[xmca] FW: Fascinating Talk About Texting and Education

[smago <smago@uga.edu>]

A local teacher sent me the following, which explores links between texting and literacy.

Hey. I came across this youtube clip on one of the edu-blogs I follow, and wanted to pass it along to you. The speaker is a well known linguist named David Crystal, and he talks about the myths of texting as well as the places texting can inhabit within the reading&writing spaces of an english classroom, dispelling the notion that texting is an enemy of literacy. One part that stands out to me, "Most of us are still in the mindset where we see the book as central and the electronic technology as marginal. For young people it's the other way around. For young people, the electronic technology is central, and the book is marginal. Now we're not going to be able to change that, so we have to manage it. And the way to manage it is to firstly put the book in the technology. And this is already happening... (27:30)" I particularly found interesting the task of transposing an idea within a text message into an academic essay, or vice versa, and the discussions of appropriateness/discourse accompanying that task. Check it out, it's a fascinating talk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Boj8VYzDAy8

Here is one of the winners of the Guardian Newspaper's Text Poetry Competition that Crystal mentions in his talk (http://www.guardian.co.uk/textpoetry):

I left my pictur on th ground wher u walk
so that somday if th sun was jst right
& th rain didnt wash me awa
u might c me out of th corner of yr i & pic me up


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