As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write - and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand" (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?
Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples - everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it - and pushing our literacy in bold new directions. [..]
click here to read the original article on Wired.com
SOTT
SIGNS
OF THE
TIMES
OF THE
TIMES
Welcome to Sott.net
The World for People who Think
I absolutely agree, it's so much easier for any kind of student to learn with the help of online media. Some parents look down on the Internet when it some to studies and claim that it's impossible to study without a teacher. But actually it all depends on how hard you are ready to work. For example, resources like [Link] and various online libraries can assist students in high school and college. For adults trying to acquire necessary for their job skills and knowledge there are numerous training courses and seminars.