Preview

Worldreader Case Study

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
646 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Worldreader Case Study
Worldreader is a non-profit organization based in the United States, Europe, and Africa, that provides worldwide digital books to increase literacy. The organization believes that literacy can change peoples’ lives financially and health wise, while bridging the gap of inequality. Their primary mission is to improve and transform the lives of people living in developing countries, through literacy; this mission is reflected throughout the diction and pictures utilized on their website, social media and web presence, and various media formats. For example, the following words are repeated frequently in different variances throughout their website and web presence: transform, change, and improve.
Representative Anecdotes play a major role in the “ideological maintenance” of Worldreader through reaffirming the organization’s values (Blakesley 97). The stories from people who have directly and indirectly benefited from Worldreader uphold the identity that Worldreader, just as Blakesley references in The Elements of Dramatism, is the “antidote” and cure to illiteracy in the world. The vocabulary employed by these storytellers align with Worldreader’s vocabulary as well.
An interview with Ronda Zelezny-Green, a PhD student who conducted a study on the use of Worldreader at a girls’ school in Nairobi, Kenya, is a prime example
…show more content…
In another interview, a young Tanzanian girl named Mery, states, “I feel like e-reader is going to change my life” (“Worldreader Program”). In both of these stories, the students clearly articulate Worldreader’s values through their own experiences, furthering the verification of Worldreader’s goals to transform, change, and improve peoples’ lives through

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    M.D. Bowles, author of our textbook, Introduction to Digital Literacy, explains the digital divide and how demographic, being underprivileged as well as those who live in underdeveloped countries play a part in the digital divide. The author goes on to state that factors such as age, income and educational attainment can influence an American adult 's access to the Internet.Those with disabilities are also less likely to use the Internet. Bowles refers to the old adage, "Knowledge is power." Bowes feels that ethical issues come to play in this digital divide because with this divide, the world would be split into two different categories, the “information-haves and have-nots”. Bowles feels that if there is a grand effort to bridge the gap by introducing all to the world of computers, then everyone can become digitally literate and the knowledge is shared amongst everyone equally. (Bowles, 2013.).…

    • 1309 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Reading is a powerful tool that assists people in understanding the daily activities one is involved in. It is the catalyst for learning functions such as math, science, art, music, etc. When one develops consistent reading habits, his/her communication skills improve. Reading allows one to acquire knowledge and expand on his/her knowledge. With good communication skills and the ability to expand one’s knowledge by reading, an individual becomes more valuable within his/her chosen career field. The more valuable one feels the more confident he/she will have when executing his/her tasks. With the knowledge and confidence one achieves through reading, he/she will have the ability to open doors that otherwise may not have been opened for him/her. Both, Moody and Manguel, are passionate about reading because they know and understand what a powerful tool it is and where reading can lead an individual, to success.…

    • 837 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Literacy is not only represented by the texts in the environment, how those texts came to be, who is using them, and how they are being used, but is also represented by the feelings, beliefs, and attitudes about those texts by the members of that community (Barton, 1994). Included in these unobservable aspects of literacy practices are the mental construction, sense-making, purpose-setting, and valuing that goes on inside the head that is also defining of literacy practices. Namely, the ways in which people think about literacy, their awareness of it, their constructions of it, how they talk about it, and how they make sense of it are all indicative of the literacy practices of a society. The conceptions people hold about the reading and writing process as they are engaged in literacy events is just as important as the event itself (Barton,…

    • 2148 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Paciga suggested that using digital storybooks or ebooks in these homes could decrease the preschooler’s risk for reading failure and have an overall positive effect on the child’s schooling. “Viewing and interacting with multimedia yielded significant improvements in the early literacy skills (i.e. vocabulary, letter identification, phonemic awareness) of low-income populations, above and beyond improvements observed in middle- to high-income populations.”(p. 1) The examples given by Paciga, were research by Buckleitner and Fisch. Buckleitner looked at the correlation in regards to how interactive the material was. For example, PDF documents are highly uninteractive while digital storybooks tend to highly interactive. Fisch studied the correlation between how much media the child is exposed to and the content of the media, and the effects it has on children. These arguments were helpful in explaining why digital storybooks have such a positive effect on reading ability in both children of low income families and children in middle-to-high income…

    • 668 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Best Essays

    Rainie, L., Zickuhr, K., Purcell, K., Madden, M., & Brenner, J. (2012, April 5). The rise of e-reading. In Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved February 11, 2013, from http://libraries.pewinternet.org/files/legacy-pdf/The%20rise%20of%20e-reading%204.5.12.pdf…

    • 3147 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In a developing society, information circulates through the world in different forms such as digital literacy. In “The Skin We Ink”, David Kirkland corresponds this idea of development as he states “While humans-poets and writers-have long written with ‘an inexhaustible voice’ and a ‘soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance,’ today’s youth are doing so in new and diverse ways-on computer screens and on the walls of buildings, on paper and on flesh.” Digital literacy makes information more accessible, but many people question the efficiency of digital literacy to address pressing issues due to its close-minded, biased evidence. Pressing social issues such as abortions cannot be discussed through digital literacy because…

    • 136 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Best Essays

    EMA E207

    • 3554 Words
    • 15 Pages

    Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) and United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA)(2005) More than Words 2: Creating Stories on Page and Screen, London, QCA.…

    • 3554 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Best Essays

    On the other hand, Richard Miller mentions several times in his book from pages 420 to 446 that technology has taken over reading and writing and that the quality of appreciating different points of view from different cultures will be gone if nothing is done to change that fact. It is necessary to mention, from a student point of view, that despite the fact that Miller is completely right in that sense, it does not mean that reading an e-book is not the same as reading a physical book. Miller seems to forget that entire compendiums of literary knowledge can be preserved from a USB with minimal memory in Giga Bytes all the way to a tablet’s memory chip or even on the Internet. The second part of this proposal is to defend reading and writing technologies that are eco-friendly and do not require cutting down vast forests to create one book that will be useful to help a student in an English class to understand the point of view of another culture or even a different time.…

    • 3193 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Good Essays

    Literacy is a major part of our daily lives it’s a way we read, write, and communicate effectively. Literacy also enables individuals to interpret and discern the many aspects in our world. Without being able to read or write will limit opportunities like jobs. However, not everyone in our world can read or write. In order to become literate, we must educate ourselves and our youth while they are young. In fact, when I was in first grade, I was unable to read effectively or spell correctly until I was in the fifth grade; although, the process was tedious, but the outcome was worthwhile. I learned a lot of information through my path to become literate. However, I was not able to become literate alone. I was helped along the way by great teachers,…

    • 752 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    I was not the first and I will not be the last person to struggle with reading. It would be selfish of me to only help myself. I wanted to find a way to make reading more accessible to students who are in a similar predicament. I decided to join forces with the other African students at my school and we created an organization called Scholars in Our Society and Africa (SOSA). SOSA aims to collect school supplies – textbooks, books, notebooks, pencils, etc. – to donate to deprived communities in Ghana. We worked with a non­profit organization called “Called To Serve” to help us with the shipping and we successfully sent our first shipment to a high school not far from my hometown Techiman. Currently, we are working with seven different high schools in the Bronx to send up to 5000 used…

    • 627 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Carefully selected e-books, chosen by the teacher to specifically develop reading difficulties, provided additional scenarios in which literacy skills were fostered. Because the child was engaged in the book experience, verbal communication and vocabulary comprehension could be encouraged and developed. Particularly, Verhallen, Bus, and de Jong (2006) evaluated reading relations in 5-year-old children that read traditional and e-book stories and discovered an increase in the comprehension and vocabulary of the children enlisting the electronic devices. (p. 410). Their findings provided that if a child with an AAE dialect was afforded even just one opportunity to read with an e-book, it was more effective than having an adult read a traditional book. This implies that children, especially those in a lower socioeconomic status, could greatly benefit from these advancements. In the findings of Larson and Marsh (2005), “children become competent in using digital technologies from a very young age and the lack of attention by educators to the experience creates dissonance between home and school experiences.” (p. 70). With the use of electronics, embarrassment of a child’s reading skills can be diminished, and the student is provided a safe reading and learning environment. The reader does not need to…

    • 1856 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Tyner, Kathleen R., Literacy in a Digital world. Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information. 1998, Ashford University Library.…

    • 1164 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Guided Reading

    • 1460 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Readers that have developed some since of print have already gained important understanding of it. If they have encountered a problem in reading they will monitor their own reading and check on themselves while searching for possibilities or alternatives…

    • 1460 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Are New Media Rewiring Us

    • 706 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Authors like Gunther Kress a great writer focuses on the literacy side of the new media age that is developing slower. As teaching a child to read is as simple as giving them a Ipad that has an application for children or even an adult learning about the medical field that is on the phone or Ipad also with diagrams plus definition of all kinds. Without learning the fundamentals usually in anything the work will not be detailed or without errors. It is no longer possible to think about literacy in isolation from vast array of social technological or economic factors is the truth as Mr. Kress expresses meaning of how being literate is the key to everyone having a foundation.…

    • 706 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Artifact Speech

    • 422 Words
    • 2 Pages

    * Attention Getter: Dr. Seuss once said, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”…

    • 422 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays