Online literacy vs. print literacy

Last week as I was helping student work on bibliography cards for their research papers, I was reminded of something that we've noticed before: students do not know the difference between magazines, newspapers, books, etc. when they read things online. A database might tell students that the article came from Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, or San Francisco Chronicle, but students do not know which one is which to use the correct bibliographic format.

My first thought-response is usually, "How could they not know these things?" especially when copies of Time and Newsweek are on a table ten feet away from them in the library. Then, I try to think back to myself in high school--did I know these things? Of course, I went to high school in the dark ages of the 1980s when the librarians had microfiche and a few years of back copies of magazines, so when I did research papers, I was using, touching, reading actual magazines and newspapers. Even on a microfiche reader, the articles still looked like they were copied from the actual newspaper or magazine. It was easy to tell the differences between sources.

For students today who use online databases, everything looks the same. Unless they are looking at pdf reproductions, how could they really know the difference? Even dates don't help--how can they tell if something is a daily, weekly, or monthly publication? So students need to rely on knowledge of names of magazines or newspapers--knowledge which it seems they do not have. While our library supplies copies of major news magazines, it seems that many students are not aware of them or do not choose to read them.

How did I become aware of magazines and newspapers? How was print literacy introduced to me? My own answer is: home. My parents ordered a daily newspaper and even brought in a second on Sundays. My mother never missed doing the Sunday NY Times Magazine crossword puzzle, so I knew that the magazine existed as well as the newspaper. We received Time, Reader's Digest, and Sports Illustrated. In short, I came from a home that valued literacy in the sense of reading and in the sense of knowledge about the world. Reading print materials was the way to become informed about the world.

So, when I began completing research projects, there was no confusion about magazines, newspapers, journals, etc. This was the prior knowledge I brought to the process. Increasingly, today's students do not have that prior knowledge. To some extent, it is a result of family literacy practices--if a family watches CNN instead of reading the newspaper, then that is what children learn. Or what if a family doesn't pay attention to the news at all? Certainly this has always been true. But today, there's another issue--what if the family only gets its information online? How then does a student learn to distinguish between sources? And if a family only practices on-line literacy, will students be inclined to pick up a magazine in the library anyway?

Many "experts" are now discussing the slow death of print media such as newspapers. With online sources exploding, is the death of print magazines far behind? If such is the case, the distinctions that we make for bibliographic formats will certainly have to evolve.