maybe of your interest:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Cornelia Carter-Sykes <ccarter-sykes@pewinternet.org>
Date: Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 8:23 AM
Subject: Pew Internet Releases Writing, Technology and Teens Report
To: sbaumer@gmail.com
The state of writing among teens today is marked by an interesting
paradox: While teens are heavily embedded in a tech-rich world and craft
a significant amount of electronic text, they see a fundamental
distinction between their electronic social communications and the more
formal writing they do for school or for personal reasons.
* 87% of youth ages 12-17 engage at least occasionally in some
form of electronic personal communication, which includes text
messaging, sending email or instant messages, or posting comments on
social networking sites.
* 60% of teens do not think of these electronic texts as
"writing."
Teens are utilitarian in their approach to technology and writing, using
both computers and longhand depending on circumstances. Their use of
computers for school and personal writing is often tied to the
convenience of being able to edit easily. And while they do not think
their use of computers or their text-based communications with friends
influences their formal writing, many do admit that the informal styles
that characterize their e-communications do occasionally bleed into
their schoolwork.
* 57% of teens say they revise and edit more when they write using
a computer.
* 63% of teens say using computers to write makes no difference in
the quality of the writing they produce.
* 73% of teens say their personal electronic communications
(email, IM, text messaging) have no impact on the writing they do for
school, and 77% said they have no impact on the writing they do for
themselves.
* 64% of teens admit that they incorporate, often accidentally, at
least some informal writing styles used in personal electronic
communication into their writing for school. (Some 25% have used
emoticons in their school writing; 50% have used informal punctuation
and grammar; 38% have used text shortcuts such as "LOL" meaning "laugh
out loud.")
All of this matters more than ever because teenagers and their parents
uniformly believe that good writing is a bedrock for future success.
Eight in ten parents believe that good writing skills are more important
now than they were 20 years ago, and 86% of teens believe that good
writing ability is an important component of guaranteeing success later
in life.
These are among the key findings in a national phone survey of 700 youth
ages 12-17 and their parents conducted by the Pew Internet & American
Life Project and the National Commission on Writing. The survey was
completed in mid-November and has a margin of error of plus or minus 5
percentage points. The report also contains findings from eight focus
groups in four U.S. cities conducted in the summer of 2007.
For the full report please visit:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/247/report_display.asp
About the Pew Internet & American Life Project: The Pew Internet Project
is an initiative of the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit "fact tank"
that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping
America and the world. Pew Internet explores the impact of the internet
on children, families, communities, the work place, schools, health care
and civic/political life. Support for the project is provided by The
Pew Charitable Trusts. The project's Web site:
http://www.pewinternet.org
About the National Commission on Writing for America's Families, Schools
and Colleges: In an effort to focus national attention on the teaching
and learning of writing, the College Board established the National
Commission on Writing for America's Families, Schools, and Colleges in
September 2002. The decision to create the Commission was animated in
part by the Board's plans to offer a writing assessment in 2005 as part
of the new SAT(r), but the larger motivation lay in the growing concern
within the education, business, and policy-making communities that the
level of writing in the United States is not what it should be.
http://www.writingcommission.org/
Please feel free to forward this email alert to colleagues, friends, or
family members who might be interested in it. If you have received this
message from a subscriber, you can sign up to receive your own alerts
at: http://www.pewinternet.org/signup.asp
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To subscribe, send a blank message to pewinternet-on@mail-list.com
To unsubscribe, send a blank message to pewinternet-off@mail-list.com
To change your email address, send a message to
pewinternet-change@mail-list.com
with your old address in the Subject: line
To contact the list owner, send your message to
pewinternet-list-owner@mail-list.com
mail-list.com 1302 Waugh Dr. #438 Houston, Texas 77019 USA
To unsubscribe, or change your email address, click here.
http://cgi.mail-list.com/u?ln=pewinternet&nm=sbaumer@gmail.com
This message was launched into cyberspace to sbaumer@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Thu Apr 24 23:36 PDT 2008
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Thu May 01 2008 - 17:14:14 PDT