Newsgroups: bit.listserv.edpolyan
Date:         Fri, 28 Aug 1992 14:44:54 CDT
              <EDPOLYAN@ASUACAD.BITNET>
From:         stan kulikowski ii <STANKULI@UWF.BITNET>
Subject:      more keyboarding curriculum

  when i wrote "i cannot escape the conclusion that keyboarding is essential
elementary curriculum", i really meant the escape part.  i wish there were
some way to get around the keyboard as an input device, but no other method
can compete with it in quality for personal text creation.  when we type, we
wiggle a finger per letter and this turns out to be the easiest way to make
literate materials.  even dictation cannot match the efficiency rates.


>>
>>  From:         Jane Clark Lindle <JCLIND00@UKCC.UKY.EDU>
>>
>>  I'm interested in any discussion of keyboarding because it's a "manual"
>>  skill in an era when we tend to heavily focus on "intellectual/academic
>>  education."
>>

  jane lindle has made a very good point here.  the notion that scholarship
is somehow beyond a foundation of physical labor is part of that naive
viewpoint which describes academics as ivory-tower, head-in-the-clouds, and
nonrealistic.  the quality of intellectual effort is directly related to its
material interface.  for advanced thinkers, a keyboard has been in that
interface for most of this century.  with the spread of computers in these
last decades, it is well past time for this to be regularized as an
elementary skill for the general population.

  one of the ways that i estimate the skill of a person with their computer
is their fluency on the keyboard.  like jane, i am a self-taught hunt&pecker
with output around 90 wpm.  i find that my skills on a qwerty keyboard hold
up rather well as i move between a dozen different computer keyboards with
their punctuation floating around.  there is nothing wrong with those of us
who have developed superfluency on keyboards with personal nonsystematic
approaches.  in making curriculum decisions, however, we ought to look
beyond the level of personal experience.

  but is there any reason why we would propose laisse-faire keyboarding as a
teaching strategy?  watching 6th grade kids struggle to enter 8 wpm is
heartbreaking.  the productivity studies have shown that longer training
times, slower output and greater error rates result from nonsystematic
keyboard use.  that is part of the rationale for dvorak over qwerty.  i
think any of us hyperskilled hunt&peckers will recognize the motions of a
well-trained dvorak typist is an ideal worthy of widespread adoption.  no
wasted motion is a thing of beauty in itself.


>>
>>  From:         reedm@GW.WMICH.EDU
>>
>>    Would Stan suggest that penmanship still be taught--is it taught
>>  anymore at all?
>>

  yes, i thought i said that with the statement on curriculum logic.  the
second-class scholars ought to be working on the quality of marks they
scratch on paper.  advanced options in calligraphy and font-selection for
desk top publishing should be available in curriculum for this kind of
scholarship.  but to leave the general public at this level of text handling
until high school is a disservice in an age of electronic data.

  i do not think we are going to see many major improvements in educational
service delivery until we develop standard electronic textual capacities.
most of the cost in textbooks is not the creation or quality of the
information, but in the distribution of the paper.  much of the labor in
teaching is grading handwritten tests and assignments.   floppy disks as a
method of data delivery is still bound to the publishing cycle which takes
at least a year to get the physical materials into the schools. i suspect
that the average age of textual materials in schools is closer to 5 years
(especially if you take the time from its initial creation, not the latest
reprinting).  there is much information for which this kind of use-cycle is
appropriate, but listen to our dropout students when many of them find
nothing relevant in schools to their month-by-month lives.

  and so i come to the conclusion that around 9 years old is the best time
for kids to break out of the hardcopy cycle.  fluency on a keyboard is one
of the basic skills which help in this release.
                                               stan

    .                  stankuli@UWF.bitnet
   ===
         when a thraskin puts fingers in its ears, it is polite to shout
   ---                                          -- old venusian proverb
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