Toward a Multifaceted Heuristic of Digital Reading to Inform Assessment, Research, Practice, and Policy

In this commentary, the author explores the tension between almost 30 years of work that has embraced increasingly complex conceptions of digital reading and recent studies that risk oversimplifying digital reading as a singular entity analogous with reading text on a screen. The author begins by tracing a line of theoretical and empirical work that both informs and complicates our understanding of digital literacy and, more specifically, digital reading. Then, a heuristic is proposed to systematically organize, label, and define a multifaceted set of increasingly complex terms, concepts, and practices that characterize the spectrum of digital reading experiences. Research that informs this heuristic is used to illustrate how more precision in defining digital reading can promote greater clarity across research methods and advance a more systematic study of promising digital reading practices. Finally, the author discusses implications for assessment, research, practice, and policy

'Creative collaboration': An 'eminence' study of teaching and learning in music composition

The image of the composer as a lone seeker of creative inspiration is embedded in popular views of the creative artist. This isolationist view ignores the ‘thought communities’ on which composers draw in their development as musicians, composers and teachers, the relationships that hold between composer-teacher and student-composer, and the role of these relationships in the ongoing development of allparticipants in the teaching and learning process. This article draws on ‘eminence’ studies of creativity to investigate the teaching and learning beliefs, processes and practices, of an eminent composer-teacher when working with a tertiary-level student-composer over the course of one academic semester. The emergent view of the teaching and learning process in music composition is one of a dyad working towards shared goals in a process characterized by collaboration, joint effort, and social support. This suggests that the teaching and learning process in composition may be a form of creative collaboration