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.
“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?
8 comments:
I'm intrigued by the idea of returning to an oral tradition. I've never considered that possibility. I like the idea that many more people could potentially be included in our collective conversations that way, but I'm doubtful that, in this consumer culture of ours, computers would be affordable/available to everyone worldwide.
2050 is a ways away, and until then, people will sharing information by reading and writing as well as speaking, so of course it's important to keep teahing it. I decided this year though,to give more emphasis in my classroom to the oral skills of speaking and listening as well as writing, so this makes me feel like maybe I'm on the right track with that.
Wendy, I think it makes sense to pay more sense to oral skills- even as we continue to build writing ones. Though I don't put any less value on writing, I think it does become increasingly harder to ignore the role other forms of communication and the new ways writing skills might be utilized.
I also wonder about about the availability of technology. I'm often surprised that its more widespread than I imagined and costs continue to drop dramatically. There are also people constantly working on the issue through things like the OLPC's (one laptop per child) effort to make and distribute $100 machines to poverty areas worldwide. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Paying homage to oral tradition as a form of storytelling and passing culture down through the generations will continue to decline as we become a more heterogenous people with the hispanics and people's of colour either being forced to become white or become white by choice to gain some semblance of priviledge that they are denied.
I don't want that to happen, yet I can see its eventuality. Technology could preserve those stories and allow those without access to tell them if someone comes around with the access to technology.
I worry that if this were to be in the future and I suspect some truth to the possibility, who has the control over content? The haves verses the have nots? Will it allow government or special interest groups to propagandize. Sounds a lot like before people learned to read and the Catholic church controlled the knowledge and dispensed their version of the truth.
I think we should be thinking ahead to the rationales for what we do and the kind of communications that students learn. I guess I hope that we find the right balance between traditional text and oral/visual texts. I believe we can help grow incredibly literate people, well-versed in both those mediums - the textured literacy idea - such that they can compose as well as read those texts at sophisticated levels. Again, it comes down to access and government intrusion into what should or shouldn't be taught or the type of teaching and content of teaching that the tests dictate.
This topic relates indirectly to something I heard this week at an inservice in Billings. The speaker is collaborator with Marzano and Associates (Robert Marzano) and made a reference to technology in a discussion about individualized instruction. She said that our students are "digital natives" and that the majority of educators are "digital immigrants". I don't know why, but I made an IEA connection, in that I connected with the need to respect the culture, practices, and knowledge of my digitally "native" students.
I guess I'm young enough to perhaps be considered digitally native myself, but students ten years behind me have an advanced understanding in comparison.
I don't know, but this might connect to this "oral tradition" of spoken word communication. One has to imagine that if writing and reading did cease to be that listening and speaking would still continue. Our premises and principles of crafting would still be relevant to formulating spoken thoughts and such, and that makes me wonder if revision would still exist. If we begin crafting in strictly digital formats, it makes sense to me that revision would continue; however, I see a de-emphasis perhaps on conventions (at least in grammarian form) as digital technologies shape craft--I don't think technology will simply stop with the spell check.
Will this free our voices to not have to worry about conventions? Or will digitization of thought develop robot voices?
I find evidence in this digital native concept in NCTE's statement: "Young children prace multimodal literacies naturally and spontaneously."
Oops,
That last one should say "young children practice multimodal literacies".
I am jumping into this idea path, even though it may not be active anymore, as I see the last posting was last September. The thought of Robot voices streaming digital communicating accross the world abhors me, but I believe if written language becomes obsolete, this would likely be the outcome. If written language disappears from the basic functioning of the day as well as in intertainment, news, and pleasure "stories," the driving force seems to be ease, convenience, efficiency, and availability to wider geographic and class groupings. With these goals, illiteracy even of spoken language would be a huge problem. Even if the entire world used one language by 2050 (a tragic sell-out option in my mind), dialect, accent and specific speaking idiosynchrasies would create barriers to understanding. I forsee the only logistically practical option as being "monolingual translation devices," whereby each person's spoken input is "translated" by the machine into the universal spoken language, or the language of the system. Perhaps messages can be immideately trananslated into robotic versions of other languages as they are received in other regions of the earth. The biggest downfall of this perhaps efficient system would be the loss of emotion and character in spoken word. Some of the mystique of the oral tradition in most cultures is the mesmorizing quality of the speaker's voice, at least for me. This would be lost entirely, or perhaps worse, misinterpreted and twisted by the robotic voice programs. Ughh.
Although I resist the idea for the above reasons, i do think access to technology to make this possible could become much more widespread than computers are today. i was surprised in my travels in Latin America over ten years ago at the widespread availability and use of cell phones. In economically distressed Bolivia, nearly every acity-dwelling teenager and younger adult adult owned and used a cel phone. Perhaps oral web technology would come to this level as well. Of course, rural areas would likely take much longer to follow course, if ever.
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