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EJournal Volume 02 Number 02
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June, 1992 _EJournal_ Volume 2 Issue 2 ISSN# 1054-1055
2545 Subscribers in 37 Countries
An Electronic Journal concerned with the implications
of electronic networks and texts.
University at Albany, State University of New York
ejournal@albany.bitnet
There are 760 lines in this issue.
CONTENTS:
Editorial 1: Should we say goodbye to "text"?
Editorial 2: Writing as reward, not punishmment
LITERACY FOR THE NEXT GENERATION: Writing Without Handwriting
by David Coniam
Chinese University of Hong Kong
DEPARTMENTS:
Summary of Network Commands
Letters (policy)
Reviews (policy)
Supplements to previous texts (policy)
About _EJournal_
PEOPLE: Board of Advisors, Consulting Editors [l. 39]
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This electronic publication and its contents are (c) copyright 1992 by
_EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away the journal and its
contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and all financial interest is hereby
assigned to the acknowledged authors of individual texts. This notification
must accompany all distribution of _EJournal_.
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Editorial 1 - Should we say goodbye to "text"?
_EJournal_ began as a strictly "text" journal, but the nature of text is
changing. _EJournal_ started out to be a place where people could discuss the
kinds of changes in "writing" that the electronic screen would encourage. Even
though we expressed interest in text "broadly defined," we were still thinking
mostly in images of "words on a page." We also wanted to sidestep as many
print-journal conventions as we could. There would be no deadlines set by
printers' schedules, no straightjackets of layout or "making up a book" or
formatting. Why accept the constrictions imposed by a superseded delivery
mechanism? So we worked with one essay per issue, a publish-when-ready
approach, and plain-vanilla ASCII.
Now, however, ASCII and the connotations of "text" are beginning to constrict
our perception. "Text" is linked too closely with "print" and "printing" to
suit the scope of electronic display. Even "hypertext," in so many ways
properly dislocating and descriptive, (i. e., the three-dimensional image
embedded in "hyper"), is somewhat limiting now that sound and motion can be
included in what we transmit and display. What then should we call that
stuff, those sequences of phosphor images and digitized wave forms that we are
transmitting and receiving and messing around with in the Matrix?
I propose "display" as a useful term. If its appearance didn't make you blink
and back up in the second sentence of the paragraph above, then it might serve
until a more obvious replacement slides into general use. Perhaps some
analogue of "recording" will eventually dominate, but for now "display" seems
suitable even though it privileges the visible over the audible.
In any case, even if we don't dismiss the outmoded word "text" all at once,
_EJournal_'s commitment to challenging inky-paper conventions continues. We
look forward to opportunities to experiment with essays (and make-believe) that
contain a-textual displays, and to essays addressing the ramifications of such
a change in the distribution of imagination and information.
Ted Jennings [l. 81]
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Editorial 2 - Writing as reward, not punishment
One of those memorable flashes of comprehension in my career occurred when a
colleague pointed out how often and how much the process of writing is
associated with punishment. "Go to the board and write ...." "Sit still in
your seat, you, there, and write ...." Even though teachers in grade school
did sometimes like what I wrote, writing has ever since then been associated
with unpleasant work. How many people rub their hands and grin when asked to
take notes at a meeting?
Even after that plausible association had been pointed out, and I realized that
many college students still bore the scars of elementary-school discipline, I
continued to overlook another negative association with writing: the agonies of
struggling to make proper R's and to get those infernal capital I's -- the
backslanty cursed cursive I's -- to line up properly.
David Coniam reminds us in this issue's essay that young people are orally
fluent long before they have enough control over their muscles to make "proper"
letters. What would happen if articulate three-year-olds, even toddlers, could
begin to make visible versions of their jabbering? What if the imaginative
songs and stories they chant so easily could apppear on a screen? What if a
chance to "write" became an attractive reward? Interesting questions, perhaps,
but until recently questions that could hardly be answered.
We can expect to begin getting answers soon. Display technology will reduce
the agonies of "handwriting" and "penmanship"; composing will not be associated
with punishment as often. "Writing" will include noise and pictures; fewer
imaginations will be wounded; many youngsters will look forward to playing with
keyboard and screen.
No one person will be able to recall having learned *both* penmanship
exclusively and keyboarding exclusively, so only historians will be able to
speculate about the precise effects of the change in the way young people are
conditioned to undertake "writing." But the changes are occurring, and the
difference will be there, and our grandchildren's children won't realize that
writing once was a psycho-motor struggle as well as a mental challenge.
Ted Jennings [l. 120]
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LITERACY FOR THE NEXT GENERATION: Writing Without Handwriting
by David Coniam
Faculty of Education,
Chinese University of Hong Kong
This essay argues that keyboard and display technology will change the way
young children learn to compose texts. They will not have to learn how to
"write" with pen on paper; without those mental and physical barriers between
their thoughts and a screen's visible, shareable version of their words,
children will be happier about "really" writing than they are when a piece of
blank paper is thrust in front of them.
I New technologies, new orientations
How many of us will still be writing with a pen in the next century? In the
22nd century, how many people will actually know what a pen is for? These
questions may seem facetious, but we need only think back to our parents, who
had inkwells on their school desks, to realize that the answers are not
obvious. Fifty years ago, writing could only be done in a special environment:
the ballpoint pen was unknown, "fountain" pens could be unreliable, the only
medium for "writing" was paper. With only a few exceptions, a "writer"
produced "manuscripts," and typewriters were for two-fingered newspaper
reporters, and secretaries. [l. 145]
Technology has already changed the way arithmetic is learned. At high school in
maths lessons in the 50s and 60s, we all had to learn by heart our times tables
(Remember chanting: "one nine is nine; two nines are 18; three nines are 27
..."?). In contrast, the Mathematics section of the U.K. High Schools' National
Curriculum (1990) states that pupils still need to know their times tables, but
that the tables should not simply be rote-learnt. Thanks to the ready
availability of pocket electronic calculators, elementary maths classes no
longer require pupils to simply memorize and recall facts. Indeed, the National
Curriculum recommends that time in the maths classroom be divided between
"cerebral" work involving pupils working with their tables, and work involving
the use of a calculator.
Certain older educators, however, lament the use of calculators in much the
same way that they rue the fact that Latin is not taught in schools any more.
A popular slogan was "Learning Latin is good for your mind". What nonsense:
the learning of Latin was simply a test of memory and very little else. The
previous allusion to learning one's times tables holds equally true for the
learning of Latin, which required no processing of language and no linguistic
communication between students. In maths teaching, the widespread use of the
calculator has resulted in a greater emphasis on application and less on the
teaching of numbers and numeracy monitored by tests of memorization.
Examination authorities recognize this. They allow calculators to be taken
into examinations and they require candidates to apply their knowledge to
complicated tasks, rather than simply testing students' powers of memory.
[l. 171]
The rise in popularity and acceptance of the personal calculator bears rather
close analogy to what is happening with regard to writing: future generations
will need to worry less about struggling with the medium, we might say, and
will be able to attend more to the message. Keyboard and screen technology will
let the child produce larger amounts of interesting text, more proudly and yet
with less effort, than the old muscle-bound technology permits. The thrust of
this essay, then, is that computer technology will have profound implications
for what and how our children -- or our children's children -- learn to write.
It will also affect and alter the way in which they acquire the skill of
writing, both inside and outside the classroom, both with and without
teacher/adult guidance.
II Old technology versus new
Pen, paper and hand-writing will not disappear entirely. Furner (1985) reports
a study by Templin in the early 1960s on types of handwritten material produced
by a cross-section of professional and blue-collar workers. Templin concluded
that handwriting was used primarily for casual or short-delivery type tasks,
such as writing cheques, dealing with social correspondence, filling in forms,
drawing up shopping lists, and so forth. Interestingly enough, Templin
commented that professionals made rough drafts in handwritten form, even when
they had access to secretarial support. Furner believes that with increases in
portability and decreases in cost, computers will be used more and more in
homes, classrooms, and workplaces. She feels that word processing programs for
children and adults will be increasingly widely used in writing, and that the
uses of handwriting will diminish in the future. Because of this decline, she
recommends that only one form of handwriting be taught in schools in the U.S.A.
(^1^). She does conclude, however, that handwriting will still have a place in
societ("Handwriting Instruction for a High-tech Society...," 1985, p. 5).
[l. 201]
People will still write by hand, so instruction in "penmanship" will still take
place. Handwriting has long been regarded by schools and educators as
essentially building up appropriate motor skills in young learners, with a lot
of emphasis given to such behaviouristic practice as copying, tracing and other
exercises and writing drills. Furner comments that such practice is generally
of limited value and she argues that effective instruction needs to take
account of handwriting as a perceptual-motor skill:
To learn to write the child must form a mental representation of
lower-case and capital letter form, numerals, punctuation marks, and
general procedures of writing including size, spacing, alignment,
straightness or slant, joining of letters ... (pp. 5-6).
This is a succinct description of how much a young person must learn and
remember in order to write by hand, yet it still does not address the
difficulties of applying such "knowledge" to the task of physically inscribing
those different shapes legibly on a piece of paper. Tapping a keyboard is
easier.
My son is a case in point. He is now four and has been (literally) bashing away
on the computer since he was nine months old. This was not intentional: when
he was eleven months old we discovered he was asthmatic, and letting him play
on my old BBC computer for ten minutes a day distracted him long enough for him
to take his medication with a minimum of fuss. By the age of twenty-two
months, he knew where all the letters were on the keyboard, and could type in
different letters upon request. His "keyboarding" has continued and developed
over the last two years, and it was not until he reached the age of three and a
half that I made the decision to begin teaching him to write with pencil and
paper. [. 230]
I would like to comment on a few of the problems my son has faced. Some of the
problems I examine are English-language specific; nonetheless, I feel much of
what I put forward can be extrapolated generally to the case of younger
learners faced with the task of writing.
The keyboard is an obvious visual palette from which the child can see and
choose the letters he wants to write with. And even though the QWERTY keyboard
layout is not user-friendly (either to the ergonomics of the hand or in the
layout and assignment of keys) these factors have little impact on early child
writing. The overriding factor for a child is not speed or efficiency, that
is, but simply the labour required to produce the characters. The easier it is
for the writer to make letters, the more letters will be made. Papert makes
the point that an adult with a word processor expects a first draft to be
essentially "unacceptable" -- expects to revise because it will be easy to
revise. This kind of fluency, however, is a luxury that a young child who is
writing with a pen does not have, since:
The physical act of writing [is] slow and laborious.... For most
children rewriting a text is so laborious that the first draft is
the final copy, and the skill of rereading with a critical eye is
never acquired. (_Mindstorms_, p. 30)
When working with a pen, a child must remember how to move arm and wrist and
fingers to shape each letter. On the keyboard, all the letters are available
at a glance; different letters do not need as much deliberation while - or
before - they are retrieved from the memory store. The load on short-term
memory is therefore lighter. The fact that on the keyboard a letter can be
quickly picked out means the writer is less likely to lose track of his next
target, the next letter. When my son uses the computer to write his name, he
says to himself "Kevin" and moves easily from one letter to another. With a
pen (to reiterate the contrast) he has to recall each letter, frame it
"correctly" on the page and between the lines, size it, and concentrate on
making the proper trail of ink on the paper.
[l. 265]
Penmanship practitioners have to learn two alphabets, upper and lower case. In
terms of handwriting, common practice has been to teach children to write
everything initially in upper case. Lower case is introduced later, and the
struggle to differentiate when to use which case then commences. The
difference is less of a problem when the child is working with a keyboard.
Initially, my son worked at the keyboard in upper case; the move to the concept
of:
When writing a name, the first letter is big and the rest are small
was surprisingly easy. All the child has to do is press the SHIFT key before
typing. The logic - or confusion - of why English needs both upper and lower
case can be left for later explanation.
Learning to put spaces between words is accomplished much more easily on a
computer than with pen and paper. My son moved to:
Kevin [SPACE] Coniam
without a great deal of prompting. In contrast, figuring out the proper
spacing between the two names on paper is not as easy for a child as it
is for an adult: How big should the space between each word be? Should
it always be the same size space? Why does the space between two words
need to be bigger than that between two letters? Why not a new line
between words instead of a space?
One major convention (in English) is that writing proceeds from left to right
across the page. (Brodie comments on how the linguist Sir Richard Burton
recalls his experiences of first learning to write Arabic. Since he was
teaching himself, Burton wrote from left to right as he did English, [rather
than from right to left] - only realizing his mistake when an Arab friend
happened to look at some of his writing! [_The Devil Drives_, 1984].) This may
not offer as great a hurdle to handwriters as some other conventions, but it
offers none at all to users of keyboard and screen, even left-handers like
Kevin.
[l. 300]
These four conventions -- letter formation, cases, spacing, direction -- look
easy to adults. But they are at least as great a barrier between a young
learner and "writing" as grammar and punctuation and spelling are for older
children. Why, if it were not for pressure and promise, would anyone choose to
suffer through learning to write with pen and paper? The fact that with a pen
each individual letter is such a struggle is quite demotivating for the young
learner. Too often, when he was younger, the only way to get Kevin to complete
a handwriting task was to threaten him.
The ability -- or indeed desire -- to work by oneself is another point worth
examining here. I quite frequently hear the computer being turned on and my
son doing some letter or word-writing or word-recognition games by himself in
his bedroom. A very successful piece of software here has been Superior
Software's "SPEECH!", which produces human-like sound. I wrote a simple BASIC
program which interfaces with the speech software so that when a letter is
typed in, the computer speaks the name of that letter:
"K" --> /kay/
"E" --> /ee/
"V" --> /vee/
and so on.
-- finally concatenating all the individual letter sounds to produce a
"word" or string of sounds.
"Hey Dad, come and look at this funny word I've typed in - is that a real
word?" I hear my son call out. Upon seeing something like "asdfsefm" I smile,
and say - I hope not too condescendingly - "Good stuff, Kevin; well, that's not
quite a word, but let the computer try and say it anyway."
[l. 331]
"Hey Dad, come and see this word I've written" is a cry I have never heard from
my son when he is writing with pen and paper. That kind of writing -- with a
pen -- is done only at my request. The colours and sounds and feedback that the
computer gives (no matter how overtly behaviourist the learning styles
currently employed in software may be) hold interest and lend much more
motivation even than a cajoling parent sitting beside the child.
Levin (1988) reflects the same perspective. She comments on the tedium of
writing for a kindergarten child, and suggests that computers can provide
support for kindergarten writers:
Children can experiment with letters and words without being
distracted by the fine motor aspects of handwriting.... Perhaps
more importantly, five-year-olds can learn to use the computer as
a tool for exploration and experimentation ("Methodologies of
Reading and Writing ....," pp. 58-9, 1988).
She discusses the fact that for kindergarten children written language is
scarce and it is the spoken language that gives them control over their
environment. Use of the computer -- to enable children to write, or even just
begin to write -- may, she suggests, give children a greater sense of control
and power over their environment.
Guddemi and Mills (1989) likewise note, in a study of literacy development,
that children seemed to prefer computer-activities to pen-based ones; they were
more aware of general alphabetic principles following computer-based work; and
they were more willing to experiment and take risks with their own writing when
at the computer ("The Impact of Word Processing ....," 1989).
[l. 360]
Imaginative software encourages children to pick up skills. I have struggled
hard with paper-based activities for my four-year-old, and have not got far
beyond basic copying and such not especially inventive moves as crosswords and
hangman! In contrast, the computer has a considerable number of different
focuses:
- speech-producing software, (e.g., Superior Software's SPEECH!)
- simple large-font word processors (e.g., Tedimen Software's FOLIO)
- simple phonic picture games where the child has to type in the
first or last letter of an object
- letter and word-matching games
According to the computer manufacturers, the next significant change in
computers and computer use for the average person will be the introduction of
pen-based computers. Such machines work on the basis of handwritten input:
The computer is equipped with a "pen" and a writing tablet. A user uses the
pen to write in hand upon the tablet, and handwriting recognition software then
interprets the different handwriting. Ironically, I do not feel the advent of
pen-based computers will significantly change the way we write. Pen-based
computers pose exactly the same problems as do ink pens and paper: One cannot
write fast enough with a pen. In contrast, even if one is not a touch-typist,
the amount of data that can be got down on a keyboard at any one time still
represents at least a four-fold increase over what can be physically written
with a pen, a point that is confirmed by investigations into college student
writing (see Edwards, "How Computers Change Things," 1991; Bangert-Drowns,
"Research on Wordprocessing and Writing Instruction," 1989).
III Getting beyond barriers
[l. 389]
Guddemi and Fite (1990) report on a computer literacy project in the US called
Head Start. Their project examined instruction among a group of 115
kindergarten and preschool children, half of whom had instruction centering
around a computer and half who did not. The researchers concluded that the
computer-managed exercises had resulted in pupil gains, even though the study
was limited by duration and amount of computer time per student. This matches
with my personal observation that not only does computer use result in easier
access to the written word for the child in terms of equal time spent on pen-
or computer-based writing, but that the child is prepared to put in his/her own
time in the exercises or "games." Guddemi and Fite further comment that:
. . . computers strengthen specific skills, foster creativity and
problem solving, and enhance the writing process ("Is there a
Legitimate Role for Computers ..." p. 5).
For the younger learner, pen-based writing is essentially an exercise
consisting of output with no communicative purpose. The child may be copying
something:
Parent: "Come on, Kevin; write 'Happy Birthday James' on this
present before you give it to James this afternoon. I've written
it; now you copy it."
Or the child may be pressed to pretend to want to write something:
Parent: "What would you like to write this afternoon, Kevin?"
Child : "Bus."
Parent: "OK, how do you spell bus?"
Child : "I don't know; you tell me."
And so the charade of pen-paper "writing" continues. In contrast, on a
computer, the child can get a reaction to "writing" he has chosen to experiment
with. The speech-synthesizing program itself, mentioned earlier, provides
response to letters, words, or indeed nonsense "scribbling" that is typed in on
the keyboard.
[l. 425]
There are other ways to associate keyboard and screen with acomplishment. One
moderately formal system involves LOGO, a computer language designed for
children. With it a young child can create lines by using simple commands to
move the "turtle" icon. The typed instructions:
BK 200 LT 90 FD 100
would produce a figure that resembles the letter "L," for instance (see
Papert).
The point here is that the child comes to realize that pressing the keys
produces a recognizable outcome, and (by extension) that writing need not be a
tiresome activity which is only done under duress at Daddy's insistence.
Papert discusses certain aspects of the traditional teaching situation (with
regard to mathematics). He suggests that where children have to learn "what is
good for them" no matter what, an unfavorable attitude towards learning is all
too easily engendered:
. . . by forcing the children into learning situations doomed in
advance, [school] generates powerful negative feelings about
mathematics and about learning in general (p. 9).
This uncomfortable feeling is one I have got myself in connection with the
foisting of pen and paper writing on my son.
Concerning the use of LOGO mentioned above, what the child is doing is
effectively scribbling on the computer. Scribbling as an activity is now
regarded as an essential part of a child's writing-development process (Warash,
"The Computer Language Experience Approach," 1984). Rather than being simply
garbage and thought of as a waste of paper, scribbling is now seen as an
integral part of the learning-to-write process. What might be a meaningless
scribble to an adult may well have meaning for the child who produced it.
Warash discusses the degree to which preschoolers ascribe importance and
meaning to scribblings or other forms of "illegible" written output. She
comments that just as a scribble a child has made on paper has more meaning for
him/her than something an adult may have written (however "legibly"), a
"scribble" on the computer may have even more "meaning" for the child for two
reasons: It has been produced by the child, and the "components" of the
scribble are more easily deciphered. She comments on the advantage the
computer has in this respect:
. . . it gives the child the opportunity to produce a
perfectly-typed picture or letter. The child has the responsibility
of making the decision about what he wants to type (p. 4). [l. 469]
Further, she comments that the computer is a great motivational tool because
the child:
has complete control over all the keys. Each key the child pushes
does something different.... A child is given control over a machine
that enables him to draw shapes that he normally cannot draw
freehand (p. 4).
In Warash's study at the West Virginia Child Development Laboratory, children
were found to verbalize considerably more over pictures they had "drawn" on the
computer than over those they had "drawn" freehand. She concludes that young
children appear not to have been given the credit they should have for their
capability of working meaningfully with computers:
Working with words may not seem appropriate for preschoolers but
the children have set the pace... (p. 6).
Lawler, in another report (1980), discusses how he encouraged his six-year-old
daughter, Miriam, to write letters with a word processor. He comments that
motivated focus on the message may well produce unintentional developments in
the child's appreciation of the form:
. . . if the child can create text which she is willing to dwell
upon as reader, she may gradually perceive the structure of the
text.... Thus an initially unstructured form of expression would
be fit, piecemeal, into those conventional forms which have been
found effective for communication ("One Child's Learning ...," p. 16).
Getting a child to focus on the content, then, may result in unexpected
spin-offs in the child's perception of form, even though this may not have been
explicitly taught. Admittedly, Lawler is discussing the use of the word
processor by a child who has mastered the rudiments of literacy; nonetheless,
the arguments which here concern motivation and peripheral learning hold in a
comparable manner for much younger learners. [l. 50]
Papert comments that word processors can make a child's experience of writing
more like that of a real writer. Adults need to accept the premise that as
they write with word processors, so should children (even though children may
not have the same purpose or produce similar outcomes):
The image of children using the computer as a writing instrument
is a particularly good example of my general thesis that what is
good for professionals is good for children (p. 30).
IV A transition scenario
Computer technology has advanced remarkably since the advent of the PC in 1981.
With regard to advances in computer miniaturization, and the feedback of such
technology into daily life, significant progress has been made even over the
last two or three years. In early 1990 I made the move to buy myself a laptop
-- a machine that weighed seven kilos, and represented (in those days) the
height of portability. Two years on, seven kilos with a 40-megabtye hard disk
of storage space depicts obsolescence -- with even the moniker "laptop" now
standing for out-of-date technology. The current trend is toward smaller,
lighter and even more portable; first came the two to three kilo "notebook,"
and now the half-kilo "palmtop," which is literally the size of a big fist, has
arrived.
As technology brings us more portable and affordable computers, and as our
attitude toward such technology changes, the process of helping young people
learn to write is likely to change. Inkwells and "times tables" will be buried
in history lessons; learning to shape letters with a pen in order to make
convenient personal lists will be postponed until mature muscles can handle the
task easily. Penmanship, hand-writing, manu-scribing won't be a barrier
between mind and message. Keyboard and display will make composing, creating,
expressing and story-telling easy and fun instead of boring and hard. "Look
what I did!" will be the cry, not "Do I have to copy it over?"
The way in which written Chinese used to be taught in the first years of
Chinese primary schools (and still is in many schools in China and Hong Kong)
can be seen as representing an extreme of misplaced emphasis. Not only was the
order of the strokes in which one wrote a character important, but considerable
emphasis was also placed on the way the brush that produced those strokes was
held. And the content of writing classes rarely involved more than copying and
recopying of characters. For many youngsters, the form that "writing" took far
outweighed any actual message that was conveyed.
[l. 547]
The future the computer holds for initial writing (in English at least) is that
our youngsters will be presented with a much more transparent medium for
self-expression than that which they encounter at present. It may also result
in a rather different classroom environment in that there will be greater
flexibility for learner manoeuvres; the greater array of writing activities
available to learners may lessen some of the tedium of accommodating to the
medium of writing. There could be less teacher pressure and more learner
independence. Opportunity to experiment with the new medium may enhance
learners' motivation to write. As for education outside the classroom, Papert
eloquently prophesies the empowering potential of the computer:
I believe the computer presence will enable us to modify the learning
environment outside the classroom so that much if not all the knowledge
schools currently try to teach with such pain and expense and such
limited success will be learned, as the child learns to talk,
painlessly, successfully, and without organized instruction (p. 9).
The computer will let our younger writers of the future express and negotiate
"meaning" without the worries that go with having to draw acceptable shapes on
lined paper. Whereas at present the final written "product" is always a long
way off, the prospect of getting the story told quickly by way of keyboard and
screen may make children look forward to writing. In the developed world,
where the school desk of the 21st century will have a computer on it instead of
an inkwell, our children's children may well be the last generation that
receives formal classroom instruction in how to use a pen. While the demise of
the pen may result in the demise of the skills of calligraphy and "penmanship"
(or result in these skills being brought into the art class), it may also
result in the demise of certain obstacles to communication faced by our young
learners. With those obstacles out of the way, young children may find writing
an imagination-stirring pleasure instead of a tedious schoolroom exercise.
[l. 577]
NOTE
(^1^) Currently both manuscript and cursive forms of handwriting are
taught in the USA.
REFERENCES
Bangert-Drowns, Robert. 1989. Research on wordprocessing and writing
instruction. Paper presented at the American Educational Research
Association. (San Francisco, CA, USA. March 1989)
Brodie, Fawn M. 1984. _The devil drives: the life of Sir Richard Burton_.
Norton & Co.
Edwards, Bruce L. Jr. 1991. How computers change things: literacy and
the digitised word. _Writing Instructor_, Vol. 10, No.2, pp. 68-76.
Folio. 1986. Tedimen Software: Southampton, UK.
Furner, B.A. 1985. Handwriting instruction for a high-tech society: will
handwriting be necessary? Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the
National Council of Teachers of English Spring Conference. (Houston, TX,
USA. March 1985)
Guddemi, Marcy and Fite, Kathy. 1990. Is there a legitimate role for
computers in early childhood? Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of
the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
(Washington, DC, USA. November 1990)
Guddemi, Marcy and Mills, H. 1989. The impact of word processing and
play training on literacy development. _Journal of Computing in
Childhood Education_ 1, pp. 29-38.
Lawler, R.W. 1980. One child's learning: introducing writing with a
computer. A. I. Memo no. 575. M.I.T.: Cambridge. Artificial
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[l. 614]
Levin, Jill. 1988. Methodologies of reading and writing in kindergarten.
ERIC/ reference details unavailable.
Papert, Seymour. 1980. _Mindstorms_. Basic Books: U.S.A.
Speech! 1984. Superior Software: Leeds, UK.
Warash, Barbara Gibson. 1984. The computer language experience approach.
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Council of
Teachers of English Spring Conference. (Columbus, OH, USA. April 1984.)
Department of Education and Science and the Welsh Office. 1990.
Mathematics in the National Curriculum. In "The National Curriculum,"
HMSO: London.
David Coniam b096770@cucsc.bitnet
Faculty of Education
Chinese University of Hong Kong
[ This essay in Volume 2 Issue 2 of _EJournal_ (June, 1992) is (c) copyright
_EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give it away. _EJournal_ hereby
assigns any and all financial interest to David Coniam. This note must
accompany all copies of this text. ] [l. 637]
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Consulting Editors - June 1992
ahrens@hartford John Ahrens Hartford
ap01@liverpool.ac.uk Stephen Clark Liverpool
crone@cua Tom Crone Catholic University
dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca Doug Brent Calgary
djb85@albnyvms Don Byrd Albany
donaldson@loyvax Randall Donaldson Loyola College
ds001451@ndsuvm1 Ray Wheeler North Dakota
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fac_aska@jmuvax1 Arnie Kahn James Madison
folger@yktvmv Davis Foulger IBM - Watson Center
george@gacvax1 G. N. Georgacarakos Gustavus Adolphus
geurdes@rulfsw.leidenuniv.nl Han Geurdes Leiden
gms@psuvm Gerry Santoro Pennsylvania State University
nrcgsh@ritvax Norm Coombs Rochester Institute of Tech.
pmsgsl@ritvax Patrick M. Scanlon Rochester Institute of Tech.
r0731@csuohio Nelson Pole Cleveland State
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twbatson@gallua Trent Batson Gallaudet
usercoop@ualtamts Wes Cooper Alberta
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Isabel Nirenberg, Bob Pfeiffer; Ben Chi, Director
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Editor: Ted Jennings, English, University at Albany
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