Blog #5: Summarize two articles assigned for today

Today’s reading assignments were: “Technology Helps Students Adopt Good Study Habits,” “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy,” “Reading, Writing, iPhoning,” and “Texting: The Gr8 Db8.” The first article about technology helping students discussed this new technology used at Purdue. At Purdue, the students have this new warning system that uses the colors: green, yellow, and red. When a student logs into his account, he receives a signal from his teacher. Red means he’s in trouble and is failing. Yellow means he needs to keep working and needs to pick up his grades. Green means he’s doing well. Some of the students in class today said they’d like to see some type of similar system here at our school. I wonder what type of work a department or college has to do in order to get something like that on computers. Also, I bet some teachers would gripe about that because it would possibly require more work, but maybe not if the signal system was based on the grade book and zeroes made the red light come on; I guess if that were the case then higher scores would cause the yellow or green light to come on.

Another article we read was “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy.” This article reviewed the debate about whether or not students are having worse or better writing due to the new Internet writing they do. I guess in this case, when I say Internet writing I really mean texting, email writing, blogging, Face Booking, instant messaging, and things like that. Since the beginning of time, people have been saying, “Back when I was young, students knew how to write. Students could read. . .” and blah, blah, blah. The truth is that people have been saying that for so long that it’s hard to believe that students are any different than they were generations ago. According to Andrea Lunsford’s study, students are writing more now than they ever have before. Most of the students in our class agreed with Lunsford. Now I guess we have to decide if these students are writing better than ever before. But then again, what does better really mean?