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john Hudson's List: Technology has Decreased Literacy Skills

  • Technology has Decreased Literacy Skills

    • How many cards did you send this holiday?
    • Clearly handwriting is less important than ever. A British survey recently found that the average time that an adult last wrote anything at all by hand was 41 days. One in 3 hadn’t written anything for at least six months.

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    • According to the International Telecommunications Union (2009), a United Nations agency, there arecurrently around 4.6 billion mobile phone subscribers across the globe, which is more than 50% of theworld's population. Between 72 and 84% of the approximately 41,000,000 American teenagers have theirown cell phones, and the percentage increases with age; 38% of those teens send text messages daily(Lenhart, 2009). Recognizing this, it seems that schools are playing ostrich, with their heads in the sand,by not harnessing the power of this medium for purposes of education.
    • Teenagers have adopted text messaging as their primary form of text-based communication, preferring iteven over e-mail (Lenhart, 2009); there are several reasons for the popularity of text messaging. First, it isquicker; adolescents have found that by texting, they can forego the normal chit-chat involved in phoneconversations. One teen stated that even for a quick question, you’d have to go through the niceties ofgreetings and spend time talking about other things (Faulkner & Culwin, 2005)

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      • How much are kids using media?

         
           
        • The total amount of media use by youth ages 8 to 18 averages 6-plus hours a day—more than any other activity.
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        • The amount of use has increased significantly, up from 4-plus hours in the last five years.
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        • Eighty percent of adolescents possess at least one form of media access.
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        • There is extensive multi-tasking associated with media use (instant messaging while doing homework and listening to music on an mp3 player, for example).
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        • Of particular concern is the amount of TV kids consume. From 2004 to 2009, television and video use averaged three to five hours per day, peaking between the ages of 11 and 14, a crucial period for kids' social development.
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        • Fifty-four percent of teens send text messages, and one third of teens send more than 100 text messages per day.
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        • One third talk face-to-face with friends, around the same percentage that talk on cell phones (38 percent) and land lines (30 percent).
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        • Twenty-four percent communicate with friends via instant messages.
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        • Twenty-five percent contact friends via social networking sites.
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        • Eleven percent use e-mail.
      • Among preschoolers, more time spent watching TV has been shown to have a negative impact on attention, academic performance, and adjustment in elementary school and middle school.
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      • Increases in media use are associated with reduced grades; only 23 percent of "light" users averaged C's or worse, as compared with 47 percent of "heavy" users.
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      • Kids who see more TV learn to read later and slower.

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    • Hey! Watch Where Your Going Pal!

       
      • Bumping your head too many times could definitely lead to a literacy skill decline.

    • Facebook is killing us! I repeat Facebook is killing us! Now that I have your attention, please...let me explain. We as a society have become so engulfed in social media that we are failing to realize the level of dependency we now have for it. Drug and drug addict would be a great analogy. We are addicted, and just like an addict we have built up a tolerance that requires more of the drug to keep us satisfied
    • Reading scores on the SAT for the high school class of 2012 reached a four-decade low, putting a punctuation mark on a gradual decline in the ability of college-bound teens to read passages and answer questions about sentence structure, vocabulary and meaning on the college entrance exam.
    • A majority of test takers — 57 percent — did not score high enough to indicate likely success in college, according to the College Board, the organization that administers the test

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    • The current tools of teenage communication go by a peculiar set of names. Wall Posts, Status Updates, Activity Feeds, Thumbs Ups, and Profiles are some of the ways that youth today communicate with one another. These tools are features of social network sites (SNS), such as Facebook and MySpace. SNS are part of a suite of Web applications, also called social media,
    • For example, a national survey in 2009 finds that 73% of online teenagers use SNS, which is an increase from 55% 3 years earlier (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010).
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