Book
Сборник научных трудов Международной научно-практической конференции Русской ассоциации чтения и Европейского отделения Международной ассоциации чтения
The articles cover issues of reading, reading competency, library development, as well as the prevention of abnormal development of the young reader.
The authors estimate contribution of different factors in reading skills of 15?year-olds by using four models of multilevel regression analysis. It turned out that the most significant factor is family background — not only at the individual level, but at the school level as well (average school socio-economic status of schoolchildren families effects average reading skills). At the school level the aggregated family characteristics of students affect individual achievements, and this effect surpasses an effect of school resources and localization of schools — those school factors that show a significant contribution to achievement. Attitudes toward reading and learning are significant at the individual level, but at the school level children’s attitudes toward reading and school don’t make an independent contribution to the individual results.
In this paper we describe the design and development of a multi-touch surface and software that challenges current approaches to the production and consumption of comics. Authorship of the comics involves drawing the ‘top level’ of the story directly onto paper and projecting lower-level narrative elements, such as objects, characters, dialogue, descriptions and/or events onto the paper via a multi-touch interface. In terms of the impact this has upon the experience of reading and writing, the implementation of paper is intended to facilitate the creation of high-level overviews of stories, while the touch surface allows users to generate branches through the addition of artifacts in accordance with certain theories about interactive narratives. This provides the opportunity to participate in the reading and authoring of both traditional, paper-based texts and interactive, digital scenarios. Prototype comics are used to demonstrate this approach to reading and writing top-level and low-level narratives.
Scholars of Russian culture have always paid close attention to texts and their authors, but they have often forgotten about the readers. These volumes illuminate encounters between the Russians and their favorite texts, a centuries-long and continent-spanning “love story” that shaped the way people think, feel, and communicate. The fruit of thirty-one specialists’ research, Reading Russia represents the first attempt to systematically depict the evolution of reading in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present day.
The second volume of Reading Russia considers the evolution of reading during the long nineteenth century (1800-1917), particularly in relation to the emergence of new narrative and current affairs publications: novels, on the one hand, and daily newspapers, weekly magazines and thick journals, on the other. The volume examines how economic and social transformations, technological progress and the development of the publishing industry taking place in Russia gradually led to a significant expansion of the reading public. At the same time, in part due to the influence of new literature reading policies in schools, there was a greater cultural standardisation of Russian society, which was partially opposed by new forms of poetic reading.
Students' internet usage attracts the attention of many researchers in different countries. Differences in internet penetration in diverse countries lead us to ask about the interaction of medium and culture in this process. In this paper we present an analysis based on a sample of 825 students from 18 Russian universities and discuss findings on particularities of students' ICT usage. On the background of the findings of the study, based on data collected in 2008-2009 year during a project "A сross-cultural study of the new learning culture formation in Germany and Russia", we discuss the problem of plagiarism in Russia, the availability of ICT features in Russian universities and an evaluation of the attractiveness of different categories of ICT usage and gender specifics in the use of ICT.