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02 Nov 09
OMG! Teachers say texting can be good for teens - CharlotteObserver.com
OMG! Teachers say texting can be good for teens
By Jeff Elder
jelder@charlotteobserver.com
Posted: Monday, Oct. 26, 2009
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Texting, a favorite and seemingly instinctive activity for teens, has loomed over education and parenthood for several years. Many adults felt like it would mash proper English into the ground and was a distraction from serious learning.
The average number of texts by U.S. teens 13-17 has reached 2,900 a month, according to Nielsen, the media and marketing information company. And The New York Times reported in May that physicians and psychiatrists fear texting is taking a toll on teens' sleep patterns and ability to think for themselves.
But now some teachers in Charlotte and nationwide are seeking to harness its power and making peace with it. Researchers back this new approach with new evidence that texting teaches some positive language skills, and pragmatists argue that a war on texting is unwinnable."
05 Oct 09
Arrest of Queens Man Puts Focus on Texting to Rally Protesters - NYTimes.com
As demonstrations have evolved with the help of text messages and online social networks, so too has the response of law enforcement.
On Thursday, F.B.I. agents descended on a house in Jackson Heights, Queens, and spent 16 hours searching it. The most likely reason for the raid: a man who lived there had helped coordinate communications among protesters at the Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh.
The man, Elliot Madison, 41, a social worker who has described himself as an anarchist, had been arrested in Pittsburgh on Sept. 24 and charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime. The Pennsylvania State Police said he was found in a hotel room with computers and police scanners while using the social-networking site Twitter to spread information about police movements. He has denied wrongdoing.
04 Oct 09
YouTube - Text Messages Save Lives
A text messaging-based program, called Mobiles in Malawi, is saving lives by connecting rural communities to hospitals. Kasey-Dee Gardner explain how it works.
03 Sep 09
More evidence that text messaging is a powerful health tool | The Institute For The Future
The Center for Connected Health conducted a randomized trial in 2008 using text messaging to send a daily weather report and reminder to apply sunscreen. The control group did not receive any reminders. Everyone got a tube of sunscreen with a monitor strapped onto it so every time the cap was removed, a text message was sent back to the researchers. Study participants who received text reminders applied the sunscreen an average of 56% of the time, compared with the control group, which had a mean daily adherence rate of 30%.
With 85% of American adults carrying cell phones these days, it is time to think about how mobile, social technology can help public health officials do their jobs.
10 Aug 09
Setting up an SMS Campaign from your Desktop | MobileActive.org
Many organizations want to use text messaging in their campaigns. However, the barriers to setting up a texting campaign appear to be steep. The process seems expensive, technical, and complex overall.
There is good news.
Setting up a text messaging campaign
There are two ways to set up a text campaign that require little technical knowledge – and one of these is inexpensive.
28 Jul 09
Texting Raises Crash Risk 23 Times, Study Finds - Series - NYTimes.com
The first study of drivers texting inside their vehicles shows that the risk sharply exceeds previous estimates based on laboratory research — and far surpasses the dangers of other driving distractions.
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Virgina Tech Transportation Institute
In these videotape stills, a truck driver texts while at the wheel, top left, with other angles seen.
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Gauging Your DistractionInteractive Feature
Gauging Your Distraction
The Dangers of Texting While DrivingVideo
The Dangers of Texting While Driving
Related
Drive to Distraction: How the Driving Tests Were Conducted (July 28, 2009)
Driven to Distraction: Drivers and Legislators Dismiss Cellphone Risks (July 19, 2009)
Room for Debate: Should Cellphone Use by Drivers Be Illegal? (July 18, 2009)
Times Topics: Text Messaging
Distracted Drivers (July 19, 2009)
Today's Business: Matt Richtel on the Dangers of Texting While Driving
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18 Jun 09
Survey: Many teens use phones in class to text or cheat - USATODAY.com
One-fourth of teens' cellphone text messages are sent during class, a new survey finds, despite widespread classroom bans on cellphones at school. The survey of 1,013 teens — 84% of whom have cellphones — also shows that a significant number have stored information on a cellphone to look at during a test or have texted friends about answers. More than half of all students say people at their school have done the same.
26 May 09
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But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.
“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.”
Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”
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“If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”
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But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.
“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.”
Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”
26 Apr 09
Letter from Japan: I ♥ Novels: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.
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The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.
In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease. The novels are set in the provinces—the undifferentiated swaths of rice fields, chain stores, and fast-food restaurants that are everywhere Tokyo is not—and the characters tend to be middle and lower middle class. Specifically, they are Yankees, a term with obscure linguistic origins (having something to do with nineteen-fifties America and greaser style) which connotes rebellious truants—the boys on motorcycles, the girls in jersey dresses, with bleached hair and rhinestone-encrusted mobile phones. The stories are like folktales, perhaps not literally true but full of telling ethnographic detail. “I suppose you can say keitai shosetsu are a source of data or information—the way they use words, how they speak, how they depict scenes,” Kensuke Suzuki, a sociologist, told me. “We need these stories so we can learn how young women in Japan commonly feel.”
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One novelist I met, a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two who lives in the countryside around Kyoto, told me that she thinks up her stories while affixing labels to beauty products at her factory job, and sometimes writes them down on her cell phone while commuting by train to her other job, at a spa in Osaka.
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08 Apr 09
Protests in Moldova Explode, With Help of Twitter - NYTimes.com
A crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership, ransacking government buildings and clashing with the police.
The sea of young people reflected the deep generation gap that has developed in Moldova, and the protesters used their generation’s tools, gathering the crowd by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network.
The protesters created their own searchable tag on Twitter, rallying Moldovans to join and propelling events in this small former Soviet state onto a Twitter list of newly popular topics, so people around the world could keep track.
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A crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership, ransacking government buildings and clashing with the police.
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Gleb Garanich/Reuters
Protesters opposed to Moldova’s Communist leaders threw a sofa out a window in Parliament in the capital on Tuesday.
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The sea of young people reflected the deep generation gap that has developed in Moldova, and the protesters used their generation’s tools, gathering the crowd by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network.
The protesters created their own searchable tag on Twitter, rallying Moldovans to join and propelling events in this small former Soviet state onto a Twitter list of newly popular topics, so people around the world could keep track.
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oung people have increasingly used the Internet to mobilize politically; cellphones and text messages helped swell protests in Ukraine in 2004, and in Belarus in 2006.
07 Mar 09
Could texting slang be good for kids? | csmonitor.com
The report suggests that when kids use text message lingo, they are actually being artful – not just lazy – and building a heightened awareness of letter patterns and sounds. In support of the theory, the study found reading ability correlated more positively with sound-based textisms, such as substituting “wiv” for “with,” than with acronyms, such as writing “lol” in place of “laughing out loud.”
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Researchers at Coventry University in England ran 88 grade-school students through a battery of literacy tests. Then, the researchers asked each child to write responses to 10 real-world scenarios – asking a friend what to wear to a birthday party, for example – and measured how frequently the students used “textisms,” such as abbreviating “tonight” as “2nite.”
Parents and educators have long complained that such slang words erode a student’s English skills. But the results of the study, published in this month’s edition of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, tell a different story. The analysis found no evidence of a relationship between frequently typing in textisms and diminished spelling ability. The more textisms students used, the higher they tended to score on measures of word-based learning and vocabulary.
03 Jan 09
quillpill - Tell a little story
Writing on the cell phone? I've heard of this!
Literature created and consumed on cell phones is already very popular in Japan, where novels written on mobile phones have become best sellers in print!
16 Aug 08
Wiffiti: Home
When you send a text message to Wiffiti, you txt a place instead of a person.
Wiffiti screens are hung in public places, and plotted on the world map. Wiffiti players are embedded on web pages all over the internet.
13 Aug 08
Engage Your Audience | Text The Mob
The easiest and most entertaining way to collect feedback from your audience:
Project polls or message boards on a large screen, have everyone send their input via their cell phones and see results instantly!
20 May 08
Turn teen texting toward better writing | csmonitor.com
teens increasingly communicate through writing. But how can educators help students carry that motivation for writing from a social world into motivation for writing that will serve them in the classroom?
25 Apr 08
How to Write Great Copy in 160 Characters - MobileActive Wiki
In order to write effective copy for your text message campaign, keep two goals in mind that all social marketing messaging should achieve to be successful:
14 Apr 08
Jott™ - How to Use Jott
Phone in message, transcribed to text and sent to email, twitter, other links.
31 Mar 08
Flirting by Text Message, Indians Test Social Limits - New York Times
Like many Indians today, Mr. Chettri is a solely cellular Casanova: a suitor who flirts brazenly by text message, but rarely, if ever, in person.
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