Tag: writing

Everyone Speaks Text Message

For many tiny, endangered languages, digital technology has become a lifeline.

The only way to ensure that languages don’t die is to see them being taken up by new generations. That’s lead many to conclude that with so many of the cool things being invented in one of  the top ten languages of the world, the other thousands of languages that currently exist are destined to disappear. After all, if your kids don’t take up your language, that’s a sure sign that it’s not going to last very long. But, if some cool technologies could be programmed in that language which the kids will be desperate to use, then perhaps the language can survive.

The word N'ko written in the N'ko alphabet

So the story of N’Ko, a standard writing system for Mande languages, a group of related languages spoken by about 35 million people in West Africa. It was invented in 1949 but, because of the difficulty of building typewriters for N’Ko (the alphabet was created from scratch by a man called Solomani Kante), it seemed destined to be used only by a small elite.

Then came the internet and it looks like N’Ko could be the means by which those languages will continue to exist.

Read more about N’Ko and the way the internet is saving languages: Everyone Speaks Text Message – NYTimes.com.

Writing in ink

My eight year-old came home recently with a request. She needed an ink pen which she would start to use in October in her literacy classes. An ink pen. Only after pushing her on what she thought was meant did we arrive at the idea that  the teacher wanted her to have a fountain pen. I was pleasantly surprised. In a world dominated by the keyboard, Emily was to experience the craft of writing through flowing ink. She’ll have to master that flow, inscribing her thoughts in ways that will force her to develop her own individual style. That style will remain with her in a way that is denied in the ascquisition of ‘typing skills’ where the only individual variable (although fascinating for other reasons, font selection is only a choice amoung pre-selected standards) is speed.

Instead, she’ll struggle and eventually gain a fluency which will be her fluency. Allied to an idiolect (her idiosyncratic way of speaking) she’ll also have an … ‘idioscript’ through which she will express herself in writing. Whilst this might be a romantic throw-back, there is also evidence that connects the physical inscription of ink to paperwith developing the brain in unique and important ways.

Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says handwriting differs from typing because it requires executing sequential strokes to form a letter, whereas keyboarding involves selecting a whole letter by touching a key.

She says pictures of the brain have illustrated that sequential finger movements activated massive regions involved in thinking, language and working memory—the system for temporarily storing and managing information. (WSJ Oct. 5 2010)

 

So, Emily’s physical and cognitive development continues with fountain pen in hand. The question is: how long will she keep using it? Will it become, like so many of those activities which we begin at school only to subsequently give up, obsolete as she manipulates the next generation of digital inputing devices? And if so, what will her brain lose in the process?

Johann Hari: Plagiarism or not?

It’s clearly not plagiarism or churnalism – but was it an error in another way? Yes. I now see it was wrong, and I wouldn’t do it again.

Why? Because an interview is not just an essayistic representation of what a person thinks; it is a report on an encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee. If (for example) a person doesn’t speak very good English, or is simply unclear, it may be better to quote their slightly broken or garbled English than to quote their more precise written work, and let that speak for itself. It depends on whether you prefer the intellectual accuracy of describing their ideas in their most considered words, or the reportorial accuracy of describing their ideas in the words they used on that particular afternoon. Since my interviews are long intellectual profiles, not ones where I’m trying to ferret out a scoop or exclusive, I have, in the past, prioritised the former. That was, on reflection, a mistake, because it wasn’t clear to the reader.

via independent.co.uk

The Disappearance of Technology: Toward an Ecological Model of Literacy

We tend to think of technology as a set of tools to perform a specific function. These tools are often portrayed as mechanistic, exterior, autonomous, and concrete devices that accomplish tasks and create products. We do not generally think of them as intimately entwined with social and biological lives. But literacy technologies, such as pen and paper, index cards, computer databases, word processors, networks, e-mail, and hypertext, are also ideological tools; they are designed, accessed, interpreted, and used to further purposes that embody social values. More than mechanistic, they are organic, because they merge with our social, physical, and psychological beings. Thus, we need to look more closely at how technologies are realized in given settings. We may find that technological tools can be so embedded in the living process that their status as technologies disappears.

via ideals.illinois.edu

Shakespeare Never Lost a Manuscript to a Computer Crash

In Shakespeare Never Lost a Manuscript to a Computer Crash Theodore Roszak argues that

the computer contributes nothing essential to the life of the mind. No, not even all the information that comes gushing out of the World Wide Web . . . Am I saying that computers might actually get in the way of significant intellectual work? Yes, I am

Do you agree?