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ashleykitty

Facebook and Twitter 'harm pupils literacy' claim headmasters | Mail Online - 1 views

  • Children's literacy is being damaged by social media, headmasters claim.They say pupils are too distracted by sites such as Facebook and Twitter to bother to read a book.As a result, thousands are poor spellers and have little understanding of grammar.
  • A survey of 214 secondary school heads found that 70 per cent believe Facebook and Twitter are ‘bad for literacy’.Excessive use of such sites means youngsters’ spelling and grammar have deteriorated. For example, some write ‘l8’ rather than ‘late’, while others rely on computer spellcheckers to correct their mistakes.
  • Bosses regularly complain about the poor literacy standards among school leavers, whose written English in applications forms and CVs can be shocking.
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  • The research uses examples such as one applicant stating: ‘I wont to work wiv you’re company.’ Others regularly confuse the words ‘to’ and ‘too’, such as: ‘I’d like too work with you’, while asking whether job ‘oppurtunities’ are ‘avalible’ at the company.Others sign their letters with several kisses, showing an inappropriate level of friendliness with a potential boss who they have never met.
ashleykitty

Technology: Declining Literacy or Changing it? by Brian West on Prezi - 1 views

  • 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."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.
  • There are major US studies of reading ability in the population at large commissioned by Congress and conducted by the Department of Education, a similar international study of literacy in the nations of the developed world, one on the reading abilities of college students, among others. Virtually all of these studies report the same basic finding: adult reading skills are in decline.
lsteimle

Libraries improve literacy of the public - 0 views

  • Libraries improve literacy of the public
  • new forms of communication expand the opportunities - if you can call them that - for illiteracy.
  • public library - continues to play a vital role in improving the literacy of the public
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    Public libraries help literacy. The article even states that new technology can be harmful to learning to be literate.
lsteimle

Demers' biggest secret; Illiteracy battle of his life - 0 views

  • He relied on TV, radio and friends to keep him apprised of world events, and somehow managed to get through his daily activities with a low literacy level
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    A reliance on media as literacy was not good.
lsteimle

From Caveman To Television - 0 views

  • ABC's portrayal of illiterate adults as victims of failed programs is inaccurate. What is more, ABC's campaign is disingenuous. Broadcast media have steadily diminished the importance of reading and writing. Fewer and fewer writers are welcomed into media to talk intelligently on serious matters. The venerable educator Jacques Barzun deplores the discontinuation, years ago, of media programs that stressed literacy and learning.
  • television is hostile to print
  • Television communicates with pictures, as did the caveman.
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    An article about ABC network and it's portrayal of illiteracy.
jennifercammon

School of Education at Johns Hopkins University-Instant Messaging: Friend or Foe of Stu... - 1 views

  • One concern about IM has to do with the "bastardization" of language. Several articles indicate that students who use messaging on a frequent basis often use bad grammar, poor punctuation, and improper abbreviations in academic writing. According to Lee (2002), "teachers say that papers are being written with shortened words, improper capitalization and punctuation, and characters like &, $ and @. " However, something that is not always considered is that these mistakes are often unintentional – when students use IM frequently, they reach a saturation point where they no longer notice the IM lingo because they are so used to seeing it. Montana Hodgen, a 16-year old high school student in Montclair, New Jersey, "was so accustomed to instant-messaging abbreviations that she often read right past them" (Lee, 2002). As she puts it, "I was so used to reading what my friends wrote to me on Instant Messenger that I didn't even realize that there was something wrong," she said. She said her ability to separate formal and informal English declined the more she used instant messages" (Lee, 2002).This was also a problem for Carl Sharp, whose 15-year old son's summer job application read "i want 2 b a counselor because i love 2 work with kids" (Friess, 2003), and English instructor Cindy Glover, who – while teaching undergraduate freshman composition in 2002 – "spent a lot of time unteaching Internet-speak. 'My students were trying to communicate fairly academic, scholarly thoughts, but some of them didn't seem to know it's "y-o-u," not "u"'" (Freiss, 2003.) These examples give credence to Montana Hodgen's point, that heavy IM use actually changes the way students read words on a page.
ashleykitty

Does the Internet Make You Dumber? - WSJ - 1 views

  • People who are continually distracted by emails, alerts and other messages understand less than those who are able to concentrate. And people who juggle many tasks are less creative and less productive than those who do one thing at a time.
  • Other studies, however, found that such rapid shifts in focus, even if performed adeptly, result in less rigorous and "more automatic" thinking.
  • When we're constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking.
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  • But that wasn't the case. In fact, the heavy multitaskers weren't even good at multitasking. They were considerably less adept at switching between tasks than the more infrequent multitaskers. "Everything distracts them," observed Clifford Nass, the professor who heads the Stanford lab.
ashleykitty

Texting, TV and Tech Trashing Children's Attention Spans | Ellen Galinsky - 0 views

  • Likewise, in the 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."
  • 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."
chaddivine

The Future of Reading - Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTime... - 1 views

  • Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.
jennifercammon

Texting, Twitter contributing to students' poor grammar skills, profs say - The Globe a... - 1 views

  • Ontario's Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills. Almost a third of those students are failing. "Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level," says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo University. "We would certainly like it to be a lot lower." Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent.
  • Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none. Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser University
  • Emoticons, truncated and butchered words such as 'cuz,' are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fraser. "Little happy faces ... or a sad face ... little abbreviations," show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani. "Instead of 'because', it's 'cuz'. That's one I see fairly frequently," she says, and these are new in the past five years. Khan Hemani sends appeal submissions with emoticons in them back to students to be re-written "because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style."
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  • "The words 'a lot' have become one word, for everyone, as far as I can tell. 'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' - 'definately'. I don't know why," says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.
  • The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an e-mail to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work.
  • "It would say to me ... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,' " he says.
ashleykitty

Pupils resort to text language in GCSE exams - Telegraph - 0 views

  • Examiners have given warning that pupils are increasingly using text message language in GCSEs, the first official acknowledgment that mobile phone shorthand is undermining standard English. A report published by the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, the largest exam board in the country, has disclosed that this year's GCSE English scripts were peppered with the abbreviated words which have become second nature to many youngsters. The report, compiled from examiners' comments on more than 700,000 English scripts marked this year, said: "Text message spellings, such as U for "you" are increasingly prevalent."
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