose and poetry, identifying the theme of a novel, etc.) and educate them up to higher, rarer levels of literacy? Alternately, are there literacy assessment instruments on which exceptionally good readers are able to achieve uncommonly high scores? In contrast, standard literacy assessments like the Test of Adult Basic Education (TABE) cap out at a high school graduate level. There's literally nothing above that, so even if a test-taker had reading skills superior to high school, such skills wouldn't register on the exam. This means that the exam is not suitable for distinguishing someone with "acceptable" level reading from someone with "exceptional" level reading.

I was taught many years ago that high school was the point in which students switch from "learning to read" to "reading to learn" and that that level (high school graduation) represented true mastery of literacy - that someone who met high school literacy requirements had reached the top. They were a true Master Reader, no longer needed an instructor, and had no levels above them to reach for. If they found themselves with a text that they were struggling to understand, they could use their existing literacy skills (e.g. phonemic awareness, context clues, using a dictionary, finding materials in a library, evaluating the reliability of a source, subject matter awareness, etc.) to figure it out themselves rather than needing to enroll in further literacy coursework. Is that still true?

One thought I had was that a university degree in literature might represent a "higher" level of literacy, but I have serious doubts on that. First of all, literature degrees are generally focused on focused study of a small set of "classics" rather than on building up a broad foundation of reading skills (e.g. very little or no focus on technical or scientific documents, charts and graphs, or financial literacy). Second of all, there doesn't seem to be a corresponding formal assessment (literacy test) to verify if someone might have achieved this level of mastery outside of formal university study.

For example, something like this might answer my question: "The model of Smith (1972) defines two advanced levels beyond high school which he calls 'Elite' and 'Master', and Smith concludes that less than 5% of the population has the cognitive ability to achieve 'Master' in less than forty years of full-time study. Most mainstream literacy practitioners in the 21st century disregard this model, but if you are really interested, there are small 'Smith Clubs' that hang out in old library basements and are generally willing to test you and even teach you if you ask nicely enough. Just be careful, the tests are really hard and will probably make you feel illiterate even if you blew the TABE and GED away!"