Literacy alive and well in computer age - Perspectives - Opinion - Technology

Here is another recent opinion article that came in from my “education + writing” Google News Alert.

I think that the Graeme Philipson makes a good point about how people are reading and writing are chaning in the internet-age and why we should resits such statements from respected authors such as Doris Lessing.

So, as you read this, think about how it fits into your emering understanding of the writing workshop. What would Calkins or Atwell have to say about this, especially in relation to the ways that students respond to one another’s work? What has been your experience so far getting comments on your blog?

The internet has not, and never will, endanger literacy.

YOU hear some truly dumb things, very often said by people who should know better. But I heard a couple of famous people say things recently that to my mind take the cake.

The Nobel prize for literature last year was won by Doris Lessing. At her acceptance speech in December she criticised the internet for “seducing a whole generation with its inanities”.

Apparently the rampant growth of online information is bad for us. “We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”

What are we to make of such comments? Can they be dismissed as the ravings of an old woman way past her prime? (At 86, she is the oldest recipient of the prize, and was too ill to deliver her speech in person). Or is there some truth in what she says?

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