Children Using Technology Have Better Literacy Skills

eldavojohn writes "A UK study of three thousand children aged nine to sixteen suggests something that may not come as a shock to geeks: using technology increases a child's core literary skills. As Researcher Obvious put it, 'The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills.' And for those of us worried about a world of 'tl;dr' and 'Y U H8n?' the research claims that 'text speech' does not damage literacy. The biggest shortcoming of this research is that it appears the children graded their own writing in that their methodology was an online survey designed to ask the children which technology they use and then follow up with asking them how well they write to determine which children have better literacy skills."

Comments

Huge Fail

[Monkeedude1212]

I can say I'm amazing at intercourse, but it doesn't make it so.

Online Survey?

[MozeeToby]

An online survey isn't science, (If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane). The summary itself exposes the falacy right out ("...may not come as a shock to geeks"). The geeks are the ones more likely to be filling out an online survey in the first place. Not to mention the obvious class differences between those who have ready access to lots of technology vs those who don't and what that implies about their neighborhoods and schools. There's all kinds of variables that arent being controlled for.

Re:I'm surprised by this

[Red Flayer]

rofl omg i been usin tech 4 a looooooong time since i wuz a kid now i read good but my boss tellz me not to send emails and memos nemore cuz no1 can read em lol!!!1

You laugh, but *I'm* the one stuck writing all the memos for admin, HR, and accounting... because out of those who speak English well, I'm the only damn person who can write.

Last week HR submitted a trouble ticket for me to write the invitation to the office holiday party... and I'm not even part of IT! The IT head printed out the ticket and brought it to my office. We laughed, but deep down inside, I wanted to cry.

Re:Seriously?

[war4peace]

...furthermore, if the survey was something like this:
"Do you enjoy writing? Click on the appropriate checkmark: [ ]Yes | [ ]No"
then all I can say is... "d00d, wtf".
I self-taught to be so attentive when writing and always try to be as exact as possible (although English is not my native language). It's a matter of pride, I confess, but it helped me a lot in the past. My native language contains special characters (îâ) which are used by maybe 1-2% of people while writing on the Internet, mainly because localized keyboards are hard to find and unappealing to most. Even I don't use a localized keyboard but use the OS-defined layout for my native language as default. learning it was pretty difficult, because back when I made contact with computers localization was unavailable. So after years of using English alphabet it was a pain to switch. Nevertheless, I pulled it off and now I'm proficient (albeit not very fast) in writing correctly in both English and my native language.
Why do I say that here? Well, I'm having difficulties understanding what some people write to me; they're using mangled words, numbers instead of letters, and even if in most mild cases of language mutilation I can get what they mean, the more extreme cases leave me perplexed. "I dn knw i r b @ hom 2morw" made no sense to me until properly translated :) - and most of that... can I say "crap"? comes from teenagers. Amazingly enough, this metalanguage has no secrets to them, but my petty attempts to understand them and respond back to them in the same style only amuses them.
So please allow me to say that I seriously doubt this "study".