Cawilliams1's List: Technology VS digital Literacy

What technology does to education.
ORLANDO, Fla.: Professor says teens' social media lingo hurts writing skills | Technology | NewsObserver.com 6

Dec 02, 14

www.newsobserver.com/...r-says-teens-social-media.html Technology Versus literacy skills
- 13-year-old blogger, is an avid user of Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. She also considers herself an “out of control” text-message whiz but doesn’t think any of that interferes with her formal writing skills.
- “Just the other day, I asked my students to write four lines of dialogue they had over the weekend,” said Terry Thaxton, a University of Central Florida English professor who runs the summer writing camp Shelby attended earlier this month. “Three of them reached for their phones to read their text messages. They said they couldn’t remember any face-to-face conversations.”
- Thaxton enjoys how students use social media to share their stories among friends but thinks their writing skills have suffered in the exchange of ideas.
  “Social media takes out all the imaginative threads, descriptions and interesting parts of a language,” she said. “I find that troubling.”
- A report published in 2010 by Clarion University shows social media and text messages are “consistently associated with the use of particularly informal written communication techniques, along with formatting problems, nonstandard orthography, and grammatical errors.”
- People are focusing more on content and catching the drift of what was written and not how it looks,
- “Social media has certainly brought attention to the poor and declining writing, communication and critical-thinking skills that teachers have seen for a long time
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Texting, TV and Tech Trashing Children's Attention Spans | Ellen Galinsky 6

Dec 02, 14

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-and-technology_b_2068862.html Technology literacy Versus skills
- There is a widespread belief among teachers that students' constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks.
- Nearly three quarters of the 685 public and private K-12 teachers surveyed in the Common Sense Media online poll believe that students use of entertainment media (including TV, video games, texting and social networking) "has hurt student's attention spans a lot or somewhat."
- Pew online survey, which polled 2,462 middle and high school teachers, 87% report that these technologies are creating "an easily distracted generation with short attention spans," and 64% say that digital technologies "do more to distract students than to help them academically."
- English teacher at Troy High School in Fullerton, California, who has taught for 14 years, says that she has had to become an entertainer. "I have to do a song and dance to capture their attention."
- children to pay attention and to be persistent!
- The answer is to teach
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Guest column: Texting, social media sites causing bad habits in our students | MLive.com 11

Dec 02, 14

www.mlive.com/..._column_texting_social_me.html Technology literacy Versus skills
- I love my students, and I love teaching. However, my job has become significantly more challenging than it was when I began my career 28 years ago. Texting and social networking sites have hurt students’ literacy skills.
- I love my students, and I love teaching. However, my job has become significantly more challenging than it was when I began my career 28 years ago. Texting and social networking sites have hurt students’ literacy skills.
- I love my students, and I love teaching. However, my job has become significantly more challenging than it was when I began my career 28 years ago. Texting and social networking sites have hurt students’ literacy skills.
  Sue Mierzwa
- I love my students, and I love teaching. However, my job has become significantly more challenging than it was when I began my career 28 years ago. Texting and social networking sites have hurt students’ literacy skills.
- However, when students text or use social networking sites, they aren’t practicing the language and writing conventions expected of literate adults and tested on the MEAP. Instead, they are developing habits that will not contribute to academic or career success.
- Texting and social networking sites don’t require careful reading or editing. Those are skills expected of literate individuals.
- They also don’t require writing in complete sentences. Twitter, for example, only allows 140 characters. Consequently, many students write in fragments and run-ons.
- This also has an effect on word choice. Typically, students use slang and abbreviations. Consequently, many students start using slang in formal writing because it’s part of their everyday writing and speech.
- There also is a negative effect on punctuation, especially when texting. It ignores language and writing conventions. Many students have no idea when to use capital letters. They don’t capitalize ‘I.’ They don’t capitalize proper names. You’re/your, there/their/they’re, and its/it’s become interchangeable. Punctuation is haphazard.
  
  Also, texting and social networking sites don’t require practicing handwriting; therefore, many students can’t write legibly. Every year, I am amazed by how few of my eighth-graders are able to read or write cursive. They struggle with their own signature.
- Aldous Huxley, a famous English writer, once wrote, “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
- Texting and social networking might have advanced “small talk” communication, but they don’t encourage deeper, more meaningful communication — the type of literacy necessary for academic success or a professional career.
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Teachers say digital technology helps and hurts student writing | Minnesota Public Radio News 7

Dec 02, 14

www.mprnews.org/...students-and-digital-writing Technology literacy Versus skills
- "Some of that informal style and language does creep into [students'] formal writing," she said, "so that's something that [teachers] have to address with their students."
- Most teachers 68 percent say use of the Internet and mobile technology leads students to take shortcuts in their writing.
- That can show up as the occasional lowercase "i," or the lack of proper punctuation in an essay.
- Corey said she has seen a decline in students' writing skills over her 13 years of teaching.
  
  "I think they have sloppy habits of mind, and I think that the Internet feeds into that," she said.
- But Cornell has noticed one big change in how students write: "The structuring of particularly longer papers is more difficult for current students." The Pew Center's survey of teachers found a few other concerns. Digital technology has made students more impatient with the writing process, and it's also made plagiarism more prevalent.
- Olivia Alger, a 14-year-old from Minneapolis, likes to work with other students using Google Drive, an online document-sharing site.
  
  But Alger says even that tool has temptations that can lead to sloppy work.
- "The downside to that is there is an option where you can chat — so it's kind of nice, but its really distracting," she said.
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Children who read on iPads or Kindles have weaker literacy skills, charity warns | Daily Mail Online 2

Dec 03, 14

www.dailymail.co.uk/...racy-skills-charity-warns.html Technology literacy Versus skills
- A survey, conducted by The National Literacy Trust, found that 52 per cent of children preferred to read on an electronic device - including e-readers, computers and smartphones - while only 32 per cent said they would rather read a physical book.
  Worryingly, only 12 per cent of those who read using new technology said they really enjoyed reading, compared with 51 per cent of those who favoured books.
- The poll of 34,910 young people aged between eight and 16 across the UK found that those who read printed texts were almost twice as likely to have above-average reading skills as those who read on screens every day.
Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis? | UCLA 6

Dec 03, 14

newsroom.ucla.edu/...logy-producing-a-decline-79127 Technology literacy Versus skills
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  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.
- Learners have changed as a result of their exposure to technology, says Greenfield, who analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and technology, including research on multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet and video games. Her research was published this month in the journal Science.
  
  Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said.
- "However, most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination — those do not get developed by real-time media such as television or video games. Technology is not a panacea in education, because of the skills that are being lost.
  
  "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."
- Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did.
- Another study Greenfield analyzed found that college students who watched "CNN Headline News" with just the news anchor on screen and without the "news crawl" across the bottom of the screen remembered significantly more facts from the televised broadcast than those who watched it with the distraction of the crawling text and with additional stock market and weather information on the screen.
- 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.
  
  
  
  Greenfield wonders, however, whether the tasks in the simulation could have been performed better if done alone.
  
  
  
  More than 85 percent of video games contain violence, one study found, and multiple studies of violent media games have shown that they can produce many negative effects, including aggressive behavior and desensitization to real-life violence, Greenfield said in summarizing the findings.
  
  
  
  In another study, video game skills were a better predictor of surgeons' success in performing laparoscopic surgery than actual laparoscopic surgery experience. In laparoscopic surgery, a surgeon makes a small incision in a patient and inserts a viewing tube with a small camera. The surgeon examines internal organs on a video monitor connected to the tube and can use the viewing tube to guide the surgery.
  
  
  
  "Video game skill predicted laparoscopic surgery skills," Greenfield said. "The best video game players made 47 percent fewer errors and performed 39 percent faster in laparoscopic tasks than the worst video game players."
  
  
  
  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. By 1992, there was a much less significant age-related disparity in visual intelligence, Greenfield said.
  
  
  
  "In a 1992 study, visual IQ stayed almost flat from age 25 to 65," she said.
  
  
  
  Greenfield believes much of this change is related to our increased use of technology, as well as other factors, including increased levels of formal education, improved nutrition, smaller families and increased societal complexity.
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Does texting hurt writing skills? - TimesDaily: Archives 1

Dec 03, 14

www.timesdaily.com/...1d-5f82-b7ac-00f951cf10bc.html Technology literacy Versus skills
- Out of 700 youth aged 12-17 who participated in the phone survey, 60 percent say they don't consider electronic communications - e-mail, instant messaging, mobile text - to be writing in the formal sense; 63 percent say it has no impact on the writing they do for school and 64 percent report inadvertently using some form of shorthand common to electronic text, including emotions, incorrect grammar or punctuation.
  
  
  
  Dorlea Rikard, Florence High School language teacher, said she understands texting is part of student life, but to excuse bad writing by saying it's just how their world is now "is ignoring the fact that formal communication is still important and necessary."
  
  
  
  She teaches 11th-graders in advanced placement language and composition class and said students often have handwritten assignments. Many struggle with the formal writing process, she said.
  
  
  
  "They slip into the informal voice often, and that's really a tightrope because you want them to find their own voice, but the writing must be appropriate," she said. "I've realized they very often write the way they speak and they speak the way they text. And yes, I've had a few students turn in papers with numbers instead of words and letters used inappropriately. It's definitely the texting influence."
  
  
  
  Texting language is constantly changing. From the easy-to-decipher "OMG" (oh my God, or oh my gosh), "JK" (just kidding) and "TTYL" (talk to you later), to the more discreet "GTG" (got to go) and "BRB" (be right back), communication by text is basically a game.
  
  
  
  Among the 64 percent of students who say they incorporated text language in their writing, 25 percent said they did so to convey emotion and 38 percent said they have used text shortcuts such as "LOL" meaning "laugh out loud.