Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Reading Response #1

It has been said that one in three students send more than 100 texts a day and more than 3,000 texts a month. Although it’s not just our younger generations that have been effected by our mass technology boost, but there is concern that it has effect on students and their writing ability. Clive Thompson is the author of “The New Literacy”; an article taking a closer look at how technology has actually affected students, whether it is taken positive or negative. Thompson’s views on the subject expand more than just his opinion. Taking a look at the past helps to see whether we have been affected for the worse. “Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything ever, that’s wasn’t a school assignment”, Clive admits. When it comes to the topic of whether our writing skill has improved or begun to deteriorate, most will agree that our skill has indeed worsened as time continues. Where this agreement usually ends, however, is on the question of if we are reading and writing more now or in future years, not excluding writing styles that are not involved with school. Whereas some are convinced that we do read and write less now, others maintain to think otherwise due to more studies. In Clive’s article he examines a study conducted by a Professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, Andrea Lunsford. The Project is called the Stanford Study of Writing. It went on from 2001 to 2006; where work samples were collected and studied, and most of the information found pointed to the fact that technology is not making our academic skills less then what they should be like much of our society is set on. The main thing Professor Lunsford found was that young people write more today than they did in generations before them. Clive Thompson supports this idea by discussing the fact that most students, in earlier generations, didn’t write outside of school when they didn’t have to, but with the technology now there is more opportunity for people to write, and it can be more convenient. One implication of Thompson’s treatment for teachers to embrace the technology and the writing that come from it even if it’s not the usual pen and paper is the fact that he says: ”Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions”
Thompson apparently assumes that it is a new time and we must work with what we are given and not shoot down what’s different, and call it lack of skill.
I have sided with both Thompson and Professor Lunsford from the beginning of this article. I will admit that I use to think that technology did take away skill from students, and that I even saw it in myself. I was a believer to think that people use to write more because of the lack of technology, and that we did let writing more. I think the only reason I thought this was because I didn’t always connect writing with a computer for example. It was always just pen and paper, and as long as there was pen and paper people wrote. That isn’t necessarily true. Because of having a computer at least it makes it more convenient for some to write, even if it’s not in the traditional way. Although I do think it’s sad how much we can abuse the technology we have, it doesn’t mean we can go back and write something that has academic value. It’s disappointing to see that there are teachers and people out there that have such little faith in what a student can do and that they assume that one cannot talk to a friend who moved away via text, and then finish a standard essay for their class, without mixing up ideas.

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