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- Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
- Path: sparky!uunet!paladin.american.edu!auvm!UWF.BITNET!STANKULI
- Approved-By: "EDTECH Moderator" <21765EDT@MSU.BITNET>
- Message-ID: <EDTECH%92082914050593@OHSTVMA.IRCC.OHIO-STATE.EDU>
- Newsgroups: bit.listserv.edtech
- Approved: NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
- Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1992 14:02:04 EDT
- Sender: "EDTECH - Educational Technology" <EDTECH@OHSTVMA.BITNET>
- From: stan kulikowski ii <STANKULI@UWF.BITNET>
- Subject: more keyboarding curriculum
- Lines: 83
-
- ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
-
-
- when i wrote "i cannot escape the conclusion that keyboarding is essential
- elementary curriculum", i really meant the escape part. i wish there were
- some way to get around the keyboard as an input device, but no other method
- can compete with it in quality for personal text creation. when we type, we
- wiggle a finger per letter and this turns out to be the easiest way to make
- literate materials. even dictation cannot match the efficiency rates.
-
-
- >>
- >> From: Jane Clark Lindle <JCLIND00@UKCC.UKY.EDU>
- >>
- >> I'm interested in any discussion of keyboarding because it's a "manual"
- >> skill in an era when we tend to heavily focus on "intellectual/academic
- >> education."
- >>
-
- jane lindle has made a very good point here. the notion that scholarship
- is somehow beyond a foundation of physical labor is part of that naive
- viewpoint which describes academics as ivory-tower, head-in-the-clouds, and
- nonrealistic. the quality of intellectual effort is directly related to its
- material interface. for advanced thinkers, a keyboard has been in that
- interface for most of this century. with the spread of computers in these
- last decades, it is well past time for this to be regularized as an
- elementary skill for the general population.
-
- one of the ways that i estimate the skill of a person with their computer
- is their fluency on the keyboard. like jane, i am a self-taught hunt&pecker
- with output around 90 wpm. i find that my skills on a qwerty keyboard hold
- up rather well as i move between a dozen different computer keyboards with
- their punctuation floating around. there is nothing wrong with those of us
- who have developed superfluency on keyboards with personal nonsystematic
- approaches. in making curriculum decisions, however, we ought to look
- beyond the level of personal experience.
-
- but is there any reason why we would propose laisse-faire keyboarding as a
- teaching strategy? watching 6th grade kids struggle to enter 8 wpm is
- heartbreaking. the productivity studies have shown that longer training
- times, slower output and greater error rates result from nonsystematic
- keyboard use. that is part of the rationale for dvorak over qwerty. i
- think any of us hyperskilled hunt&peckers will recognize the motions of a
- well-trained dvorak typist is an ideal worthy of widespread adoption. no
- wasted motion is a thing of beauty in itself.
-
-
- >>
- >> From: reedm@GW.WMICH.EDU
- >>
- >> Would Stan suggest that penmanship still be taught--is it taught
- >> anymore at all?
- >>
-
- yes, i thought i said that with the statement on curriculum logic. the
- second-class scholars ought to be working on the quality of marks they
- scratch on paper. advanced options in calligraphy and font-selection for
- desk top publishing should be available in curriculum for this kind of
- scholarship. but to leave the general public at this level of text handling
- until high school is a disservice in an age of electronic data.
-
- i do not think we are going to see many major improvements in educational
- service delivery until we develop standard electronic textual capacities.
- most of the cost in textbooks is not the creation or quality of the
- information, but in the distribution of the paper. much of the labor in
- teaching is grading handwritten tests and assignments. floppy disks as a
- method of data delivery is still bound to the publishing cycle which takes
- at least a year to get the physical materials into the schools. i suspect
- that the average age of textual materials in schools is closer to 5 years
- (especially if you take the time from its initial creation, not the latest
- reprinting). there is much information for which this kind of use-cycle is
- appropriate, but listen to our dropout students when many of them find
- nothing relevant in schools to their month-by-month lives.
-
- and so i come to the conclusion that around 9 years old is the best time
- for kids to break out of the hardcopy cycle. fluency on a keyboard is one
- of the basic skills which help in this release.
- stan
-
- . stankuli@UWF.bitnet
- ===
- ║ ║ when a thraskin puts fingers in its ears, it is polite to shout
- --- -- old venusian proverb
-