Latest New Yorker Issue

Enlightened by today's EdLab seminar on digital publishing and Prof. Siegel's class about Teaching Literacy in the Early Years, I explored the digital (beta) edition of the latest The New Yorker. Currently, the online registration is free and every newly-registered online viewer is given four issues (the latest September issue and the next three to come) for free, as one of the magazine's promotion strategies.

The magazine's web version also offers multimedia content supplementary to its hard copies. For example, the following is additional multimedia content of the current issue:

Audio: The Texas execution that may change the death penalty debate.
Video: David Grann discusses the flaws of the Cameron Todd Willingham investigation.


The cover presents a compelling cartoon image about a child teaching a class of grandpas and grandmas "new literacy". How many words on the blackboard do you know? The types of literacy in the contemporary world just keeps updating. Teaching of literacy shifts from the elder generation to its younger counterpart. What's the next step? The blackboard in the image looks traditional, but a lot of public schools in New York are installed with SmartBoard. Would it be possible that in the near future our younger children are going to produce a multimedia story on their own and show us what meanings they want to convey?

As teachers and educators, let's just turn our lifelong learning on, communicating with avant gardes in our field and constantly learning from peers and also from our students.