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Simora Martin

A lament for the future of meaningful reading; Why bother with serious books when Angry... - 0 views

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    Edmonton Journal (Alberta) January 22, 2012 Sunday Final Edition A lament for the future of meaningful reading; Why bother with serious books when Angry Birds is a tap away? BYLINE: Brett Josef Grubisic, Vancouver Sun SECTION: SUNDAY READER; Pg. B9 LENGTH: 1036 words Reading the 21st Century Stan Persky McGill Queens University Press 278 pp; $29.95 In an article about the good deeds of E.D. Hirsch, the recently deceased American cultural literacy superstar Christopher Hitchens dropped alarming findings from a nationwide survey: "The chances of a 17-yearold American being able to say anything meaningful about Thomas Jefferson are disconcertingly slight. The chances of the same student knowing anything significant about Poe, or slavery, or of being able to translate the most elementary Latin . or even being able to define the word 'ironic' are slighter still." Published shortly after Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind and Hirsch's Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, Hitchens' New York Times piece drew references from a 1988 survey. Since the ensuing two decades have witnessed the explosive growth of the Internet and gadgets for every occasion, it is tempting to wonder about the cultural literacy of that former disappointing test-subject's teenage son. A professional philosopher at Vancouver's Capilano University for nearly three decades and the author of more than 20 books that range from sexual politics (Buddies: Meditations on Desire, On Kiddie Porn) to Canadian politics (Fantasy Government, Delgamuukw), Chicago-born Stan Persky has been studying the data. He cannot be labelled an optimist. Persky's latest work - which he calls a "jeremiad, as defined by the writer Brian Fawcett: as accurate a description as possible of the present situation" - expands his impressive range while remaining close to an ever-keen interest in the cultural landscape of the here and now. Page-wise, Reading the 21st Century is dedicated primarily to signifi
Simora Martin

Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis? / UCLA N... - 0 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.
  • 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.
  • "By using more visual media, students will process information better," she 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.
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  • mong 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.
Albert Martinez

Google Drive Document - 29 views

I find your revision of the title much better. Shorter and straight to the point. and I just added this to the diigo group and will be adding it to the doc: "Schools are continuously updating the...

Google Drive Document Editing Assignment

Simora Martin

Literacy rates expected to worsen - 0 views

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    Edmonton Journal (Alberta) September 8, 2010 Wednesday Final Edition Literacy rates expected to worsen BYLINE: Postmedia News SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A6 LENGTH: 399 words DATELINE: OTTAWA Current low literacy rates in Canada's biggest cities are expected to be about the same in 20 years unless some serious efforts to improve them are made now, a new report released today warns. Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa are all on track to see the number of adults with low literacy levels in their populations soar because of demographic shifts, according to a report from the Canadian Council on Learning, and it should be a major concern for the cities, the group's president says. "It's surprising for people who think that the problem of low levels of literacy among Canadian adults will improve over time, because they won't," Paul Cappon said in an interview. "And that includes in the bigger cities where people might have thought you'd get the most improvement." The latest numbers from the CCL indicate that about 48 per cent of adults have low literacy rates and projections show little is expected to change over the next 20 years. By 2031, about 47 per cent of Canadian adults are projected to have low prose literacy skills, as defined by the OECD's International Adults Literacy and Skills Survey -- which means they'll have difficulty reading, comprehending and functioning effectively with written material. While the percentage is expected to stay the same, the total number of Canadians with low literacy is predicted to jump 25 per cent to 15 million between 2001 and 2031. The major factor behind that trend is the projected growth in the number of senior citizens and immigrants, the report said. In Toronto, a slight decrease of five per cent in the share of the population with low literacy is expected by 2031, but the absolute number of residents who need help is expected to go from 1.9 million to 3.2 million. The change in Toronto is being driven mostly by immigrati
Randall Oxendine

School of Education at Johns Hopkins University-Instant Messaging: Friend or Foe of Stu... - 0 views

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Students need to understand the importance of using the appropriate language in the appropriate setting, and that who one is writing for affects the way in which one writes. For example, IM-speak is perfectly acceptable when instant messaging with someone; on the flip side it is completely unacceptable when writing a formal letter. The same thing is true of formal writing – it is appropriate in an official document, such as a school paper, but would be inappropriate in-- for example-- an online chat room.
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  • Lee, J. (2002, September 19). I Think, Therefore IM. New York Times, p.G.1.
  • Friess, S. (2003, April 1). 'Yo, can u plz help me write English?': Parents fear online chatting ruins kids' language skills. USA Today, p.D.08.
  • 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).
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