As I begin this post, comfortably sitting in front of a screen, I am struck by the differences in approach to document creation by the members of my family.
My husband, a confirmed Luddite and senior citizen, writes everything he wishes to say in longhand. His horrible (should have been a doctor) handwriting is scrawled on little pieces of paper, waiting to be entered into an email message, replying to a fellow book club member. Although often illegible, these works are usually perfect in both spelling and grammar. The first draft is filled with stroked out workds corrections and arrows to remind him (or whomever he can get to type the message) to move text.
I type everything……and I do it quickly. I can type almost as fast as I can talk, and usually faster than I can think. Longhand transcription is tedious. In spite of the fact that I have beautiful, teacher handwriting, I rarely use it. Corrections to my text and typos are made in real time, with the help of my “Grammarly” plug-in and built-in spell check with autocorrect features that have been customized to my biggest and most frequent blunders.
Our daughter, almost 12 with the wisdom of the ages, only dictates using voice recognition. For the most part, spelling is taken care of for her by her “virtual assistant”. In fact, when she wants to spell something, she simply says, “Hey, Siri….how do you spell ________?” Her skills (?) are reinforced in school, as handwriting, spelling or even word processing are subjects long gone the way of her aged parents.
If Microsoft was a Caxton of spelling practices around the world, (Peña, 2018) then is Apple the Saint George of the Word Processor? Although slaying dragons may not be the correct analogy……as Dragon Naturally Speaking is also a text dictation program, but I digress.
Knowing that I am not ready to concede dominance to my child, and also that my methods must be more efficient than my husband, surely the art of Word Processing isn’t actually going to die!?!
Pope (2005) notes that in a constructivist educational context, it is imperative that teachers guide the students to discover the best methods to complete their educational tasks. Yet, I cannot see a world of 20+ individuals dictating their assignments simultaneously in a classroom. Looking further, surely an entire thesis cannot be dictated? Yet what of Hawking or other learned masters who did not need to physically process their words to get their ideas to the masses?
I am only beginning to venture into the world of dictation and audio learning. I still like to see the words in front of me. To manipulate them and put them in their proper place. To make my ideas come alive with my fingers is an accomplishment, particularly getting past the initial, inevitable writer’s block. But could it be that I am soon to be a dinosaur? That the skill and mastery of touch-typing will be as valuable to me as typesetting my own manuscript would be? I can’t imagine coding without the skill of typing, but perhaps I am just not on the leading edge there either? Maybe there are drag and drop, or listen and do, programs available and I am stuck in the dark ages.
Only time will tell if, like the tailbone of humans, this skillset disappears and becomes a vestage of times gone by.
References:
Peña, E. (2018). The Calculator of the Humanist: Word Processing and the Reinvention of Writing. Retrieved from https://canvas.ubc.ca/courses/8770/pages/the-calculator-of-the-humanist-word-processing-and-the-reinvention-of-writing?module_item_id=446359
Pope, Margaret, Hare, Dwight, & Howard, Esther. (2005). Enhancing technology use in student teaching: A case study. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 13(4), 573-618.
amy
July 26, 2018 — 4:20 pm
Hi Carri-Ann,
You raise an interesting question when you ask if the skill of word processing will eventually meet its demise with the evolution of word processing. To be honest, after reading your post it instilled a bit of fear in me. I, myself have a 2 and soon to be 4 year old and I wondered to myself if they would grow up not needing and as a result, not knowing how to spell at all. I am teaching my little ones to write their names right now, using the good old Magna Doodle, but will all this just be wasted effort? It hadn’t occur to me that they too, like your daughter, may not even use or need to use a keyboard by the time they are 12 years old.
I have to admit, at times I feel like technology has “dumbed” me down, in that I struggle to spell certain words that I know for a fact I knew how to spell when I was in high school. This is only because Word auto corrects it for me and I rarely write on my white board at school now, as everything has gone digital. It’s like when we rely on GPS or Google Maps to go somewhere. Now I can’t even remember to learn street names to save my life! But is it even necessary?
A part of my formative and summative assessments are for my students to not only know their verb conjugations and vocabulary in French, but to also know how to spell them, including the dreaded accents. Often many of the endings in French vocabulary and verbs are not pronounced and fall silent. Students tend to have a difficult time learning to spell words in French, as they are not always spelled the same way they are pronounced. A part of my written assessment that I do requires students to spell accurately. Will this then have to change in the future?
In Michael Wesch’s video, Information R/evolution, he highlights techniques such as, searching to social tagging, and demonstrates how it challenges our traditional assumptions about information. In the past, if students had carefully written notes and neatly organized binders, it was a fairly good indicator of academic success. Those who were diligent and kept all their materials together in their binders tended to achieve better grades than their disorganized peers. Makes sense, because before your only source of information when you were studying would have been your binder. However, as the binder is now in the midst of being replaced as we speak with digital devices there’s been a major change in how we sort and search for information. Again, we have been moving away from sorted information to more searchable information. Rather than having to create a system to organize and physically place items into a systematic and retrievable order using tabs and a binder to collate it all, students’ works are now kept online, often in a “Cloud” and is searchable online. Consequently, we are in an age where we no longer sort information, but search for information. The Internet and computers as we know it are more efficient at storing and retrieving information than humans. Perhaps then, should we let the Internet and all our technology devices deal with storing and retrieving information? That way we can spend more time figuring out what to do and how to synthesize all that information.
References
Michael Wesch (2007). Information R/evolution. Retrieved July 26, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM