The Project eMysteries – From reading to writing

Abstract

Digital culture is impacting heavily on young people’s lives, be it through their own attachment to social media through mobile devices or the new Covid-19 demands on distance online education. Maryanne Wolf in Reader, Come Home (2018) argues through her cognitive neuroscientific studies on reading that the mind of readers is changing given the media they are constantly using (mobile phones, computers). One of the issues Wolf debates is the loss of deep detailed modes of reading comprehension or the willingness of today’s (young) readers to engage with complex sentences or longer texts. She claims, however, that really good reading is close reading, a form of reading that requires intellectual effort from the reader involving the intellectual skills of reasoning, thinking and understanding (Wolf, 2018). How can this be promoted in the digital age? This is the aim of a European Erasmus+ funded project the authors are involved in called e-Mysteries: Detective Stories to Engage Students in Close Reading with the Use of Mobile Devices (short name: e-Mysteries). New forms of reading, as those being developed by the e-Mysteries project, create opportunities for the participatory empathetic, critical, and analytical engagement of students with what they read as well as with individual and collaborative writing in a modern flux of consumer-producer.