Misc Ed Tech Isaac on 20 Apr 2007 08:14 am
Handwriting, Penmanship, and the Computer Generation
“Is the pen still mighty in the computer age?” from CNET News.com:
Your grandchildren may use a stylus on a tablet PC instead of a Bic on tablet paper, but they will continue to write.
That’s because even in an era when elementary school students are adept at mousing and teenagers are fiends at text-messaging, some experts say that writing with a pen is still the backbone for teaching people how to read and learn facts.
The difference will be in how the characters are made.
It’s interesting to look at how handwriting has evolved. Having learned mostly D’Nealian print, then not really ever learning cursive script, my handwriting is a strange mix of printed letters and things that just run together (are they called ligatures even when handwritten?). For my purposes in writing, it’s not really an issue since I can write fast enough most of the time and my students eventually can figure out how to read my handwriting (and they also learn how to figure out missing or hard to read words from context), but it has also meant that I am horrendously slow at reading cursive script.
The article goes on to say:
Even some college professors prefer the pen to the keyboard.
David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, banned laptops from his classroom in part, he said, because writing in longhand forces students to pay more attention.
“The (laptop) note-taker tends to go into stenographic mode and no longer processes information in a way that is conducive to the give and take of classroom discussion. Because taking notes the old-fashioned way, by hand, is so much slower, one actually has to listen, think and prioritize the most important themes,” Cole wrote in an essay published by the Washington Post.
So, how would this professor feel about Tablet PCs? While I suspect that the professor is not entirely wrong about students being more concerned with writing stuff down than processing it (and frankly I see this with kids taking notes with pencil and paper in my classes all the time), the response seems very misguided to me.
