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Stupefying technology | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6041 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 9 of 30 15 December 2011 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Radio Sweden ran a news story today about the effects of text messaging on the written
language of Swedish-speaking Finnish youths (according to research made at the University of Umeå). When texting, chatting and in short e-mails to friends and family (but probably not in more formal genres) they use a lot of dialect as a way of strengthening their regional identity. In Sweden (nowadays) the use of dialect is usually regarded as something positive. Radio Sweden (in Swedish) //aloysius 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Icaria909 Senior Member United States Joined 5392 days ago 201 posts - 346 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 30 16 December 2011 at 3:34am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'm with the others who say that technology is great because it gives us access to so
much. I never would have learned as much about languages had it not been for this site and the amazing people who come here. However, I do feel the author does have a point that there has been a fundamental change in how students approach education. Quote: Estoy por pensar que la curiosidad se esfumó de estos veinteañeros alumnos míos desde el momento en que todo lo comenzó a contestar ya, ahora mismo, el doctor Google. I think Jiménez is right that too many people have lost the ability to think critically now that so much information is right at people's fingertips. In my personal experience in both high school and college, I would venture to say that at least 40% of people write their essays by looking up other's essays on the same topic online and then go to wikipedia and copy/paste a few sources into their Works Cited page and instantly they have an A paper. Granted, not many of these students will graduate once they are forced to confront more upper-level classes, but I do think this is reflective of the shift in how many students have been approaching education in general since the maturation of the internet. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5027 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 11 of 30 16 December 2011 at 3:52am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I think it's more likely that people like that never had it in the first place. My critical thinking is as its very peak right now, precisely because I have loads of information to contrast if anything has the slightest odd whiff.
Maybe things are worse now, but all of these happened in my time. My Particle Physics teacher always wanted hand-written essays to ensure even plagiarists did some work. OTOH I distinctly remember a composition on dolphins written by a brilliant girl in my class when I was 12. It was so good it was read aloud for the whole class. It didn't sound exactly as she used to express herself, and there was some strangely familiar wording in it. When I got home I picked up an animal encyclopaedia I had and I could read the same text, verbatim. The built-in laziness that makes people do that kind of things must be corrected by parents at home long before the kids ever go to school or touch a computer. Edited by mrwarper on 16 December 2011 at 3:52am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| hypersport Senior Member United States Joined 5682 days ago 216 posts - 307 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 12 of 30 16 December 2011 at 5:21am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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This is already off topic so why not....
As long as schools nowadays want the highest grades turned in so they can get more money steered towards them during annual budget allotment, they're going to continue to allow the students to re-take tests that have been failed and they'll continue to give high marks to papers that have obviously been plagiarised. Google is the students best tool in this world. The students understand how the game works, the teachers don't teach and there's no incentive to actually learn the stuff. Do what you need to do to get the grade and move on. I understand that there's a small minority of teachers that really want to teach and of course there's students that really want to learn, but they're in the minority. The fact that classes in high-schools can now be taken online is amazing to me. My daughter graduated high-school this year and I was continually amazed at how much the teachers don't actually teach...it's amazing. Find it on google, mod it a bit and turn it in. Next. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6383 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 13 of 30 16 December 2011 at 7:38am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I wonder how long it will take until Google launches a plagiarism algorithm. It shouldn't be too complex. Search through articles and essays written on the topic and make some comparisons, wind up with an estimation of the likelihood the essay has been plagiarised.
Same thing with Cantonese. I suspect the current vitality of written Cantonese would be impossible without these technological advances. Text messages and online forums have been the breeding grounds, and it's spreading to advertisement and entertainment columns now. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5135 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 14 of 30 16 December 2011 at 10:42am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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We also see a steep decline in the traditional skills of the kids at school, but we have blamed it mostly on the fact that there is a new teaching philosophy every two years, and most of them do not include much actual learning. The facts that in Norway you do not get any grades until the 8th year, as they do not want to "produce losers", you cannot really fail a subject, and you are automatically given acces to high school even if you cannot read or write, are also blamed for it.
We are also told not to correct children when they make written mistakes "because it is bad for their self esteem". The result of all this is that the teachers at the University are complaning that the students don't know how to write their own language. Given the fact that even the teachers at the two shools my kids attend are unable to send home any written material without mistakes, I am quite willing to believe that. There was however a reason why I started mentioning the traditional skills. Because obviously kids of today are great at the new skills. Power Point was unheard of when I was a kid, now my 12 year old is an expert. When I wrote a paper on Eurocommunism in the 70ies, I had to go the library, and order material, and wait for two weeks to get the articles I needed. Now my kids can get it in less than a minute through Wikipedia or Google. In many ways they are more adapted to the reality of today. I still feel like crying when I see texts in Norwegian that are so full of mistakes that even I as a dyslexic can find heaps of them, but I guess with spell checks, spelling correctly is something which is considered obsolete. Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 16 December 2011 at 10:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5027 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 15 of 30 16 December 2011 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Which is precisely what the old professor complained about. THIS. THIS. THIS.
The unfortunate consequence of all of the above is that eventually the educational system starts to incorporate individuals that shouldn't have gotten there in the first place, and when they access it, a second loop of the whole process starts further damaging and poisoning the system itself. These are the fallacies of the 'new' teaching in action. How can someone who doesn't know a thing teach anything? And yet they become teachers...
I beg to differ. There are no 'new skills', just 'new toys'. Your kid is able to gather information a gazillion times faster than you did. So? If you bothered to learn the proper use of those tools you could it as well. Plus, you'd know what and what not to do with that information to write a decent article, whereas modern day kids probably wouldn't anyway.
It's just another sign of the times. "Why bother to spell correctly if the spell checker does it for me?" Yes, except that you have to activate it, moron. And it's not available everywhere... Then there are those who activate 'automatic correction', and it's even worse. I never understood what people meant by "you never learn to walk if you always use a crutch" until I started to find this kind of things. Spell-check should never be set to 'correct automatically' because a machine can't know what I mean or if it's correct, it can (and should) merely point out what's not in its dictionary, so that's what it must be limited to do. That's what people (like kids at school) should be taught, not that they can enable some 'magic' and be done with it. If someone wants to try it, please be my guests ;( Edited by mrwarper on 16 December 2011 at 4:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4847 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 16 of 30 17 December 2011 at 3:10pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It seems to me that the reverse is very much true, namely people with gadgets tend to be more 'cultured'. Because they're the ones with the money to buy the gadgets. Because they have the better (higher paying, more stimulating) jobs that pay for those gadgets. Because they received more education to get those jobs. Because they got more 'cultured' in the process of receiving the superior education, in the environments of more challenging jobs, and through using those gadgets (as opposed to those who didn't have the gadgets). In essence having the gadget gives you the potential to use it to your advantage, as well as the potential to not use it for that advantage or at all. While poor/disadvantaged people in Africa, India, China, South America, etc have no such potential. This is why we have many OLPC-type programs and why more and more schools are incorporating technology.
Everyone has the capacity. It's a whole different matter that so many gadget users tend to multitask so much more than be in silence concentrating on one task. On a personal level, it can put you off or appear rude at times. However, that ability to multitask is very much an advantage, one that those who don't multitask don't have. It becomes a very complex issue of what's better and for whom, under what circumstances and to what ends, and what if this or that. To put oil on the fire, anyone can choose to multitask or not, it could well be true that those who choose to multitask (and not everyone does) are those that would've stared out the window anyway instead of at a smartphone, maybe they are just choosing to do what they'd have done anyway, what is in their nature, just in a digital instead of analog way. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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