Completely booked up

We've been evaluating the Booked Up programme (to a rather tight timescale), and that's rather distracted me from blogging of late. The programme is a book-gifting scheme aimed at 11-12 year olds on school transfer, and it's organised nationally by the Booktrust. It's not exactly digital practice, then, but the Booktrust are open to the idea of reading in other media. Part of our design was investigating students' reading habits, using both the perceptions of adults in school, and the students themselves. As you might expect we tried to work from a broad conception of reading. As it happens I was intrigued by the fact that there was little reference to digital practices in the data. Students seemed to prefer reading print. This could be accounted for by a number of contextual factors: the study was about Booked Up, interviews took place in the school setting, and the Booked Up selection was used as an elicitation prompt. It may also be the case that digital literacies are so embedded in students' everyday life that they are not actually seen as a kind of reading. We clearly need to look at this in more detail.