Looking at your link:
Bauerlein writes: "The ignorance is hard to believe ... It isn't enough to say that these young people are uninterested in world realities. They are actively cut off from them. ... They are encased in more immediate realities that shut out conditions beyond -- friends, work, clothes, cars, pop music, sitcoms, Facebook.''
How is this different from any other generation? I see TV shows like "Leave it to Beaver" making the same judgments against THAT generation.
"It's a new attitude, this brazen disregard of books and reading. Earlier generations resented homework assignments, of course, and only a small segment of each dove into the intellectual currents of the time, but no generation trumpeted aliteracy ... as a valid behavior of their peers.''
What's so special about books? Now instead of reading a book on generator functions, I can read a couple of web pages. What's the difference, other than the web page can include interactive examples, be updated the minute an error is spotted, and is generally free from the perspective of the reader?
Lack of capitalization and IM codes dominate online writing. Without spellcheck, folks are toast.
And we also do without "thou" and "thee"! Langauge changes. Further, online writing is many times in the form of - amazingly - instant messaging where both parties are likely knowledgeable about the lingo used. Therefore, no information is lost between the parties communicating so
who cares?
"On MySpace, if you write clearly and compose coherent paragraphs with informed observations on history and current events, 'buddies' will make fun of you,'' Bauerlein says. Wikipedia writing is clean and factual, but colorless and judgment-free. Often the most clever students, with flashes of disorganized brilliance on MySpace, switch to dull Wiki-writing formats for school papers, he says. "If we could combine the style and imagination of MySpace with the content of Wikipedia, we might get good stuff."
Seems like a baseless claim to me. I have never seen such a thing happen, at any rate.
The stats tell the story here. First week's sales: $500 million. The sales of GTA dwarf movie premieres, CD sales, or, Bauerlein notes, book sales. All that video use, Bauerlein says, has hurt in the classroom, too. Thousands of Massachusetts public school graduates are ending up in remedial reading and writing classes in college, according to a Globe story.
What does Grand Theft Auto have to do with one's reading levels? I'd say a bigger problem is when teachers spend an entire class time lecturing on why one should address them as "Miss" instead of "Misses" instead of teaching the students how to read.
"For digital immigrants, people who are 40 years old who spent their college time in the library acquiring information, the Internet is really a miraculous source of knowledge,'' Bauerlein says. "Digital natives, however, go to the Internet not to store knowledge in their minds, but to retrieve material and pass it along. The Internet is just a delivery system.''
Another baseless claim. One just as easily skims through a book looking for information to quickly "pass along" as one does on the internet. Further, one can just as easily store the information learned on the internet as one would with a book.
Or because their parents don't check their bedrooms at midnight to halt the instant messaging..."Kids are drowning in teen stuff delivered 24/7 by the tools, and adult realities can't penetrate," Bauerlein says. Another factor: "It's the era of child-centered classrooms and self-esteem grading.''
I'll give partial credit to this. Children should be pushed more. However, I don't see what this has to do with late-night instant messaging. I never had a bed-time, and I did fine.
Do you remember how stupid you were when you were a teen-ager? Or all that you didn't know -- and thought you did? And the skills you gained by holding back on foolish comments? Oh, the now-old guy in this picture? He once wrote: "I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now.''
...OK...
I seriously don't understand why people get so upset anytime something changes. For god's sake do you see anyone speaking middle English anymore? Do you see mail being delivered by pony? Do you go out and shoot your dinner every night?
Just because something is different doesn't mean it's bad.
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