Andrae Sanders's List: Technology's Impact on Literary Skills

• As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles
• "No one medium is good for everything," Greenfield said. "If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet. Each medium has costs and benefits in terms of what skills each develops."
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  "Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."
• New Zealand researcher Paul Kearney measured multi-tasking and found that people who played a realistic video game before engaging in a military computer simulation showed a significant improvement in their ability to multi-task, compared with people in a control group who did not play the video game. In the simulation, the player operates a weapons console, locates targets and reacts quickly to events.
• Visual intelligence has been rising globally for 50 years, Greenfield said. In 1942, people's visual performance, as measured by a visual intelligence test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices, went steadily down with age and declined substantially from age 25 to 65

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• The ongoing debate about whether technology makes us smarter or dumber continues, but evidence proves technology's positive influence on literacy.
• Technology improves, advances, and sallies forth, and some things are lost and/or found in the transition.
• Technology is especially potent in reference to literacy and the ways we communicate, and has provided a positive influence on both. With technology, never before have we had such a wealth of knowledge and resources at our fingertips, helps and guides readily available, and peer sharing and editing has been so widespread that, without a doubt, technological advances have affected literacy in a positive way.

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