Shake It Up

Here's another option for response.

Some overlapping ideas...different format.

http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=8416a242f40fb7d7f338

Survival of Traditional Literacy in the Face of Advancing Technology

Below is a lengthy excerpt from an article by William Crossman. The issues he raises echo some Dave’s prompt brought up a few weeks back. His article makes a case for schools eventually moving away from teaching reading and writing at all, simply because the skills will be irrelevant. What do you think of what he has to say?

Don’t worry about composing a lengthy response that addresses every one of his points, just jump in quickly with a thought or two and begin the conversation. Check back as you have time to see how others responded or to add another one of your points when you have time.

Crossman, William. “Voice-In / Voice –Out Computers and the Postliterate Era: The movement away from text may be a positive step in human evolution.” The Futurist. March- April 2007.

“By the year 2050, voice-in/ voice-out (VIVO) talking computers incorporating mutisensorary, multimodal technologies will make written language obsolete, and all writing and reading will be will be replaced by speech and multisensensory content, recreating a worldwide oral culture. This will be a positive development.

Writing is an ancient technology…As with all technologies, writing can and will be replaced by newer technologies that do the same job more quickly, efficiently, universally, and economically, given the enormous resources it takes to teach everyone to write and read well.

Written language isn’t a necessity of life; it’s just a technology…

VIVO technology offers three great potential opportunities:

• VIVOs will allow the word’s millions of functionally nonliterate people to access all information via the Internet and Web without having to learn to read and write. Access to the world’s information storehouse should be considered a human right, as should the access to the information technology that opens the storehouse doors.
• VIVO’s instantaneous language-translation function will allow everyone in the world to speak with one another…Foreign language barriers will melt away.
• VIVO will allow people whose disabilities prevent them from either writing or reading to access all information by speaking, listening, looking, or signing.

Four “engines” are driving us into an oral culture by 2050:

• Humans are genetically, evolutionarily hardwired to access information by speaking, listening, and using our other senses. We start speaking or signing at age 1 or 2—we don’t just start writing.
• We now develop information technology that uses our innate ability to speak and we regularly replace older technologies with newer technologies that do the same overall job better.
• Young people are rejecting text in favor of these other information technologies. Reading for pleasure rate are going down while video-game use is going up Young people’s pro-VIVO revolution is going to change how education happens—and what education is—over the next decades.
• The large percentage of the world’s people who are functionally nonliterate are demanding access to the Internet, the Web, and the world’s storehouse of digital information.”

Crossman ends by concluding that “Our great-great- grandchildren won’t know how to write or read text and it won’t matter. They will become as skillfully ‘literate’ in the information technology of their generation as we are in ours.”

Response Possibilities:

• Crossman’s point of view is one which is certainly going to becoming increasingly more common and more supported. Since we are collectively exploring ways technology and writing could effectively intersect, how would you respond?
• Is there truth to any of his ideas and arguments? What makes enough sense that we need to be thoughtfully coming up with responses?
• How to we articulate the need for solid writers in the face of these arguments?