After I spotted the new paper on texting last night, I noticed this morning that another one of the blogs that I read had picked up the same story, and had added a nice collection of pro/con articles:
Positive studies on the effect of text messaging on student’s writing skills:
- Texts ‘do not hinder literacy’
- Texting teenagers are proving ‘more literate than ever before’
- E-Mail and Texting – Not at all bad
- Texting ‘is no bar to literacy’
- Teacher finds novel way to use texting
Negative studies:
- Text messages harm written language? (Oh-Hum)
- Technology marches ahead, grammar gets worse
- Y TEXTING MAYBE BAD 4 U
- SMS Resulting in Poor English Grades?
- SMS and Internet blamed for decline in English Examinations
- SMS threatens Norwegian language say teachers
- Teachers hung up on SMS
- An essay written in text message shorthand
They also spotted another negative study that suggest that the “instant gratification” that comes from IM/txt is potentially addictive.
It seems that the ubergadet is a real Pandora’s box in the classroom, though I wonder if the same issues were raised with TV/Video in the classroom and (hark!) computers. I would assume, that with every new medium, there comes an optimal way to make use of it. Comics seem to show this rather nicely as the text is as much part of the illustration as the characters are – ornate languages like Chinese, Japanese and Arabic used the language itself as the art, and to some extent so did Latin Character languages with the ornate characters used to start new sections of a document. This argument seems to help make sense of the pro/con list above, but what about the addiction?
Well, that is something that is certainly new – but as with anything else that has an associated behaviour, it is not new at the same time. There is a continuum of users and the behaviour should not be damned for the actions of the more harmful extremes. What we need to understand is that there is a spectrum of use and how to know when students are slipping into dangerous territory.
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