Jonesieblog

I posted a somewhat curmudgeonly comment on Derek’s Hotmilkydrink back in October, to the effect that time spent playing Guitar Hero would be better spent learning to play the guitar.  As usual, someone else has said it better:

Stumble it!

As I said last week, a pupil claimed to be able to text more quickly than she could handwrite. Ewan then kindly offered me a loan of a device that looks like a chunky mobile phone without a screen and operates as a usb keyboard.

With the Cre8txt device, my pupils did not manage to enter text very quickly. They complained that it didn’t do predictive texting (it does have software to do this) and more importantly that it wasn’t like their own phones.

I gave them the sentence “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” as a challenge using their own phones (so sack me!) and the quickest was 12 seconds. I reckon I can just about manage to handwrite that in 12 seconds, and can type it in 8 seconds, so 12 seconds is pretty good.

d pupils complained dat d sNteNc wz unfair cuz it didnt offer NE opps 2 uz d abbrz dat dey alwys uz!

One girl argued quite persuasively that they should be allowed to use this kind of txt-speak in their school notes. I cnt rly c NE diffrNce Btwen DIS & shrt& but I didn’t want the school English teachers hammering on my door so I remained non-committal on this issue!

Several things struck me very clearly from our little experiment:

• Pupils put a lot of time into learning to use their own phones effectively. They struggled when they tried to use someone else’s phone;
• Some young people can write more quickly with their own mobile phone than with a pencil;
• Young people today are writing vastly more than we did when I was their age. Most of this writing is on computers and mobile phones.

The above points are, of course, generalisations. Some young people do not have computers at home, and some use their mobile phones infrequently.

Stumble it!

Barcamp Scotland 2007 was a brilliant event, so I was delighted today when I noticed that a date has been set for the 2008 edition.  It’s on Saturday 2nd February 2008.  You can sign up on the wiki.  See you there

Stumble it!

I was talking to my S3 class the other week, and one of the girls revealed that she can text much more quickly than she can handwrite.  She didn’t get the chance to demonstrate, what with the school rule on mobile phones, but her friends confirmed the fact.  I don’t suppose that she is unusual.

Interesting.  I tend to take talk about mobile phones as the next big thing in education with a big pinch of salt, but I think I’ve based my cynicism on an assumption that the keypads are awkward, slow input devices.  Apparently that is not the case if you are 14 and female.

Stumble it!

The main thing I have learned on this journey is that if you aren’t governed by fear you can live truthfully and you can find a kind of beauty. If you are inhibited and fearful you will live a prescriptive existence. But once you get beyond the hedonistic first impulse of that philosophy you find that you need to focus on something wider, more permanent and beautiful and valuable. That’s what I’ve learned. I think “I want to do something worthwhile”.

Can you guess who said that?

Stumble it!